CIA launches a podcast, hoping to 'demystify' the agency and boost recruitment | Hacker News Reader

CIA launches a podcast, hoping to 'demystify' the agency and boost recruitment

arcamax.com

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-langley-files

There's almost no source I consider less trustworthy on CIA matters than the CIA.

Indeed. Here is a short list of top ~20 CIA controversies (with solid references), many of which officials said weren't true until hard evidence was put in their face and made public: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies

A longer list: https://github.com/binka/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md

I see nothing wrong with several items on that list, especially the items related to modern foreign policy.

> On February 15th, 2017, US-backed Saudi planes bombed a funeral in Yemen

Not the U.S.

> In 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki

Good. Justified. The man was a terrorist.

> Since 2013, The US has intervened militarily in the ongoing Syrian Civil War

Good. Justified. Though civilian casualties are always deplorable.

> From 2011 up to the present day, the US ousted Mummar Gaddafi in Libya, and began conducting an extensive bombing campaign in the Libyan Civil Wars of 2011 and 2014

Good. Justified.

> From 2000 up to the present day, the US has been carrying out a campaign of drone strikes and asassinations in the Middle East and Africa

Good. Justified.

> The attacks precipitated the signing into law in 2001 of the Patriot Act

Good. Justified.

> The September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, provoked an international military campaign of middle east imperialism known as The War on Terror

Good. Justified.

> Since the 1960s, the US has given immense economic and military aid to Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Good. Justified.

> In 1989, The U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega

Good. Justified.

> In early 2017, ICE began a campaign of arrests and deportation of undocumented immigrants. 700 People have been arrested so far.

Good. Justified.

> In 2010, Chelsea Manning was imprisoned under the espionage act

Good. Justified.

Without addressing anything else you said, calling the invasion of Panama and subsequent dictatorship “justified” is genuinely one of the dumbest things I have ever read on this site.

Agreed 100%. The western world's framing of placing high value on human life and freedom is paramount, and the preservation of American hegemony is a critical component of both that, and ensuring world peace.

To all the salty tiers from oppressive regimes like russia, china, and iran, I say: vae victis.

I can't tell if this comment is meant to be sarcastic or not.

> In 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki

>Good. Justified. The man was a terrorist.

are we sure about that? personally, I think Americans should give Americans fair trials and be proven guilty before condemned to death by drone-strike, but I'm a conservative.

>personally, I think Americans should give Americans fair trials and be proven guilty before condemned to death by drone-strike, but I'm a conservative.

Conservatives were the ones most in favor of tactics like torture - sorry, enhanced interrogation - stripping terrorist suspects of citizenship rights, indefinite detention and assassination after 9/11. They were the ones insisting that wanting to give terrorist suspects fair trials was a sign of left-wing weakness and an unwillingness to take the existential threat of Islamic terrorism seriously.

It's fair to criticize Obama - I voted for him and I have a list of things I hate about him, and the drone strikes are on it - but invoking conservatism when doing so is ahistorical. If anything, your views in this regard are more traditionally liberal, not conservative.

I mean I'm conservative in that I care about using the legal process before blowing people up. Jesus, dude.

There's also the Nazi-level human experimentation which needs to be remembered. In particular, the CIA-funded MKULTRA Montreal Experiments consisted of such horrible torture of unwilling and unaware innocent civilians that several people had their identity essentially erased from their own memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra#Experiments_on_Canadia...

"Cameron ... experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were often carried out on patients who entered the institute for common problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions. His treatments resulted in victims' urinary incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/03/montreal-brain...

"Patients were subjected to high-voltage electroshock therapy several times a day, forced into drug-induced sleeps that could last months and injected with megadoses of LSD.

After reducing them to a childlike state – at times stripping them of basic skills such as how to dress themselves or tie their shoes – Cameron would attempt to reprogram them by bombarding them with recorded messages for up to 16 hours at a time. First came negative messages about their inadequacies, followed by positive ones, in some cases repeated up to half a million times.

“He couldn’t get his patients to listen to them enough so he put speakers in football helmets and locked them on their heads,” said Johnson. “They were going crazy banging their heads into walls, so he then figured he could put them in a drug induced coma and play the tapes as long as he needed.”

