John Kerry: “But I say to my friend from Colorado, really what he is saying about the Peace Corps is to turn fundamentally a blind…”

“But I say to my friend from Colorado, really what he is saying about the Peace Corps is to turn fundamentally a blind eye to an assiduously sought after separation of entities. The Peace Corps is not meant to be an arm of the CIA, nor are any other of our quasi-NGO's. Because the minute they become that, they lose their effectiveness. That is precisely what Sam Brown was trying to preserve--their effectiveness. I am confident that my friend from Colorado remembers well the ways in which a whole bunch of people, and separate entities, were tarnished by virtue of the ability of other countries to point the finger at them and say they are just operatives of the CIA; therefore we cannot trust them or we will not let them in here or we will not let them do this. So what Sam Brown was trying to do was preserve the integrity of the Peace Corps, not as an instrument of American ideology, but rather as an instrument of our highest principles and moral standards; as a purveyor, if you will, of the notion that America was going to show people by action how we could have an impact on their lives.”