Los Chinchillas (detail), Plate 50 from Los Caprichos, Francisco Goya, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

– TS Eliot, The Hollow Men

Back in 2003, during peak post-9/11/Iraq War patriotic fever, when, as Dylan said of the McCarthy Era, “as long as you don’t say nothing, you can say anything at all,” Bill and Kathy Christison and I gave a talk in Taos, New Mexico, about the Iraq War, the neocons and the Israel Lobby. It was a bitterly cold night with brutal winds blowing down out of the Sangre de Cristos. As we left the venue, Bill noticed we were being tailed by a black truck, which followed us down State Road 68 towards Santa Fe, sometimes flashing its brights in the rearview mirror. Just outside Española, the truck pulled even with us and someone fired two shots at us from the passenger side window. Kathy and I flinched and ducked at the flashes. We heard a sharp metallic “ting.”

Bill and Kathy had both retired from the CIA in the late 70s and became two of the Agency’s fiercest critics. Bill, who had started as an analyst in the 1950s, had risen to near the top of the Agency. In the course of his career, he worked on the Soviet desk and nuclear proliferation. He became the principal adviser to the CIA director for Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa

And ended his career as director of the agency’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis. Few people knew more about how the world worked, who benefited and who paid the price. Bill and Kathy met Cockburn shortly after 9/11 and quickly began writing erudite and incisive pieces for CounterPunch, excoriating US foreign policy. In an early essay, Bill laid out what he considered the root cause for many of the terrorist attacks on the US: “the support by the U.S. over recent years for the policies of Israel with respect to the Palestinians, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States is as much to blame as Israel itself for the continuing, almost 35-year-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Bill and Kathy had contributed a chapter to our book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I’d spent the previous week driving across the Southwest, giving talks about the book and speaking at anti-war rallies, starting in San Antonio, then El Paso, Las Cruces, and Albuquerque, before meeting up with Bill and Kathy for events in Santa Fe, where they’d moved........

© CounterPunch