CIA

The World's Best Or A Failure?

 

The CIA or Central Intelligence Agency is America's overseas espionage outfit. It is in the business of spying and is in addition to the NSA or National Security Agency which deals with SIGINT or signals intelligence rather than HUMINT or human intelligence.

The Director of Central Intelligence reports directly to POTUS or President of the United States of America. Bureaucracies do like their acronyms.

It would be nice to think that the CIA's reports were accurate, informative and used well. Their track record leaves plenty of scope for doubt. One source which tells us about these things is Espionage: The Greatest Spy Operations of the Twentieth Century by Ernest Volkman.

Of course every triumph of a spy outfit is likely to be a disaster for the opposition. And this is an area where it is difficult to know who has got it right until it all goes wrong or that particular war has been won.

Then there is  the question of why they got into the narcotics industry as major suppliers with its follow ons: why they stayed in, what happened to the profits and the effect on America and other countries. See The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred McCoy.

Now [ 2006 ] there is the fact that the CIA runs Bush's secret prisons and torture operations. They make the Gestapo look like amateurs.

CIA Espionage Operations
These are the point of the outfit presumably rather than sabotage and subversion. They have not always succeeded.
George H. W. Bush
Was the CIA boss when it was active in major crime ie 39 January 1976 to 20 January 1977.

Other outfits have had awful moments of realization too. MI6 is one such. Mossad was thought to be competent of but has been doing worse of late. Errare humanum est. But would you want to trust any espionage outfit?

Another venture by the CIA got them into dealing in narcotics at the big end of the trade. It started as a side effect of subversive operations against China and grew. The  man who has gone into this  is Alfred McCoy, the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. He was a lecturer in history at a major American university. This gives him a degree of credibility. His subject area was Asian and his investigation of the subject started off as  historical research which became topical.
The idea that the CIA would involve itself in big time narcotics trading is literally fantastic [ incredible, absurd ] and highly plausible in Doctor McCoy's thesis. The CIA were operating against China's south west borders and that meant colluding with the hill people of Laos, Burma and the Golden Triangle. The only currencies up there are rice and opium. So we find American military choppers moving opium which is more valuable than rice. They saw operations against communist forces at the time of Korea onward as more important than drugs. Wow, were they wrong! They also worked with the Mafia and French mobs to get narcotics moved through Europe.
Now with huge demand and leaky borders preventing the stuff from moving is impossible. Cannabis can be grown locally. Cannabis is grown locally, often by illegal immigrants. They like to deal in cash and tax free. Then there are more sophisticated drugs. Given the chemical knowledge, a certain amount of initiative, an extremely attractive rate of return and a favourable  tax position it is not surprising that there is a supply for the demand.
 

The CIA - America's Premier International Terrorist Organization
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Some one is not beating about the bush; it is a fact that Bush ran the CIA so he knew what was going on. This makes him just as crooked. But he seems to have done far less harm than his son, the drunken half wit in the White House.

When sources are given one should give the writer that much more credence. Checking them can be very productive and prove that the originator was not bluffing.

CIA agent tells the truth about the polygraph
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John Sullivan's job was ferreting out liars. During a 31-year career as a ''gatekeeper'' for the Central Intelligence Agency, he hooked up a record 6,000-plus potential liars to polygraph machines in 40 countries.
Gatekeeper is his story, and it's fascinating and troubling.... Sullivan concedes there are ''many questions about the validity and reliability of polygraph'' and concludes that ``polygraph is much more effective in determining that a person is being deceptive than it is in verifying that a person has been or is being honest.''
UNQUOTE
This is about their competence rather than their capacity for evil. That is enormous.
 
