Mike Keefe's comic plays with blowback.
Chalmers Johnson borrowed the term "blowback" from the CIA. It first appeared in a classified CIA post-action report on the secret overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953.
The term "blowback," which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of "terrorists" or "drug lords" or "rogue states" or "illegal arms merchants" often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.
Chalmers Johnson, Blowback
Johnson upset many coffee circles when he suggested that the attacks of September 11, 2001 could be understood as "blowback" for US foreign policy. Writing for Foreign Affairs, Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds apply the blowback model to the US military invasion and "stablization" of Iraq.
According to the Urban Dictionary, blowback means "To hold a marijuana joint in ones mouth between the lips with the hot end in the mouth while blowing smoke out of the hole at the other end into someone else's mouth, so as to get a big 'hit". Trickly illustrates it on his album cover buy the same name.
Comic strips now require spaces for blowback. Blowback, the band, plays protest punk. The video game, Blowback, created by Elizabeth Sampat, allows you to play spies blacklisted after a job goes awry. You can get involved with "the people who care about them". Unlike working for the CIA, this game is "designed for long-term play".
Valerine Plame makes use of the term to fuel her new fictional endeavors. In these gnarly times of postmodern terrorism, the blowback of intelligence leaks gives birth to novels. Patrick Anderson describes it for Washington Post:
Valerie Plame, as all true political junkies will recall, rocketed from anonymity to celebrity a decade ago thanks toa truly bizarre episode that the George W. Bush administration inflicted upon itself. Briefly, during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the CIA sent Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, to Niger to check reports that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy materials there that his nation could use to build weapons of mass destruction.
Wilson reported back that it didn’t happen, which wasn’t what the Bushies wanted to hear. Soon thereafter, apparently to punish Wilson for his truth-telling, sources in the administration leaked to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Plame, was a covert operative at the CIA. That was true, but to disclose it to the news media was a crime. In time, Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was put on trial for misleading FBI agents investigating the leak.
Dave Smith, a poet from Sydney, shares his poetic rendition of blowback. With blowback, it seems, someone always gets blown away.
