John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY

 

“The CIA Is Out of Control, Has Been Since the 50’s”

 

No other result is possible given all the circumstances of the organization.

You create a secretive organization which has relatively little oversight.

Its members are given to understand that they can lie, even under oath. Director Helms openly said as much during the Warren Commission’s investigation into Kennedy’s assassination.

You pass laws, pretty much for appearances, about matters like the organization not spying on its own people, but the organization just goes around these laws with various subterfuges, and no one in authority corrects them. CIA has always spied on Americans through one device or another, especially by using other friendly intelligence services to get around the laws.

You give the organization virtually unlimited resources.

You task it with very dark deeds in other countries, great numbers of them, so that they become inured to such activities. As any student of human psychology knows, once people get used to doing things in one area of activity – such as dirty tricks in countries abroad – they will gradually slip into acceptance of using the same methods anywhere. People’s minds are not compartmentalized like a set of laws.

Moreover, on the “operations” side of the house – as opposed to the purely intelligence-collecting side, the CIA having what are almost two distinct businesses under one roof – the nature of the work involved requires the services of very specific types of individuals.

Narcissists and psychopaths, intelligent ones, are both needed by the organization and attracted to the nature of its well-paid work, people pretty well without conscience, as you may well understand by such operations as we do know about.

One, the CIA’s International Torture Gulag, a collection of black “rendition” sites scattered in several countries where kidnapped people are secretly imprisoned. I have no idea if it still operates, but it did for many years. The CIA’s current Director, Gina Haspel, headed up one of these, and her icy smile would have been one of the last things some unfortunates saw.

Two, America’s industrial-level extrajudicial killing operation with drones and missiles and kill lists, where employees sit in secret rooms in front of computer screens to play violent computer games with real humans. They kill people they know nothing about, people who have no legal rights, people who are legally guilty of nothing. They also frequently kill other bystanders in error, but neither bystanders nor targets are guilty of anything.

Three, the plotting against and overthrow of governments in other countries, often even democratic governments if they look like stumbling blocks to American interests. Just a few well-known examples include democratic governments in Guatemala, Chile, and Iran. A whole list of leaders has been eliminated since the 1950s, and an even longer list of countries have experienced destructive black operations.

Four, the utter corruption of many foreign leaders through the use of blackmail, threats, and secret payments. These are methods are used on leaders of “friendly” and allied countries. Talk about interfering in other people’s elections, CIA has been relentless in such activities.

CIA’s ability to do what would be unacceptable things is aided greatly by little accountability and plenty of resources.

In general, we all know what effects power has on people. It corrupts, and the closer you get to absolute power, the closer you get to absolute corruption.

Readers may enjoy these articles about CIA:

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/why-the-cia-always-will-be-a-costly-flop/

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/the-cia-and-americas-presidents-some-rarely-discussed-truths-shaping-contemporary-american-democracy/

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SEVERAL AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE VETS IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/us-intel-vets-dispute-russia-hacking-claims/ri18173

An excellent piece.

However, when they say: “a key mystery is why U.S. intelligence would rely on “circumstantial evidence” when it has the capability for hard evidence”

The authors surely are being generous.

The CIA has always been a highly political organization. Always.

And its long-term record of obtaining accurate information and properly assessing it has actually often been quite poor.

The best example is in its old annual assessment of the USSR. It was always grossly incorrect.

This was in part owing to poor work, but it was in part deliberately used to squeeze more money out of Congress for defense and intelligence. It was actually quite a game they used to play.

Truth never much counted, politics did.

By the way, when President Kennedy received his first CIA briefings, he made the memorable comment that there was little there that he had not already read in the New York Times.

It provides a good response to those criticizing Trump for saying he does not need the daily briefings because his (very smart) people are on top of things, the unspoken truth there being that CIA briefings are larded with stuff the CIA wants you to think, not necessarily what reality is. A real man of action does not waste time with that.

However, the CIA has two major branches, intelligence collection and assessment and clandestine operations.

While intelligence gathering has often been a failure, the clandestine branch – I don’t want to say has been a success because that would be inaccurate but it has done a lot of damage over the years.

It failed in tasks such as killing Castro, but it helped engineer coups and overthrows in many places, including against democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and, of course in Ukraine.

It has always worked with the thugs and scum of the earth – as it does today in Syria – to bring disorder and destruction to many places.

Essentially, the guys who work for this branch resemble vicious college frat-boys who enjoy hurting and killing with impunity. In Vietnam, for example, these scum organized Project Phoenix during which 20,000 Vietnamese village leaders and such had their throats cut by guys crawling into villages on their bellies in the middle of the night.

Any society has a natural endowment of such psychopathic types, but they don’t all give them free rein and resources to enjoy themselves, except in the case of genuine war.

Readers may enjoy these discussions:

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/why-the-cia-always-will-be-a-costly-flop/

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/the-cia-and-americas-presidents-some-rarely-discussed-truths-shaping-contemporary-american-democracy/

Please, also, keep in mind that the Washington Post is now owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame.

Bezos, like other big American hi-tech guys – Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google – has been in bed with the CIA for a while. All such companies at some point are made offers they cannot refuse (“in the national interest”) to share information secretly and sometimes to slightly bend or slant operations in particular ways.

He is also a notorious partisan of Hillary Clinton, having assigned a team of reporters to dig dirt on Trump during the election.

 

Readers should also see these sources on the leaks:

http://alexanderhiggins.com/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-emails-leaked-by-pissed-bernie-backer-not-russia/

https://sputniknews.com/us/201612141048568197-nsa-whistleblower-binney-cia-lying-russia/

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-12/theres-psy-op-all-right-it-isnt-russians