CIA beats torture charge
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A US federal appeals court on Friday upheld a refusal to hear the case of a Lebanese-born German man who says he was tortured by the CIA, citing national security reasons. Khaled el-Masri claims was detained by the CIA for several months in 2004 on suspicion of links to terrorism.
UNQUOTE
If he had no evidence of their guilt then they would get away with it and should too. Given the reality the case pretty much proves that the CIA is a criminal organization protecting its own.
CIA drug trafficking
The Wikipedia points to sources and witters about allegations.
The CIA is a terrorist organization
A review of some CIA operations. They fit legal definitions of terrorists. The writer is annoyed more by attacks on left wingers than the rest of us.
 
CIA is the Mother of all TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS
CIA men walk then CIA men talk. CIA men know what they are talking about. CIA men do not admire the CIA.
 
CIA secret wars killed 6 million
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What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.
UNQUOTE
John Stockwell, a senior CIA man walks and talks. The corruption is profound. He spoke in 1987. He wrote In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story.  He was published but nothing changed.
 
Contractors taking control of CIA's duties, author says
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Prominent corporations and contractors are pushing control of the CIA out of the government's hands and into their own, acclaimed novelist R.J. Hillhouse said at a lecture Thursday...... "It is no question that the CIA is dysfunctional and the CIA is in danger," she said.
UNQUOTE
If the woman is right the CIA is even less accountable. In fact the CIA is not the solution. It is the problem.
 
The Fort Marcy Massacre
Happened on 20 July 1993. There was only one victim so massacre may not be the right word for it. But the victim mattered. He was part of the Arkansas Mafia which was Clinton's entourage in Washington with access to secret paper. Vince Foster came unstuck by way of gun shot wound head with a "family pistol" that none of the family knew anything about. Being at it with Clinton's old woman didn't help. His murder/suicide was one of a long string of similar killings, largely shootings connected with Bloody Bill Clinton - American Caligula.  The Wikipedia has a much more nonchalant view of his trail of blood. The cover up is assumed to be a CIA operation. The Ruby Ridge and Waco massacres are definitely FBI jobs and they did the investigations. No problems there - for the FBI that is.
 
How the CIA funded the film version of Animal Farm
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In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden years: the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, conducted experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own operatives as unwitting guinea pigs), ran literary journals and produced the first general-release, feature-length animation ever made in the UK.
UNQUOTE
It was not a bad idea. It did some good but not enough. They lost the battle of ideas in the universities, media, you name it. The Zionist front men were too deeply entrenched. Funding politicians was their most effective wheeze. Bought politicians stay bought if they want to be re-elected.
 
The killing machine - Reflections from a target of the CIA
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By FIDEL CASTRO
It was announced that the CIA would be declassifying hundreds of pages on illegal actions that included plans to eliminate the leaders of foreign governments. Suddenly the publication is halted and it is delayed one day. No coherent explanation was given. Perhaps someone in the White House looked over the material.
The first package of declassified documents goes by the name of "The Family Jewels"; it consists of 702 pages on illegal CIA actions between 1959 and 1973. About 100 pages of this part have been deleted. It deals with actions that were not authorized by any law, plots to assassinate other leaders, experiments with drugs on human beings to control their minds, spying on civil activists and journalists, among other similar activities that were expressly prohibited.
UNQUOTE
Fortunately for Fidel, the CIA were incompetent. Others were not so lucky.
 
The prohibition game
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Why is it possible that 80 years after introduction of prohibition for an ever-growing number of recreational drugs, it is still easier to buy those substances in almost every corner of the world than to buy a decent second hand car?......
Cui bono? Who benefits from drug prohibition?..... It is the drug dealers who benefit most, isn’t it? After all, as long as they manage to escape law enforcement, prohibition allows them to make more money because of less competition [ and significant advantages in the tax position - Editor ].  Andreas von Bülow,.... who said, "Seventy percent of the drug trade is licensed by the intelligence agencies.........
According to von Bülow, the reason for going into Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban government was their ban on opium production......
It also explains why the US and the UK invaded Afghanistan within months after the Taliban effectively abolished opium production in their country and why production immediately returned back to previous and even higher levels after the ousting of the Taliban.
UNQUOTE
If this sounds fantastic that is because it should. Is it true or even nearly true? The shadow world of espionage and rivalry has its oddities. Everyone from this milieu in Ireland used to drink in the same pub. They had to if they wanted to know what was going on. The CIA was very big in narcotics during Vietnam - see The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.
 
