During the various phases of my professional life, I have drawn and analyzed many a complex diagram. I once had to diagram the entire communications plan for a 20,000 strong Marine Expeditionary Force down to the last squad radio and field telephone. Later on as an intelligence officer, I analyzed a captured diagram of the workings of the national guerilla movement of a foreign country. This latter diagram was a bit of a worry for me because identified in it was the guerilla unit that had the mission of killing me. The concern that I had over that diagram was nothing compared to my fear of the above, however. The above diagram is a plan for the systemic denial of healthcare in the United States to the infirm and elderly in order to pay for an exclusive government-provided healthcare system that will cover everyone who sets foot within our country, legally or otherwise. Lest their be any doubt of this, President Obama himself has even said in an interview that it will take “ten, fifteen or even twenty years to eliminate private healthcare” in the United States. I guess that he didn’t know that he was being videotaped, because now his public affairs flacks are trying to deny it. But the video is on the internet for all Americans to see in full context.

Does that sound a bit alarmist? If so, let me offer my credentials: I lived in the United Kingdom and personally participated in their National Health Service (NHS) universal healthcare system. Further, because of my official duties while I lived in Britain, I had to become fairly familiar with how NHS worked, both on a practical as well as a policy/bureaucratic basis. The British NHS is the model for American healthcare that is being advocated by Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel (White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's British-educated older brother), President Obama’s most influential advisor on the nationalization of the American healthcare system. Unlike the President, who as a politician has consistently waffled on how an American version of NHS would be funded, Zeke Emmanuel has been quite open and honest about his intentions for many years. Zeke has consistently argued in medical and professional journals for physicians to take their Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm” with a large grain of salt and substitute a medical ethics concept of “communitarianism,” or the denial of medical care to the disabled and elderly in order to optimize the provision of it to the young and fundamentally healthy. If that policy sounds familiar, you’re right, we have seen it before in recent modern history. In Nazi Germany.

Just how would these healthcare denials occur, when President Obama has solemnly (well, kind of) promised us that no one would get between us and our doctor? Very simple, if you look at the above diagram. Interposed prominently between your doctor and you is a nifty new government entity called the Health Insurance Exchange. The Health Insurance Exchange tells your doctor what s/he can and cannot do for you, regardless of whether you are under a private health insurance plan or the so-called “public option” federal healthcare bureaucracy (read: America’s NHS). And who tells the Health Insurance Exchange? Why, an innocently named new little bureaucracy called the “Health Choices Administration” (HCA). Under the leadership of the HCA Administrator, the HCA serves as kind of a giant actuary, deciding who will get what healthcare based on the limits of what a system mandated to provide comprehensive healthcare to everyone who might set foot in America can afford. Yep, that’s just the way it works in Merry Olde Englande. The “health choices” are not the patient’s, made on the advice of their doctor, but rather reserved for government statisticians and bureaucrats based on budgetary constraints. Not surprisingly, Zeke spent his formative years at Oxford University, drinking in and learning to admire the British notion of socialism and the sacrifices that the elderly (read: sixty years and over) must make for the young under NHS. I’ve seen the same, and, unlike Zeke, I’m glad that I’m back in the United States.

Does any of this bother you? If so, you are in luck, because there is a very narrow window of opportunity to make your voice heard in what remains of our democracy and let your elected representatives know that if you wanted live under communitarianism, you would move to Cuba. The above bill has not passed either house of Congress. During the month of August, our Senators and Members of Congress will be home on recess, meeting with their constituents. This is the time to let them know in no uncertain terms how you feel about the nationalization and rationing of healthcare. First, write a letter to your two Senators and your Member of Congress. Second, send them an email and telephone them to make sure that they get the message. Third, go to public meetings that they have scheduled and let them know how you feel about Zeke Emanuel’s theories of medical ethics. And don’t be shy in letting them know that if they vote for the above monstrosity, you may just have to consider voting for their opponent in the next election.

