The CIA and Sudan

Kirk Sowell over at Arab World and Beyond has an interesting post regarding the CIA and the government of Sudan. He writes:

There is a danger here. Although working with the Sudan clearly brings some benefits, the CIA has a past history of becoming an apologist for countries which provide it with information the agency is unable to obtain itself. In my previous posts (on my blogspot blog) I have argued that the assistance that the CIA gets from Syria with al-Qaeda has become a real problem, because Syria has played a strong role in supporting the terrorist insurgency in Iraq, and it appears that Syria has been helping al-Qaeda with one hand while feeding Langley information with the other in order to buy an advocate within the Bush Administration. Indeed, the Times article quotes a former deputy director of Sudanese intelligence as saying that "the CIA was seeking to smooth the broader political relationship between the Bush administration and the Bashir regime." And this at a time when the Sudanese military is supplying the Janjaweed who are raping, pillaging and killing with abandon in the villages of Darfur in the Western Sudan.

I agree that contact with such a corrupt and repulsive regime has moral implications, but it hardly represents much of a danger. The CIA has become so marginalized in the current administration that what it does is largely irrelevant to policy formation. So, let the CIA play around in Sudan. Maybe it can learn something worthwhile. It can't hurt.

Read Kirk's new blog here. He has lots of interesting observations on a lot of subjects.

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