Left I on the News

It wasn't enough that the U.S. government, via the CIA, sponsored an invasion of Cuba in 1961 (one in a long line of illegal attempts to overthrow a foreign government) at the Bay of Pigs. Now they're celebrating a massacre that was part of that invasion:

The Bay of Pigs invasion has been a low point for the U.S. government since its failure more than four decades ago. Now, the men who volunteered for the mission are being remembered at an art gallery at -- of all places -- the CIA, which plotted the clandestine operation.

Veterans of the ill-fated attempt to topple Fidel Castro -- Cuban exiles, CIA contract pilots and the families of four Alabama Air National Guardsmen who died in Cuba -- will gather Thursday at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Ala. There, an oil painting will be unveiled that depicts one of the successes of the covert operation: an April 1961 aerial attack on Castro's forces that took out an estimated 900 soldiers.

Titled Lobo Flight, the 40- by 30-inch painting shows a vintage B-26 twin engine bomber flown by Connie Seigrist -- the lead pilot of a convoy of B-26s painted to look like Cuban aircraft -- dropping bombs onto a column of Cuban troops heading to the beach, where a group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles had landed to attempt to overthrow Castro.

Quoting Dana Carvey as the Church Lady, "well, isn't that...special." What's next, a painting celebrating the "success" of the firebombing of Tokyo, or the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How about a painting of the "success" at My Lai? Oh sorry, those weren't CIA "successes." OK, we'll go with a painting of the murder of Salvador Allende. They're probably still toasting that "success" at CIA headquarters.