The thing that makes the CIA such a threat to the world is how the agency gets off scot-free time and again no matter how egregious its activities.
From training the Contras to testing LSD on humans to assassinating presidents, the CIA does as it pleases. How did it come to this and when will it end?
The Central Intelligence Agency has become somewhat of a household name in the US and in other countries unfortunate enough to be a stage for its meddling. Practically since it was founded to this very day, it has gone well beyond simply collecting intelligence and assisting the President, which are the limited tasks the CIA states as its mission.
Whatever your stance on the present-day CIA may be, it’s hard to object to the notion that every state must have an intelligence agency. It is like the balance of terror: in the world where everyone has their own intel-gathering agencies, you should have one, too.
However, the power of the CIA started to exceed merely collecting intel very soon after its creation. Just one year after the National Security Act had established the Agency in 1947, another piece of legislation bestowed a bunch of extra powers on it.
This new act, NC 10/2, placed the authority over covert espionage and counter-espionage operations abroad during the time of peace under the control of the Director of Central Intelligence. Such operations were to be conducted by the Office of Special Projects nominally independent of the other CIA units; the Chief of this office, however, was to report to the Director of the CIA only. Moreover, the Director also held the power to approve the candidate for the position of the Chief of the OSP.
The next time the CIA was granted additional privileges was not long in coming. Per Section 6 of the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act, it was exempted from the obligation to disclose any information regarding its funding. Of course, it went against the Constitution’s demands to publish regular reports on how any money withdrawn from the Treasury was spent but why would anyone care? The Supreme Court definitely did not, essentially telling the public that how much money the Agency spends and how should not concern the citizens.
That case, United States v. Richardson, is extremely indicative of the relationship between the CIA and the general public. It showed that some entities in the nation are free from all scrutiny and the less the population knows about their doings, the better for it.
And indeed, the Agency doesn’t want anyone looking into its activities not only because of the oh-so-secret intelligence but also because they are oftentimes illegal.
The most famous example of the CIA treating American citizens as guinea pigs is, of course, the MK-Ultra program. That project, carried out in the middle of the twentieth century at eighty-six institutions, involved conducting unethical experiments on humans.
“Unethical” doesn’t even begin to describe it, really. Here’s what Ted Kennedy told to the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resource during the joint hearing in 1977: “The Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent. […] The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers. […] Other experiments were equally offensive. For example, heroin addicts were enticed into participating in LSD testing in order to get a reward — heroin.”
There is something other than the shocking cruelty and indifference to human life and well-being that Senator Kennedy’s words tell us about the CIA. To give heroin as a reward, it would need to have obtained heroin somewhere in the first place. Surely, the drug trade is not something that the CIA would do, is it?
Well, we don’t necessarily have the proof that it did participate in drug trafficking back when MK-Ultra was still undiscovered by the Senate. What we do know, though, is that the Agency was involved in it a few decades later, using drug money to help finance the Contras.
Pilots who delivered arms from the US to Nicaragua could “bring back [their] own cargo”, that cargo being marijuana and cocaine to earn a little extra. The CIA made sure that they were not searched on arrival. Moreover, the drugs those pilots were flying back to America were also provided by the CIA and a “friend” it had brought into this scheme, drug trafficker George Morales whom it had pressured into providing planes and money to the Contras in exchange for some benefits during his jail time.
With its nearly limitless financing that it doesn’t have to give an account of, you’d think that the Agency should be hyper-competent in fulfilling its primary task, namely gathering and analyzing intel, especially such that concerns the safety of the American citizens. If the CIA has time and funds to see coup d’états through in half a dozen foreign states, it surely must manage to keep the American soil safe from inside and outside dangers.
But as we all know, it is as far from the truth as it can possibly be. What was the taxpayers’ money that went to finance the CIA wasted on if it couldn’t prevent 9/11 despite having advance knowledge of the planned attack and having been tracking some of the hijackers?
The eyes of the CIA were more drawn to other countries than to the USA from the get-go. Back in 1953, the CIA planned and saw through the TPAJAX project which resulted in Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh being deposed and the authority of the Shah being consolidated.
Because of this overthrow of a democratically elected official, the rule of the Iranian monarch that was perceived as pro-American was also widely hated by the Iranians. While it can be argued that it was facilitated by the Shah himself and his West-oriented policies that angered the traditionalists much more than by the circumstances of his installation as the ruler, the result was the same. After 26 years, the CIA’s efforts to secure Iran as a secular and US-friendly state went bust when the Iranian Revolution happened in 1979.
Despite the fact that Iran today is anything but a friend to the USA, opinions that it was the US that staged the revolution have been voiced. If it is so, it’s safe to assume that the CIA was involved in such an operation. It would be quite fitting, actually, if the Shah’s regime rose and fell with the help of the Agency.
And let us not forget, of course, the funding that the CIA gave to the Mujahideen of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, trying to reestablish their foothold in the region after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. This so-called Operation Cyclone flooded the region with guns and ammunition that were later used by al-Qaeda.
The question all these considerations bring us to is this: Have the American people seen more good or bad from the CIA?
It can be argued that our view of this problem is going to be one-sided because we are less likely to find out about their successes than blunders. While it is true, the number and the magnitude of these blunders are so off the charts that no amount of good work that the CIA does can possibly outweigh it.
One thing makes the CIA as threatening to the world as it is. This thing is how the Agency gets off scot-free no matter what it does time and again. Nobody was punished for the awful events that transpired under the MK-Ultra project as the researchers were decided to be “protected intelligence sources” by the court and could not, therefore, be prosecuted.
Today, there’s little that we can do to change this situation. But to be aware of it, to be aware of every operation Central Intelligence wants to sweep under the rug, of every country that has suffered because of the Agency’s machinations is the step we all should take. It is the least we can do, but hopefully not the last.
Harry Truman regretted the way the CIA went rogue in this1963.article.
The Washington Post
December 22, 1963 – page A11
Harry Truman Writes:
Limit CIA Role
To Intelligence
Copyright, 1963, by Harry S Truman
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President’s performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what’s worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being “upset.”
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,“ ”exploitive capitalism,“ ”war-mongering,“ ”monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
The CIA should be dismantled entirely. It is run by Jews who answer to no one on a normal basis so to have them in control of any organization where their illegal activities are par for the course is a main reason to end this corrupt horde.
Intel is necessary but it should be without any Jewish member. Mossad has lied and cheated the U.S. repeatedly in all of history and to have a Jew in the CIA is to have an open door policy for Mossad to get all the knowledge they want from the U.S. Another new organization can be formed but minus the freedom to do as they please at any and all costs to humanity and the budget!
Not just the CIA…..
In 1848 Abraham Lincoln gave the following speech to Congress as an Illinois congressman..,.
It’s a Constitutional right for a state to vote on and nullify any Federal law passed which is shown to be detrimental to the well being of the citizens of said state.
It is also a Constitutional right of a state to vote on seceding from a government which is operating in such a manner that is continuously detrinental to the well being of the citizens of that state.
But…..Lincoln did not stop there….he went on to say…..
It is a Constitutional right….not just a right but the duty….. of the citizens under a government that has become so large, corrupt and out of control that it is no longer operating for the best interests of these citizens to dismantle that government and reorganize it so that it is once again operating by the people for the people within that government…..
Sadly….as president he took a 180 degree turn on his speech, and turned against those who took him up on his speech……money talks……sin walks….
history of killing their own citizens.