When Harry Truman created the CIA in 1947 out of the Office of Strategic Services that had been formed during WW II to coordinate espionage activities against the Axis Powers, Truman wanted a civilian intelligence organization that would bring raw data to him as President, unadulterated by the bias that wouldn’t be “slanted to conform to established positions of a given department.”

It appears that the following year Congress expanded the role of the CIA to include "sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures...subversion [and] assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation movements, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world” [snip]  including “an active Black operations mission has been launched deep under cover into Bolivia.  (Wikipedia asks for citation for the expansion claim.)

By 1963 Truman expressed public dismay at the directions the CIA had evolved:

We’ve been watching Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland about hydraulic fracturing (or ‘fracking’) , the method used to release natural gas from shale deposits.  Millions of gallons of water, sand  and proprietary chemicals are pumped under high pressure into a drilled well to release the gas.  Many of the 80-300 tons of chemicals per frack are highly toxic and carcinogenic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, and a veritable host of others.  A well can be fracked up to 18 times.

We’re bombarded lately with television ads claiming that natural gas is the clean and safe alternative to coal, and known deposits could provide us with safe energy for the next fifty years, la la la… It seems that the industry is pushing back hard against the public awareness that Fox’s film has generated over the dangers involved with fracking methods.

 Now there appear to be some pretty major problems with fracking, including the potential to poison water wells when the well casings crack, and it appears that has happened plenty.  The toxic water used has to be disposed of; estimates are that only half the water is recovered.  Typically the VOCs are evaporated off, then the water is trucked to wastewater treatment facilities, none of which is supervised or regulated either.

The so-called ‘Father of the Egyptian Revolution’ was the shy and relatively unknown former peace activist now turned orchid-grower Gene Sharp.  Now 83, Sharp is slowing down, but is about to publish another book, and must marvel at the success his writings on nonviolent revolution and especially “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which was used as an overarching guide to revolutions, both successful and failed, around the world, including Serbia, Myannmar, Burma, Tunisia, Egypt and different of the color and blossom revolutions.  A Wikileaks cable said a year ago that Syrian dissidents were training with Sharp’s work.

He has been the object of various smear campaigns by autocrats including Hugo Chavez and top Iranian officials, one of which included a cartoon video portraying Sharp as a CIA agent teaming up with John McCain and George Soros to overthrow Iran’s government. (grin)Sharp had studied Gandhi and Thoreau and subscribed to their notions that: (from the NYT)

”… power is not monolithic; that is, it does not derive from some intrinsic quality of those who are in power. For Sharp, political power, the power of any state - regardless of its particular structural organization - ultimately derives from the subjects of the state. His fundamental belief is that any power structure relies upon the subjects' obedience to the orders of the ruler(s). If subjects do not obey, leaders have no power.