"About a month before Georgia's Rose Revolution in 2003, an order came down from the minister of state security. It was verbal. We were to destroy everything we had on the opposition, above all on Mikheil Saakashvili's National Movement.
Classified documents were torn out of the files by hand. The secret registry altered its logs and voided the registration numbers. A second verbal order followed: stop all work on the opposition, including agent work. We waited for the protests.
I thought of those orders again this fall, when a researcher who posts as DataRepublican began publishing what she says are hundreds of recorded calls and thousands of documents. They come from former officers of USAID's democracy office, retired national security officials, and protest coalitions. She says one of the groups, Renew to Thrive, put them online by accident. On those recordings, people whose job was to assess democracy abroad talk about the legitimacy of our own government.
I have seen this film. I watched it from inside the state…"
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Armand
paints up some Israeli mortar vehicles.
