You may note that despite my view of the organization’s history, I agree with kniz. The CIA itself is, as I said, largely unpartisan. Like any tool, it can be used for good or evil.
No amount of education is going to help you, Ralph. You are just too far gone. The irony is that you are saying the same thing about me right now.
At the risk of feeling like I’m wasting my time…the world is a dangerous place. There are many many people whose first priority is not creating a socialist utopia. Therefore, we need to know what they are doing, hopefully before they do something that is not in our best interest. The very people who find the Operations Directorate of the CIA ideologically offensive are the same ones who damaged it severely in the 1970s with the Church Commission among other efforts.
The stupidity continued with the Clinton administration directive that CIA informants cannot be criminals. Apparently, making sure that people pass a political correctness test is more important than getting information that could help the United States strategically.
This created a serious defecit in the Human Intelligence pipeline. That problem continues today. You can’t exactly show up on Osama’s doorstep with a paste-on mustache and be admitted to the inner circle. You have to create a “legend” to go undercover, which can take years and be very dangerous work. These people are risking their lives to provide vital information…and dozens of them are represented by stars in the lobby of the CIA. Each star represents an agent killed in the line of duty. Due to the sacrifice of pragmatism and common sense on the altar of ideology, it will take a minimum of five years to start realizing the benefits of the human intelligence corps which President Bush recently doubled in size.
I dont think there is a need to defend our need to have a CIA. Just like the FBI, DEA, DOT and any other goverment agency - when they are out of work and risk budget cuts they create work for themselves, whether America needs it or not the CIA is here to stay.
Easy. Pass legislation to limit the CIA to espionage and intelligence functions. Those are what we really need it for. Make “black ops” explicitly illegal and never-to-be-funded. Leave the president with no agency he can use to mount a coup against any foreign government, order assassinations, etc.; those are not powers he should have.
:eek: You call that a “political correctness” test? Criminals are criminals; you can’t trust what they tell you, and if you work with them you’re enabling their criminal careers.
Sometimes the actions of foreign governments are a threat to the United States and to the interests of the United States, sometimes seriously, to the extent that action needs to be taken. In a case like that, we can either go to war, which will result in the death of innocents on both sides, or we can take covert action, which, if done right, prevents or limits the death of innocents while accomplishing the same goals.
You criticize the CIA’s actions in Iran and Chile, but would you have preferred we went to war against those two countries to install the Shah and Pinochet? Would that really have been a better outcome, in your mind?
First, no President would let an org like the CIA operate outside of executive control. No US Administration would permit that from a government agency. As with any agency, there is a “signoff” hierarchy for the requisition/use of assets. A middle management guy doesn’t orchestrate state coups, signing authority would have to come from the top (political, not bureaucratic levels).
Second, my impression of the CIA is that it ruthlessly advances American interests and likely prefers a sort of realpolitik stability over upheaval and war. This pragmatism generally extends beyond election horizons because good forecasting can’t be done in 4 year windows or the CIA will fail to achieve its mandate to preserve American ideals and ensure national security.
I’m sure the same ego battles, turf wars and moronic senior management found in other gov’t agencies are in the CIA as well. It’s likely got inefficiencies in its org structure because governments are always slow to change (even under pressure). And it’s been under an incredible amount of scrutiny due to near-constant scapegoating by the current administration. The CIA is only as dangerous as the President/Congress allows them to be, just like the military.
I’d prefer that they have left them alone-being that neither were a threat in the first place.
I think an argument can be made that they were, but if that’s your argument, than your problem isn’t with the CIA, but with the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations.
:dubious: This line of argument is utterly beneath contempt. A “better outcome” would have been to leave those countries alone to make their own mistakes, even if their peoples’ decisions had consequences detrimental to our national interests. The United States had no legitimate “interest” in unseating the democratically elected governments of Iran and Chile, and our decision to engineer coups in those countries did not “prevent the death of innocents” but, to the contrary, caused the deaths of thousands of innocents. Whether invading would have killed even more is irrelevant; we had no right to invade, in those countries or any of the others the CIA has destabilized over the decades.
