Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
INTELLIGENCE GATHERERS
INTELLIGENCE GATHERS
When notorious liars, deceivers, assassins, economic hit men and women, spies, etc., are integral parts of the national "intelligence-gathering" apparatuses; but their opposites are not, thereby evil, wickedness. murder and mayhem are honored, enshrined, encoded, while their opposites, the good, the righteous , the wholesome are dishonored, discarded, destroyed.
This is not to suggest from the foregoing that the men and women of our nation's seventeen security agencies must be terminated and their former duties vacated. Not so! Rather, it would seem that a more counterbalanced regime of their opposition must be incorporated into, configured into, our national government to rectify its harmful malevolent tendency to infamy .
This may well duplicate, reprise, echo Benjamin Banneker 's vain plea to Thomas Jefferson in 1791, for the establishment of a "Peace Department" to counter the War Department, then extant . If so, good, great, blessed, salubrious!
More recently, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, final book, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE : CHAOS OR COMMUNITY (1967), which I have just concluded, also includes many similar ideas and concepts as Banneker's about the natural need to endorse "peace."
I also need to mention, here, James Armistead Lafayette on this New Years' Eve, 2016, a black man, a slave, who was the most critical "intelligence gatherer," whose 1781 clandestine work contributed to the birth of our nation. Now little

known "Revolutionary War" hero, and spy, James Armistead Lafayette so won the confidence of General Charles Cornwallis, British Commander-in-Chief, that he was able to deliver him and his whole army into a surprised surrender at Hampton, rather than into certain annihilation at Yorktown, Virginia .
http://www.blackpast.org/…/lafayette-james-armistead-1760-1…