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Like Fred Said: Is this gonna be our lives now? Fighting our own employees, our own clients? Are we really gonna do any good?

But ANGEL is optimistic: Yes, we are. We're gonna change things. We came to Wolfram and Hart because it's a powerful weapon, and we'll figure out how to wield it.

The CIA and Poison Letters: BlackValentines?

Saddam Hussein, then an up-and-coming CIA asset and dictator, and other members of the Ba'ath party worked with,the Americans, to overthrow General Kassem. According to Frontline, "With CIA help, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party seized power in 1963. General Kassem was killed in the coup. The CIA provided lists of suspected communists for Ba'ath Party hit squads, who liquidated at least 800 people. Saddam Hussein rushed home to join in as a interrogator, torturer and killer.

Our bloody coup in Indonesia
It has been known for more than 10 years that the CIA supplied lists of names for Suharto's assassination squads. What is less widely known is that the supposed pro-communist coup that triggered the crisis was almost certainly also the work of the CIA. Sukarno was finally removed from power in 1967.

How Washington backed bloodbath in Indonesia
They made the rivers in many parts of Indonesia literally run red with the blood of their victims. For months, the army went from village to village, island to island, shooting and hacking at whoever was pointed out to them by local reactionaries as "trouble makers."

The police, landlords and merchants used this holocaust as the opportunity to settle old scores and tame the mighty popular movement. Hundreds of thousands who survived the killings were jailed for decades in barbaric concentration camps, where many died.

In a discussion of the difficulties facing the oppressed masses, how can the utter intransigence of the rulers be left out? How can social transformation be seriously considered without taking into account that those with privilege and property may resort to any means, including mass murder, to stay on top?

Government Calls Back Newly Released Book Detailing U.S. Role in Deadly Anti-Communist Purge
By Pete Yost Associated Press Writer
Published: Jul 27, 2001

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government on Friday scrambled to call back all copies of a State Department history that details the U.S. role in Indonesia's deadly purge of communists in the 1960s.

In a diplomatically embarrassing case of terrible timing, hundreds of libraries across the country are stocking the recently released history of American officials' secret support for the anti-communist campaign that undermined the rule of Sukarno, Indonesia's founding president. Sukarno's daughter became the country's new leader this week.

The State Department blamed the Government Printing Office for issuing the book without approval from State, but the GPO saidit had gotten clearance from State in April.

"We did not inadvertently release this history," said GPO spokesman Andrew Sherman.

"Only within the last two weeks have we been contacted by the State Department" and "every now and then an agency will say, 'There is a problem with a document, can you pull it back.' That's what we have been in the process of doing over the last several days - talking to the State Department and finding a way to ask the libraries to take those books off the shelves," said Sherman.

The State Department said that it discovered this month, before the internal process of deciding when to release the volume was completed, that the printing office had begun distributing copies.

"We asked the Government Printing Office not to sell any more copies because the process was not yet complete and no release date set," said a State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The National Security Archive, a private group specializing in national security issues, said the CIA had tried to suppress the history.

The text of a four-page CIA memo from then-Far East Division Chief William Colby is deleted in its entirety. The history identifies the source and date of the memo. Colby, who later became CIA director, died in 1996.

The CIA memo is dated the day after a State Department cable contained in the history spells out a U.S. plan to funnel tens of thousands of dollars to a group bent on the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party.

"This is to confirm my earlier concurrence that we provide Malik with fifty million rupiahs requested by him for the activities of the Kap-Gestapu movement," says a Dec. 2, 1965, document from the American ambassador in Indonesia to William P. Bundy, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 1964 to 1969.

"The chances of detection or subsequent revelation of our support in this instance are as minimal as any black bagoperation can be," the document concluded.

Of the Gestapu, the ambassador's document said, "This army-inspired but civilian-staffed action group is still carrying burden of current repressive efforts targeted against the PKI," a reference to the Indonesian Communist Party that was allied with Sukarno.

In a message to Washington dated April 15, 1966, the embassy acknowledged: "We frankly do not know whether the real figure" of communists who have been killed "is closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000 but believe it wiser to err on the side of the lower estimates, especially when questioned by the press."

Adding detail to revelations of over a decade ago, the volume also points out that the U.S. Embassy supplied lists of top communist leaders to the Indonesians who were trying to destroy the PKI.

The history quoted from an airgram from the embassy to the State Department saying that an embassy-prepared list of communist leaders "is apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership."

What makes you think the Communists who were being suppressed were such nice guys? The human rights record of communists in the world is abysmal...millions upon millions of people have been shot in the back of the head, starved to death or otherwise been "reeducated" by the likes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or the Shining Path guerillas in Peru. There are people today starving to death in N. Korea because the Communist government there believes guns are better than people. The actions of the CIA in Indonesia possibly prevented a Pol Pot style bloodbath in the 70's if the communists had come to power.

You can't divorce the alleged actions of the CIA from the events of the times.

On second thought, you're right. Wolfram & Hart, under the control of Angel's team is a good metaphor for the CIA. Sometimes you have to do some evil to do a lot of good. :)