Which administrations would have have been able to take the shameful and criminal actions they did if they had not had the CIA available as a tool for covert ops. That is where the problem lies. The executive branch of the U.S. government should be deprived of that tool, lest it yield to the temptation to use it.
Sorry, “Which administrations would have have been unable to take the shameful and criminal actions,” etc.
Gotta preview.
Yes. At least then it would have been open and we wouldn’t have dopes denying that we had anything to do with overthrowing democracies and installing dictators (not talking about you, Captain).
More to the point, we most likely would not have gone to war and would have left the countries alone.
Well, this assumes that killing people goes against American ideals, which it likely does, in some contexts. Killing people in order to promote or achieve certain other American ideals (e.g. maintaining American economic hegemony, maintaining primacy of American systems of governance, safeguarding of resources, safeguarding of allies, destruction of ideologies that run counter to American principles…like Communism) is often endorsed by citizens themselves. Justification for killing through covert action is usually through signoff by an elected representative/Congressional endorsement, as representatives of the people.
If US intelligence agencies were suddenly limited to clandestine ops alone and then an immediate and serious threat to the US emerged, how long do you think it would take for American citizens to reverse those restrictions, simply to protect their ideals and way of life?
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The circumstances where we might need to foment a coup, etc., in a foreign country to “protect our ideals and way of life” are so rare and bizarre they hardly warrant discussion, and certainly have not existed in any country at any time from 1945 today.
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If circumstances emerged where some amoral and recklessly insane elements in our society or our government somehow formed the idea such action was necessary and justifiable, and an established covert ops agency were not ready and available to carry it out, then at least they would have to go through the motions of getting Congress to authorize it, and it is likely the action sought would never happen; and if it did, it would only be when the necessity and justice of such action were too obvious and compelling for any significant dissent.
I don’t think that’s true, at least from the USG perspective during the Cold War. If you take the Mideast, the last 40 years or so have been a balancing act between preventing the Soviet Union from turning Arab countries into client states, preserving access to cheap Saudi oil and maintaining the security of Israel. Soviet influence over developing countries was viewed as a serious threat to US national security and American ideals by US administrations. Many, many CIA operations have been initiated to address that one specific threat.
I think a reversal would happen fast, it would fly through Congress with bipartisan support and overt/covert acts that would normally be viewed as horrific would instead be entirely justified. Quite a lot of strange things can be rammed through legislative channels when citizens are scared and emotional. And no politician wants his administration to be labelled “unprepared” for a given event, so it’s more prudent to have all of these orgs in place and extend/limit their powers according to public expectations. Currently, public tolerance for morally “dubious” acts runs rather high, especially when officials mention the GWOT.
BrainGlutton, your idealism is as exemplary as your morality . But do you really think “laws” are going to stop anyone from doing something? If I’m not mistaken, your country has laws against extra-judicial killings, yet sent a drone over the Yemeni desert to kill a terrorist leader (death sentence without trial = extra-judicial killing).
You certainly have laws against torture (via both international and federal legislation) which did nothing to stop torture. Putting legal restrictions on the CIA will do nothing to stop black ops; it’s part and parcel of the intelligence apparatus.
Captain Amazing:
I echo the sentiments expressed here by the others who said they wished you hadn’t engaged at all. But if the choices are limited to the ones you’ve outlined, then I’d choose war. At least then the American people themselves would have had to endure the personal sacrifices (perhaps minimally in comparison) along with those nations. Then they’d be more informed and better able to judge what the bigger “threat” really is.
So if the CIA is so dangerous, do you have an alternative? I mean, the Bush administration is sidelining the CIA (presumably to avoid the required oversight by Congress) and building up large military intelligence operations, to the point the military may very be conducting covert ops with no oversight. Isn’t this quite a bit more dangerous to us that the present structure the CIA is supposed to operate within?