Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”

It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions. President Harry S. Truman.

Sadly, those concerns that Truman expressed in that op-ed — that he had inadvertently helped create a Frankenstein monster — are as valid today as they were 50 years ago, if not more so.

Very rarely does our government ask us what to have a war on. The proposal for missile strikes into Syria was a rare occasion when public pressure and other factors compelled Congress to demand a say. Public pressure then compelled Congress to say No.

But daily drone buzzings over various nations aren't occasions for public debate. We aren't being asked about another decade in Afghanistan or cooking up a future war on Iran. And our current president and his predecessor combined have wiped out eight wedding parties (six in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and one in Yemen earlier this month) without our having ever been asked about any of them.

What if we were?

Job Title: Field Organizer - SEIU District 1199 WV/KY/OH
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Apply for this job here:
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Organizers empower workers to make gains in areas that matter to them and their families: wages, benefits, respect and a voice on the job. You’ll learn skills from some of the best organizers in the labor movement that can help people overcome difficult odds and win the power to change their lives. If you want to put your mind and heart to work in the cause of a better world, there’s a role for you in SEIU District 1199 WV/KY/OH.

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A Field Organizer is responsible for:
Organizing workers to overcome opposition and win union recognition

“I’m dying to know what it’s like to love somebody — to know what it feels like to be wanted.” — Art Corneau

So we need a documentary to break the Code of Shame. It’s called A Hard Name and came out in 2009; it ran on Canadian public television. (The film is online but, unfortunately, can’t be viewed in the U.S. “due to rights restrictions.”) Director Alan Zweig found seven ex-prisoners — five men, two women — and just let them speak. The result was the opening of a raw wound: the public exposure of something so deeply hidden, so wrapped in cynical taboo, I could barely listen without screaming: Why?

I hadn’t been aware of the film until Dave Atkins of Prison Alpha Ministry in Ottawa wrote to me about it, in response to my recent column about the Hollow Water First Nation Reserve, in Manitoba, where in the 1980s residents began addressing the hidden matter of childhood sexual abuse that was shattering their tiny community. They began talking about it publicly — they had no choice. The secret stain of it was claiming the lives of their children, who were disappearing into the void of alcoholism and drug abuse.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's U.S.-trained military appears to support next February's endangered election, and oppose a right-wing insurrection bent on destroying the government, seizing power, blacklisting politicians, and cancelling the polls.

The blockades and sit-ins, mostly by Bangkok's wealthy and middle class, are also trying to prevent poorer urban and rural voters repeatedly electing politicians who the comparatively well-off protesters despise.

In some ways, the protesters can be perceived as Thailand's "opulent minority" against the working class, wrote analyst Apivat Hanvongse.

Another commentator said the goal of the insurrection is to clamp this poorly educated Southeast Asian country under a closed system of "elites electing elites to rule the majority."

Wedging itself into this split is the military.

Army generals, including some who participated in a bloodless 2006 coup, are mediating between the protesters' rich and loudly threatening leader, Suthep Thaugsuban, and the damaged government of Caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.