Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com