Amitai Etzioni Notes

The CIA and I

Recent revelations about domestic spying by the CIA made me relive my own experience in this department. It started very innocently. Someone named Bogdan Walewski called me at Columbia University, where I was teaching at the time. Though he was a Polish citizen, he explained that he worked for the United Nations. He asked if he could drop by for a quick visit to discuss trends in American culture. Curious, I agreed. Soon, a young man who spoke English well was in my study at Fayerweather Hall. He wanted to know what I thought about several recent Broadway plays and various orchestras that performed in Carnegie Hall in the preceding year. After a while, he allowed that he greatly benefited from my sophisticated observations and wondered if my wife and I would be his guests at dinner at an expensive French restaurant in New York.

Russia: The Wrong Priority

Here we go again. President Bush meets with Putin. He pressures him to restore democratic reforms that Putin has rolled back, which he is about as likely to do as he is to run for dog catcher in Texas. After all, such reforms may very well put him about of business. At the same time President Bush—once again—fails to even mention our first, second, and third most important interest in Russia: ensuring that loose nuclear arms and materials do not fall into the wrong hands. Practically all the leading experts on nuclear terrorism agree that Russia poses far and away the gravest threat to international security. The threat is not that  Russia itself will attack the United States or that its government will arm terrorists, but that Russia, as a failing state, will be unable to prevent terrorists from obtaining and exporting nuclear weapons.