You may have heard on the news yesterday that the CIA has allegedly been caught spying on the Senate committee responsible for overseeing the CIA. Specifically the agency was trying to find out “how much” the Senate committee knows about which war crimes/crimes against humanity the CIA may have committed in the Bush years.
Senator Mark Udall recently sent a letter to President Obama. Here is the scariest statement you will read today: ?As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy. It is essential that the committee be able to do its oversight work ? consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers ? without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.?
A sitting US Senator has had to ask the President of the United States to please try to get the CIA to not spy on the Senate Committee in charge of the CIA.
Which is kind of odd. We have spent billions of dollars, or more, turning the CIA into the worlds most formidable spy agency.
Let’s review their list of accomplishments:
- No idea the Berlin Wall was coming down
- Didn’t predict the collapse of the Soviet Union
- 9/11. Enough said on that
- Sent Colin Powell to the UN with cartoons to justify war
- Torture/raping/etc
- Analysts didn’t predict the Arab Spring uprisings
- Didn’t know Kim Jung Il had died
And we can go on. Use your search engine and you can find several incidents that we know the CIA dropped the ball on so we can assume there are more we don’t know about. Let’s not also forget the FBI and CIA lovechild, COINTELPRO and all the wonderful things it did.
In short we have not gotten even close to our money’s worth.
Oh, and it’s getting worse.
The same outsourcing that allowed Edward Snowden at the NSA to take over a million documents is prevalent at the CIA. About 70 percent of CIA’s National Clandestine Service is estimated to be contracted labor from private companies. Costing at least 500 thousand dollars per year per person.
Since the CIA seems unable to do its actual job of collecting foreign intelligence is it little wonder they have instead used their power to instead guard their turf?
It is time for us to dismantle the failure known as the CIA. Either bring it all back into government and under direct congressional control or simply do without it.
Edited/Published by: WG
