Word: orderers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...failed coup against Panama's Manuel Antonio Noriega, the fickle finger of blame is being pointed in all directions. It has been aimed at George Bush, at Congress, at CIA director William Webster and at the coup plotters themselves. Last week it targeted a section of a presidential order that bars all direct or indirect U.S. involvement in assassinations. The issue was whether American officials withheld support for the coup out of fear that Noriega might be killed...
...years, a drumbeat of press stories and congressional investigations disclosed past attempts by the CIA to kill Congolese ex-Premier Patrice Lumumba, Cuba's Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. Though apparently none of these plots succeeded, President Gerald Ford included the assassination ban in a 1976 public Executive Order regulating U.S. intelligence activities. Every President since has adopted the ban with little change...
...agree that Webster has identified a real problem, some think the ambiguity should not be resolved. "There is a gray area," says Anthony Beilenson, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "And it ought to remain there. The fact that there's a little bit of uncertainty about the Executive Order serves a useful purpose. We should be cautious when it comes to coups that may lead to assassination." In fact, the CIA has procedures for high-level review of operations that could violate the ban. And yet a clear distinction between coups and assassinations is not always possible...
...natural disasters, the earthquake somehow is the most unnerving. It is the earth talking, after all, and so it speaks with a primal power. Earthquakes in Scripture mean that God has crumpled up the order of the world and hurled it down in disgust. "And the foundations of the world do shake," says Isaiah. "The earth is utterly broken down." Or, agnostically, earthquakes are a wandering, enigmatic fierceness, now and then breaching the surface like Moby Dick...
...earthquake rides on a principle of disintegration -- the disintegration not only of architecture and pavements and lives but also of the entire idea of order, of process and human control. "What can one believe quite safe," asked Seneca, "if the world itself is shaken, and its most solid parts totter to their fall . . . and the earth lose its chief characteristic, stability?" The familiar world goes rioting down to rubble. Reality comes to rest at a crazy angle...