Normal citizens like you and I are already starting to take action over the August recess of Congress. Amazingly, the level of this action is so compelling that even network television news programs are reporting it, which is a bit of a miracle in and of itself. Join your neighbors in exercising your right, nay, your responsibility, to discuss legislation with your elected representatives and voice your opinion. I’ll be there with you.

Mike Gorbell is a retired intelligence officer from California’s Central Coast.

There is, however, one difference in Ms. Harman’s recent self outing as a politician above all else. In her LA Times treatise, she puts her fundamental ignorance of basic matters of intelligence on full and irretrievable public display. Considering what Harman wrote, rather than headlining her Op-Ed as “What the CIA hid from Congress,” the editor would’ve been more accurate to title it, “What Harman doesn’t understand about her oversight responsibilities on a select committee.”

Harman leads off her “igno-rant” by correctly stating that as a member of the so-called “Gang of Eight,” composed of the four top Republican and Democrat leaders of the Senate and House (two each), and the Chairman and Ranking Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) (two each), Federal law requires that she and other Gang members be briefed on the CIA’s “covert” (her quotation marks) action programs. Does the text of this law put “covert” in quotation marks? No, but Harman chooses to do that herself in her article, signaling through mocking spite that this is a political hit piece, rather than a public representative informing her constituents of what she has discovered from her solemn oversight duties.

The esteemed representative then continues on to describe just which briefings on CIA covert operations that she felt she and other Gang members were deceived by, to wit: quarterly briefings at the White House on the Terrorist Surveillance Program by General Michael Hayden during the period 2003 through 2006. Harman goes on to say that then Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, was present at the briefings; as were other, unnamed CIA officials. It is about at this point that anyone with even the most basic knowledge of the U.S. government, let alone the intelligence community, starts scratching their head and saying, “Huh?”

From March 1999 through April 2005, Mike Hayden was Director of the National Security Agency (NSA). NSA’s principal mission is the collection and analysis of signals intelligence. What was the Director of the National Security Agency doing giving quarterly briefings to the Gang of Eight on a CIA covert action program? The answer is, he wasn’t. He was briefing the Gang on something entirely different, an NSA intelligence collection program. Apparently, in her rush to join her colleagues in publicly accusing the CIA of lying, Harman overlooked the fact that Hayden’s briefings had nothing at all to do with the CIA, let alone CIA covert action.

But wait, if they had nothing to do with the CIA, then what was the Director of the CIA, George Tenet, doing attending the briefings? Answer: Tenet was at the briefings not in his capacity as Director of the CIA, but wearing his second hat as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the then semi-titular head of the entire U.S. intelligence community. The DCI position was disestablished and replaced in 2005 by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). One would expect that Harman would understand this distinction, as she was the Ranking Member of the congressional committee that drafted the 2005 legislation that made this change. But I guess that an organizational relationship that is required to be understood by every military intelligence Second Lieutenant, not to mention every CIA trainee, is a bit much for the Ranking Member of HPSCI. It’s all so confusing, isn’t it Jane?

I wonder what Representative Harman thinks that it does for the morale of CIA officers, both those operating alone overseas on the pointy end of the spear as well as those who toil in windowless rooms at Langley, when one of their former Congressional overseers so boldly and publicly impugns their integrity and honor while simultaneously displaying such a remarkable lack of understanding of her own responsibilities? I am told by former colleagues back in Washington that CIA employees feel embattled and betrayed by their own government (and, indeed, their own Director), and that morale is as low as it was in the days of the feckless leadership of Jimmy Carter and Stansfield Turner. I remember those days, and I sympathize with the current generation of intelligence officers trying to do their job while they are disrespected by both the ignorance and actions of Representative Harman. But to answer my original question, I think that Rhett Butler said it best: Frankly, she doesn’t give a damn.

