Here’s something I’m sick of hearing. I’m sick of hearing former CIA officers complain that civilians ask them to ‘think outside of the box’ and ‘go right up to the edge’ but then ‘scurry for the bushes’ when the going gets tough and ‘sell out the officers’ that followed their orders.
We’ve been through three major traumas with the CIA. The first was in the mid-1970’s when Watergate, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations revealed the Family Jewels of domestic espionage, foreign coups, mail opening, assassination attempts, etc. The result was a series of reforms including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
As soon as those reforms were in place the reactionaries started to complain that the intelligence community was ‘risk averse’. But that assertion was proven wrong when Iran-Contra revealed a parallel government called The Enterprise had taken over much of the dirty work for the CIA. Iran-Contra combined with the end of the Cold War combined to make the CIA ‘risk averse’ all over again.
And that risk aversion explains why 9/11 happened. Apparently, we could have prevented 9/11 if only we hadn’t intimidated CIA officers during Watergate and Iran-Contra. So, post 9/11, the ‘gloves came off’. We were going to make sure the terrorists had flies walking across their eyeballs.
So we tortured people and we delivered them up to be tortured in foreign countries. And these former CIA guys are more concerned that they are being sold out than they are that they were given illegal orders.
The CIA engages in skulduggery. We all understand that. We don’t expect the CIA to behave in an admirable manner. But torturing people and setting up criminal enterprises is not part of the job description of a national intelligence officer.
There is such a thing as resigning in protest. It gives a person a little more credibility.
Of course, I’m even more tired of a different kind of CIA hack. The one that says torture really, really works but it’s kind of icky and maybe we shouldn’t do it. Those kind of CIA hacks aren’t really ex-hacks at all. If they were, they’d be prosecuted for divulging classified information.
