The Huffington Post's front page link to the article describing President Obama's first day in office and his closing of CIA Black sites is extremely important. That the HuffPost put this front and center and that our President understands on a very deep level the need to create more trust in the world via closing these sites is monumental. This would never have happened under the Bush administration and is part of why we had an increasingly negative image abroad. We were saying and supposedly standing for one thing and then, via these Black Sites and other CIA-backed activities, doing the opposite of what a truly democratic United States of America stands for...and it has to stop.
The next step is stopping all of the disturbing funneling of CIA black budget monies through private foundations immediately. These monies have not only financed activities Americans would be horrified to learn about, they have helped to destroy our most important calling card internationally...the belief that we can be trusted.
I first became interested in this when I began looking into a family foundation linked to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and came across documents linking foundations to private biotech companies with strong connections to the previous Bush administrations and biologicals sold and tried out as vaccines during the first Gulf War. That the same people who once ran the CIA also ended up on the board of the medical center and then tied to private (extremely profitable) biotech investments, while sending out sons and daughters to war, was a horrific eye-opening experience for me. That this story has remained mostly untold during the two Gulf Wars is a crime... some have tried to tell it, but they were silenced and the powers that be (and that includes the mainstream media) chose not to tell this important story.
It went almost unnoticed a few months ago when finally after more than a decade, more than 30% of the Gulf War troops were declared to be officially suffering from a "syndrome" linked now (legally) to their service in the Persian Gulf. What happened to these soldiers is a crime. They were used as guinea pigs by private companies which had access to the highest levels of our government and very well connected investors (politically).
That President Obama has put a stop to these CIA Black Sites reveals his profound lack of naivete, of how the world and America works under "regimes" which use fear and control and secrecy to operate. Now it is time to halt the cash flow to CIA-backed foundations and come clean. Put the money to better use!