Along with intensive bouts of electroshock therapy, Johnson’s grandmother was given injections of LSD on 14 occasions. “She said that made her feel like her bones were melting. She would say: ‘I don’t want these,’” said Johnson. “And the doctors and nurses would say to her: ‘You’re a bad wife, you’re a bad mother. If you wanted to get better, you would do this for your family. Think about your daughter.’”"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_experiments#Patients

"None of them had given informed consent to the procedures, or were aware of the experiments being conducted. This was a gross violation of the Nuremberg Code."

"To this day, neither the Canadian government nor the CIA have issued formal apologies for their involvement and funding of Project MKUltra or the Montreal experiments."

"Participants often suffered from retrograde amnesia for the rest of their lives and had to relearn most skills they had. Many were in a childlike state and even had to be potty-trained."

And considering one of those controversies is the CIA editing Wikipedia, even this article is somewhat tilted in favor of the CIA.

Like the opening bit about "the Legacy of Ashes. There's one sentence saying it exists followed by the rest of the paragraph mostly criticizing the unmentioned contents.

Honestly, this isn't for people like you who know that nothing the CIA says can be taken without a massive grain of salt.

It's for the masses who don't question the word of authority.

For clandenstine stuff yeah but they do stuff that isn't clandestine. The C is central not clandestine in CIA.

Reading the transcript now, why use pseudo anonymous hosts? You want to demystify the CIA but can't even name the employees tasked to do so?

The CIA is probably not a very necessary agency, and could be disbanded with no real impacts on national security. Most of the critical intelligence work - such as maintaining knowledge of the distribution of global nuclear weapon systems - could be done by dedicated agencies like the military DIA and the NRO (National Reconnaisance Office, i.e. satellites).

As far as the propanganda programs, i.e the fomenting of coups and shady regime change efforts and attempts to manipulate public opinion, that's all very sleazy and eliminating it is a good idea.

You know if the CIA actually did what they say they do people would be chomping at the bit to join. As it stands, why would I want to work for Atrocities 'R' Us?

So you can become a star?

While this is 3rd hand from materials I have read over the years, it seems a lot of their human capital comes from referrals such as if you are a diplomat or their attaché and recruiting from such. It also might be relatively seamless to transfer from other agencies such as FBI, Military, NSA as you would have the background checks and clearance already done.

Also there are a lot of roles, support staff and other personal various degrees removed from the core programs and their corrupt nature.

And lastly, there are a few people I am sure that just want to take advantage of virtually unaccountable power and might even be in a position to profit from such.

Party in the CIA https://youtu.be/C-CG5w4YwOI

Oh and read the first comment

Where do I sign up to do stuff like this? https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R0017002...

Listened about 10 minutes into the first episode, why do the speakers sound so nervous? Maybe it's because of a stubborn script or lack of prior preparation? It's just not very... podcast-like.

You would be nervous too if your guest could MKUltra you.

It's two people fairly low in the organization being tasked with interviewing the head honcho. Even outside of the CIA, that'd make the interviewers nervous.

Absolutely. But I thought the production team could've find a combo that works better. Any combo. They don't even have to actually have someone that high up in the ladder to make an ok podcast imho...

Right now it sounds straight PR and ingenue due to the tone & the scripting, even for a regular company's PR piece, let alone CIA's.

See also the comments on this post, which should probably be merged, as it covers the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32952021

Probably the true link should be the cia.gov link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957948

It’s presumably about more than just recruitment. I have no idea what exactly has the CIA done in the last 30 years that’s worth even a small fraction of their budget. That’s not a great place for a government agency to be.

The public not knowing what they do is precisely how an intelligence agency intends to operate.

Yet, they are also creating a podcast to publicize past success.

Pretty sure they're not telling us everything.

Sure and that’s reasonable, but they should be able to point to stuff that’s no longer relevant. Ie if they played a role in discovering Saddam Hussein‘s hiding place then that’s something they could point to without jeopardizing any future intelligence operations.

Not that a few individual successes alone represent or justifies a 30+ Billion annual budget, but it would help counter the more common narrative that the CIA failed to do X.

sure, but the point is that they are trying to tell people what they do. The existence of the podcast is proof of that. So, why can't they just put the podcast information in the normal information sources?

It feels odd that an organization that is likely incredibly good at foreign propaganda, seemingly falls flat for personal PR.

In the 40s-50s the FBI had a radio show:

https://archive.org/details/OTRR_This_Is_Your_FBI_Singles

I started my own podcast as well. Follow me from twitter or soundcloud. Danbobhollins on both.

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