After reading Harman’s LA Times opinion, I couldn’t help but think back to my days as a CIA trainee. One day, an instructor asked a Socratian question on the missions of various agencies of the intelligence community. Predictably, the class springbutt proceeded to answer it with an overly long and entirely incorrect spiel. “Thank you,” the instructor said, “that was a valuable lesson for all of us. If you don’t know the answer, stay in your seat and shut up.”

Mike Gorbell is a retired intelligence officer from California’s Central Coast.

I first entered the Headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1980 as a Captain of Marines who had been summoned to brief Agency analysts on my then area of expertise, Soviet amphibious warfare capabilities and tactics. I suppose like every first time visitor, I paused at the impressive Seal on the marble floor at the entrance and considered the challenge of the words of John 8:32, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” To the right of me, 43 stars were engraved on a marble Wall of Honor, representing those CIA officers who had died in the line of duty (to that date). To my left was a single star for those of the Office of Strategic Services who had similarly given their lives (in the days of OSS, they didn’t keep records). I knew at that moment that I would be a CIA intelligence officer some day.

When I arrived overseas on my first assignment for the Agency as a replacement for a Star that had been added since that first visit, my Chief of Station, himself to become a Star two years later, schooled me on the ethics of my chosen profession. “When you are overseas, you spend your life telling lies,” he said. “You lie about who you are, where you come from, what you are doing. But as an intelligence officer, there are four times when you may never lie. To the President, to Congress, to those for whom you are providing intelligence, and once you cross over that Seal and pass those Stars at Headquarters. Then it is all truth.” Every time I crossed that Seal and passed those Stars when I returned from various assignments overseas, I thought about what he had said. When I was loading a Star’s remains onto an aircraft overseas, a man with whom I had just shared a meal a few hours before he was killed, those Stars took on a particular meaning. I realized how many Stars that I knew and had worked with, even though their names didn’t appear in the Book of Honor because they were under cover on a sensitive assignment. Those thoughts were always with me years later when I briefed Congress on what I had done, and what I intended to do, as a senior officer.

Although it may seem strange to others, as an intelligence officer your life is very much about discovering the truth and making sure that the President, Congress, the military and every other government “intelligence consumer” receives your very best assessment so as to keep the people of the United States safe and successful. You realize that your consumers may act on your intelligence differently than you might have, but what matters is that they get your very best effort at the truth. That is your job, and it is what your honor and the memory of those Stars on the wall demand.

In days past, this professional ethic was respected by our consumers in general, and in particular by those whose job it was to oversee our activities on behalf of the citizenry: the select intelligence committees of the Senate and House of Representatives. One Senator on a select committee, himself a Medal of Honor winner and former Navy SEAL officer, told my colleagues that he was inspired by their bravery and dedication. High praise indeed, particularly so as it came in a private, face-to-face meeting that involved the Senator undertaking a very inconvenient surveillance detection routine so as to protect our identities.

Our current crop of “betters,” particularly Representative Pelosi, seem much more interested in pursuing their political fortunes at the expense of intelligence officers’ honor. Since we are used to being in the shadows, this might be tolerable except for the fact that man chosen by President Obama to be the current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the retired career partisan politician Congressman Leon Panetta, has publicly sided with his former congressional colleague Pelosi and in effect told his troops to suck eggs.

How do POTUS (President of the United States), Pelosi and Panetta think that it makes their intelligence troops feel when the values that define the profession and very life of an intelligence officer—integrity and honor—are so callously sacrificed on the altar of political expediency? Actually, since their own chosen profession of politics apparently values integrity so little, I really don’t think that they care. Worse, they don’t understand the people who serve America that do care.

There is one glimmer of hope, though. Intelligence officers are generally, well, intelligent. They have faith that the majority of the American people still have special trust and confidence in their patriotism, valor, fidelity and abilities. And there are now 87 stars on that marble wall to remind you when you come back from a mission of a challenge that will ultimately outlast POTUS, Pelosi, Panetta and the other prevaricators of political expediency: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Mike Gorbell is a retired intelligence officer from California’s Central Coast.