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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

The CIA continues to cover itself in shit and serve as a national embarrassment. The time has long since passed that we need to unravel this mess. From botched coups, to exploding cigars, torture chambers, and burned informants the CIA seems only capable of pissing away money and making us look terrible internationally.

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And in what circumstances would you hear about their successes?

Precisely. Its easy to criticize an agency when one is only privy to the failures. What the public sees is such a tiny fraction of what actually goes on, including positive publications. Its a tough aspect of working in the intelligence community honestly, and especially concerning when many people want to de-fang US foreign intelligence.

As others have pointed out they frequently brag about their alleged successes. They also lack any oversight by congress or the presidency(in practice). They’re also know to have surveilled and threatened active members of congress.

They posed as a polio eradication effort to try and find Bin Laden, and failed nothing their stated aim and literally prevented the eradication of polio. It’s unforgivable.

I’m not against having intelligence as an arm of the state department and accountable to congress, but the CIA is a malignancy on the body politic.

We can look back to the now public records of the early days of the agency and see that they were fuck ups from the start. We can see glimpses from KGB records exposed in the mitrokhin archives. There are leaks, and exposed diplomatic cables. Nothing paints a positive picture. Moreover, the constant embarrassment is very real.

Looking at recent stories about the CIA; there's this one, then one about how a report saying the CIA warned Germany about oil pipeline attacks in the summer somehow leaked, and one of then recreating a terrorists hideout they bombed. They seem to enjoy bragging.

I think there are (at least) two failure modes for this kind of agencies:

1- They fail to stop state-level enemies, they fail to predict attacks, they fail to assist friendly troops.

2- They break the laws of their own country, commit torture, treason or what can be considered crimes against humanity in the pursuit of their mission.

What we are seeing belongs in the second category. Whether it's also the first is harder to assess (though like others have mentioned, their historical track record is less than stellar).

Just look at the public record:

1. Knowing Russia would invade Ukraine - Success

2. Knowing Iraq had no WMD - Fail

3. Correctly predicting Iranian Nuclear progress/ambitions - Repeated fails

4. Knowing the USSR would collapse - Fail

5. Sept 11th - Mega fail

Compare those items with candidates for success. For instance, the CIA failed to discover Sept 11th. Have they ever foiled, has anyone in the US who might work with the CIA every foiled such a large attack? No.

The same for other areas: Maybe the CIA predicted North Korea would have nukes when they did. That would give them a one in 3 (the others being Iran and Iraq) success rate at WMD intelligence.

Even with the "assume they got everything right that we don't KNOW they got wrong" level of credulity, they're not as good as flipping a coin...

There were idiots on YouTube already predicting the russian invasion back in autumn last year. You didn't have to be the CIA to see that it was going to happen as soon and the roads dried.

Yea, this one didn't take a genius. Anyone who mildly kept track of eastern European affairs and Russia knew something was about to happen as soon as Russia started moving large numbers of troops. I guess if we want to give the CIA a victory here, maybe we knew about the movements earlier because of the CIA, but the conclusion those movements came to didn't need a CIA agency to predict.

World peace? Enemies forced to cooperate? Wars won? I mean the list would be almost endless.

Just like the list of their proved fuckups and outright careless evil done because 'we can' and 'who is gonna stop us'

> World peace?

Please tell me which world are you living in. I'd like to move there.

Which wars did the CIA help to win?

Maybe the renewed cold war will prompt the CIA to get their shit together. The Russians have been actively sabotaging things in the EU through useful idiots and corrupt politicians.

One person who was able to sucessfully trick them so far is Marine LePen, who gladly takes their money while she keeps losing elections.

The CIA is not an independent agency, they do as the ametican public tell them.

Wrong on both counts.

The CIA has a blank check and does whatever the fuck they want. Much of it opposed by most Americans if they ever find out about it.

Congress and the president have oversight over anything they di. I din't see how "blank check" is relevant.

75 years of history disagree with you. Unless you believe the public told the CIA to arm the Mujahideen, overthrow Allende, invade Panama, recruit Nazis, traffic drugs - should I go on?

Arming the Mujahideen sucessfully grinded the USSR and hastened its collapse, just as arming Ukraine would hasten Russia's disintegration. The plan was sound, however both of these strategies can backfire, as we've seen in the first case.

Disintegration was never the goal, just like with vietnam and china the goal is containing and preventing their territorial expansion. It is a lesson learned the hard way with hitler and poland.

Even knowing now about al-qaeda and 9/11, arming and training mujahideen in afghanistan was not a mistake.

Ukraine having just applied for NATO membership, I would say you are comparing apples and oranges. Even the muslim NATO member Turkey that is hostile against the US despite the US giving them nukes hasn't backfired.

The public voted congress and presidents who run the cia into office so yeah,they did.

The only president of the last 80 years that has called for CIA oversight was JFK, who…

As for Congress, the idea that they know any more about the CIA’s activities than the average citizen is laughable.

They do know, they have oversight hearings regularly in a SCIF. As much as the CIA is romanticized, they can get in big trouble if they go rogue. They also have inspector generals for stuff like this and brief the president daily. The president can fire anyone in the CIA technically. Whil conspiracy theories sound cool and spooky let's stick to evidence unless you simply don't want blame for wars and chaos your voting causes. And that boys and girls is one more reason why I don't vote.

It's not a conspiracy theory, you just aren't reading the news. The Senate Intelligence Committee has stated that they weren't aware of the CIA's bulk data collection program until the public was. Did Congress authorize CIA intervention in Iran, Guatemala, or Nicaragua? Did Congress provide effective oversight of CIA torture in the Middle East? No, because they weren't even aware of it until 2009. Are you going to claim that all these instances are one-offs, or see them as signs of a systemic problem within our intelligence agencies?

The president was aware of the interventions in those countries and gave approval (if you remember the nicragua/contras scandal with raegan for example). I would like to think he is also briefed on their data collection but if they are like the NSA they went through DoJ for approval on any domestic collections but if they didn't they can be prosecutes and if they are not being prosecutes then blame your president who appointed and can fire the attorney general and the senators who approves the nomination. The only scenario voters are not responsible is if there is a "deep state" that operates outside of the democratic process and checks+balances.

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