CIA: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone
By David Swanson
There's a contradiction built into every campaign promise about transparent government beyond the failure to keep the promises. Our government is, in significant portion, made up of secret operations, operations that include warmaking, kidnapping, torture, assassination, and infiltrating and overthrowing governments. A growing movement is ready to see that end.
The Central Intelligence Agency is central to our foreign policy, but there is nothing intelligent about it, and there is no good news to be found regarding it. Its drone wars are humanitarian and strategic disasters. The piles of cash it keeps delivering to Hamid Karzai fuel corruption, not democracy. Whose idea was it that secret piles of cash could create democracy? (Nobody's, of course, democracy being the furthest thing from U.S. goals.) Lavishing money on potential Russian spies and getting caught helps no one, and not getting caught would have helped no one. Even scandals that avoid mentioning the CIA, like Benghazigate, are CIA blowback and worse than we're being told.
We've moved from the war on Iraq, about which the CIA lied, and its accompanying atrocities serving as the primary recruiting tool for anti-U.S. terrorists, to the drone wars filling that role. We've moved from kidnapping and torture to kidnapping and torture under a president who, we like to fantasize, doesn't really mean it. But the slave-owners who founded this country knew very well what virtually anyone would do if you gave them power, and framed the Constitution so as not to give presidents powers like these.
There are shelves full in your local bookstore of books pointing out the CIA's outrageous incompetence. The brilliant idea to give Iran plans for a nuclear bomb in order to prevent Iran from ever developing a nuclear bomb is one of my favorites.
But books that examine the illegality, immorality, and anti-democratic nature of even what the CIA so ham-handedly intends to do are rarer. A new book called Dirty Wars, also coming out as a film in June, does a superb job. I wrote a review a while back. Another book, decades old now, might be re-titled “Dirty Wars The Prequel.” I'm thinking of Douglas Valentine's The Phoenix Program.
It you read The Phoenix Program about our (the CIA's and “special” forces') secret crimes in Eastern Asia and Dirty Wars about our secret crimes in Western Asia, and remember that similar efforts were focused on making life hell for millions of people in Latin America in between these twin catastrophes, and that some of those running Phoenix were brought away from similar sadistic pursuits in the Philippines, it becomes hard to play along with the continual pretense that each uncovered outrage is an aberration, that the ongoing focus of our government's foreign policy “isn't who we are.”
Targeted murders with knives in Vietnam were justified with the same rhetoric that now justifies drone murders. The similarities include the failure of primary goals, the counterproductive blowback results, the breeding of corruption abroad and at home, the moral and political degradation, the erosion of democratic ways of thinking, and — of course — the racist arrogance and cultural ignorance that shape the programs and blind their participants to what they are engaged in. The primary difference between Phoenix and drone kills is that the drones don't suffer PTSD. The same, however, cannot be said for the drone pilots.
“The problem,” wrote Valentine, “was one of using means which were antithetical to the desired end, of denying due process in order to create a democracy, of using terror and repression to foster freedom. When put into practice by soldiers taught to think in conventional military and moral terms, Contre Coup engendered transgressions on a massive scale. However, for those pressing the attack on VCI, the bloodbath was constructive, for indiscriminate air raids and artillery barrages obscured the shadow war being fought in urban back alleys and anonymous rural hamlets. The military shield allowed a CIA officer to sit behind a steel door in a room in the U.S. Embassy, insulated from human concern, skimming the Phoenix blacklist, selecting targets for assassination, distilling power from tragedy.”
At some point, enough of us will recognize that government conducted behind a steel door can lead only to ever greater tragedy.
In an email that Valentine wrote for RootsAction.org on Monday, he wrote: “Through its bottomless black bag of unaccounted-for money, much of it generated by off-the-books proprietary companies and illegal activities like drug smuggling, the CIA spreads corruption around the world. This corruption undermines our own government and public officials. And the drone killings of innocent men, women, and children generate fierce resentment.. . .Tell your representative and senators right now that the CIA is the antithesis of democracy and needs to be abolished.”
ROBERT STEELE: I am forced to disagree with David, whose views are deliberately included by the Phi Beta Iota team because these views are not to be found in the corrupt mainstream media. It is not CIA that should be abolished, but rather the hidden chains of command, the programs that lack all moral and legislative foundation, and the impunity from prosecution. CIA as envisioned by President Harry Truman was then and is now an essential element of any Republic that wishes to leverage the truth for national security and national competitiveness. As I approach my 61st birthday (feeling at most 40 years of age), my perspective continues to broaden. It is not CIA that is the problem. It is the two-party tyranny that has so corrupted itself as to shred the Constitution and turn the politically elected, appointed, and overseen leaders of the US Government into an arm of a corporate fascist network rooted in Texas oil and New York money, with strong inter-locking religious fanatic and organized criminal networks. If the CIA and the FBI were to suddenly reconnect to their ethical roots, they could, alone, restore the integrity of the United States of America (USA). This is not something I expect to see happen in the near term. Not that I have any influence at all, but before I eliminated the CIA I would first transfer the drones to a new national reconnaissance activity, close down the DNI and the NRO, merge USGS and NGA, and cut NSA by two thirds, leaving only a single all-source data processing center in Utah. CIA is not the problem. Congress is the problem. The truth at any cost lowers all others costs. For one brief shining moment, that was the soul purpose of CIA. We need to get back to that. Intelligence with integrity is what is lacking in the US Government, CIA is potentially — along with the FBI — the most powerful force in favor of truth — and consequences for traitors — still standing within the US Government.
See Also:
2013 Robert Steele Answers on OSINT to PhD Student in Denmark
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)
