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Abolish the CIA?

Eddie Dane

Philosopher
Eddie Dane
Joined
Aug 18, 2007
Messages
6,681
OK, I heard Chris Hitchens state that the CIA has lost all credibility due to:
-allowing themselves to be used as a propaganda tool for the Iraq war.
-Misrepresenting the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
-Various anti-democratic coups in Iran, South America.
-numerous other cock-ups.

I believe their failings are chronicled in the book Legacy Of Ashes. (haven't read it).

What say you? should the CIA be abolished? And if yes, what should it be replaced with?
 
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I can't recall exactly how many intelligence services we have at present... A lot.... I don't think anyone would deny that we need good intelligence-gathering and espionage services in today's world.
The CIA has been used as a tool by various political administrations over it's history for a number of purposes which are questionable...
Perhaps their charter needs some work. The problem with oversight of intelligence is that the work is secret for the most part.. The more overseers the less secret.
Too frequently it seems that Congress has merely provided a rubber stamp.
 
How would a replacement be any better without compromising it's abilities to function?
 
Eddie Dane said:
OK, I heard Chris Hitchens state that the CIA has lost all credibility due to:
-allowing themselves to be used as a propaganda tool for the Iraq war.
-Misrepresenting the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
-Various anti-democratic coups in Iran, South America.
-numerous other cock-ups.

I believe their failings are chronicled in the book Legacy Of Ashes. (haven't read it).

What say you? should the CIA be abolished? And if yes, what should it be replaced with?
Click to expand...

Tim Weiner complains mostly that they didn't even do what they were set up to do (gather intelligence and be able to predict an attack such as Pearl Harbor) and that the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 are an example of that. He pooh-poohs the counter-argument that maybe they were responsible for thwarting other attacks saying, effectively, that they didn't and wouldn't have been able to partly due to factionalism within the CIA in which some people jealously guarded their turf, the fact that they often engaged in illegal activity that they couldn't talk about and the fact that they were often used by various administrations to find evidence or concoct it to bolster a particular presidents policies rather than providing neutral intelligence for the president who could then decide policy on the basis of the intelligence.

Much of their budget was spent on often laughably inept "covert" operations in which their involvement became very obvious very quickly.

As for Hitchens, I think he has been saying for a while that the CIA should be abolished, but the last time I remember him saying that I thought it was because they were guilty of "treason" in his gradually more and more unhinged mind.
 
TragicMonkey said:
The CIA had credibility? Ever?
Click to expand...

It did; it had a lot, actually. And Hitchens is a fool if he thinks CIA's exaggerating the USSR's economic and military strength was a "mistake". That "mistake" is the reason we emerged as the world's only unchallengeable superpower when the Soviet Union collapsed.
 
Checkmite said:
It did; it had a lot, actually. And Hitchens is a fool if he thinks CIA's exaggerating the USSR's economic and military strength was a "mistake". That "mistake" is the reason we emerged as the world's only unchallengeable superpower when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Click to expand...

I don't give a damn what countries do to each other, but I really don't like agencies that victimize their own citizens.
 
The CIA is not an autonomous agency; as I noted essentially all of it's unsavory/illegal undertakings were done so at the behest of various administrations, or even the president himself in the case of Tricky Dick.
Much as in the case of certain police "special units" that were told to go out and take care of a problem and by the way, don't say we told you to or involve the city government in any way...
Plausible Deniability was invented for CIA ops.

Perhaps it's certain other segments of government that need to be looked at....
 
Abolishing the CIA would be suicide. Both JFK and RFK wanted to do it and both of them met early deaths.

Sadly, the CIA doesn't always even work in the interests of our country, they work with the CFR, and work in the interests of multinational corporations, dynastic oil monopolies, and international banks. Have you ever wondered why so many people in the CIA were bankers?


INRM
Hope I don't get a heart-attack, a stroke, or die mysteriously.
 
Checkmite said:
It did; it had a lot, actually. And Hitchens is a fool if he thinks CIA's exaggerating the USSR's economic and military strength was a "mistake". That "mistake" is the reason we emerged as the world's only unchallengeable superpower when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Click to expand...

I think that that had more to do with the Soviets choosing an economic system which required a central commission to decide how many tons of teddy-bear toy-factory 526 in Ukraine should produce in quarter three.
And that for every other product in the SU.

The criticism that the agency has been very dysfunctional and didn't see stuff coming like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iranian revolution.
In the sixties they want all James Bond with all their let's-put-LSD-in-Castro's-cigars and crap like that.

Most their successes seem to have created a lot of blow-back. The Shah, every coup in South america.
 
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Eddie Dane said:
I think that that had more to do with the Soviets choosing an economic system which required a central commission to decide how many tons of teddy-bear toy-factory 526 in Ukraine should produce in quarter three.
And that for every other product in the SU.

The criticism that the agency has been very dysfunctional and didn't see stuff coming like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iranian revolution.
In the sixties they want all James Bond with all their let's-put-LSD-in-Castro's-cigars and crap like that.

Most their successes seem to have created a lot of blow-back. The Shah, every coup in South america.
Click to expand...

I wasn't aware that South American terrorists attacked the US due to numerous coups.

And i thought the Shah was overthrown bythe ayatollahs because he was attempting to reduce their power. I dont see how that's blowback, and the Shah didnt really take power in a coup anyway.
 
Bikewer said:
The CIA is not an autonomous agency; as I noted essentially all of it's unsavory/illegal undertakings were done so at the behest of various administrations, or even the president himself in the case of Tricky Dick.
Click to expand...

In fact, Kennedy and Johnson (and maybe Eisenhower, although I can't remember now) asked the CIA to spy on US citizens which the CIA were specifically forbidden from doing at their founding. Under Nixon they just happened to get caught.
 
Eddie Dane said:
OK, I heard Chris Hitchens state that the CIA has lost all credibility due to:
-allowing themselves to be used as a propaganda tool for the Iraq war.
-Misrepresenting the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
-Various anti-democratic coups in Iran, South America.
-numerous other cock-ups.

I believe their failings are chronicled in the book Legacy Of Ashes. (haven't read it).

What say you? should the CIA be abolished? And if yes, what should it be replaced with?
Click to expand...

This is one of the reasons why I do not care much for Christopher Hitchens.

He was one of the biggest supporters of the Iraq War, and after the war even though he acknowledged that all of his justifications were incorrect, yet he still supported the Iraq War.

But now, he is critical of the CIA for being wrong about the Iraq War.

Ugh! This guy goes in so many different directions on the Iraq War issue it is hard to keep them all sorted out.

But to answer the question, I would say do not abolish the CIA. Instead, have the CIA do what it supposed to be doing. And what the CIA is supposed to be doing is to gather information, analyze that information, and then distribute that information to the decision makers so that they can make the best informed decisions possible.

The CIA is not supposed to be terribly emeshed in political infighting, secret wars, pro-presidential propaganda, and so on, but unfortunately, these are just the sort of things that the CIA gets deeply involved with all too frequently.
 
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