The Spies Who Shagged Us
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I saw the latest Austin Powers movie, "The Spy Who Shagged Me," the other day and throughout the movie could not get the CIA out of my mind. What exactly does a bumbling, goofy, inept spy with bad teeth, an overblown ego, and a missing "mojo" have in common with our own $30-billion-a-year real-life super-spies? Everything.
UNQUOTE
Could Mr Levine be telling us about the wonderful people of the CIA? He most certainly could. He makes them sound incompetent rather than malicious. I am prone to think there is conspiracy as well as cock up.
A Time Line of CIA Atrocities
This is from a left winger. He says nothing about their big time narcotics trading and claims that getting rid of Whitlam, the Prime Minister of Australia was one of their jobs. I don't believe it for a moment. Whitlam was a nasty little crook and the Governor General acted rightly.


 
Wikipedia and the CIA
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..... Conducting false flag operations and planting disinformation in the mainstream media have long belonged to the craft of the spies..... "The CIA was apparently able to use contacts at the Associated Press to put on the newswire a statement from Tehran about royal decrees that the CIA itself had written. But mostly, the agency relied on less direct means to exploit the media.... Half a century later, the technique of disinformation is as important as ever to intelligence agencies...
In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon set up the Defence Department's Office of Strategic Influence with a mission "to provide news items and false information directly to foreign journalists and others to bolster U.S. policy and the war on terrorism."
UNQUOTE
Crooks and liars?

The CIA, The World's Biggest Drug Traffickers [ 26 January 2008 ]
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The DEA and its predecessor federal drug law enforcement organizations have always been infiltrated and, to varying degrees, managed by America's intelligence agencies. The reason is simple enough: the US Government has been protecting its drug smuggling allies, especially in organized crime, since trafficking was first criminalized in 1914. Since then drug law enforcement has been a function of national security in its broadest sense; not just protecting our aristocracy from foreign enemies, but preserving the Establishment's racial, religious and class prerogatives.
UNQUOTE
The American security and military apparatus is profoundly corrupt or Mr Valentine is completely wrong. I am going with the first propostion.

 
Sloppy tradecraft exposes CIA drug plane [ 11 October 2007 ]
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Seventeen
months after an American-registered DC9 airliner was busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine, a major international scandal is brewing over a second drug trafficking incident in Mexico's Yucatan involving an American-registered jet owned by a  dummy front company of the kind usually associated with the CIA...... The more influential the listed owner of the plane is, the more uncertain the identification becomes.  The whole business, suggested a story which ran on the Associated Press, quickly moves beyond the realm of human ken.....
UNQUOTE
Why are the CIA moving narcotics big time? Because they are major criminals with immunity from prosecution. Ditto for torture, kidnapping et cetera. Does it make sense? Not to me.
 
CIA is the World's Biggest Drug Dealer [ 18 August 2007 ]
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This week the 64th British soldier to die in Afghanistan, Corporal Mike Gilyeat, was buried...... But the key question is this: what are our servicemen dying for?..... There was a logic to attacking Afghanistan after 9/11. Afghanistan was indeed the headquarters of Osama Bin Laden and his organisation, who had been installed and financed there by the CIA to fight the Soviets from 1979 until 1989..... the occupation has.... has increased Afghan GDP by 66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy.... The achievement is the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.....
The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government – the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.....
Our Afghan policy is still victim to Tony Blair's simplistic world view and his childish division of all conflicts into 'good guys' and 'bad guys'.
UNQUOTE
Craig Murray was the  British Ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan and sacked for telling the truth.
 
CIA encouraged Sikh terrorism [ 28 July 2007 ]
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NEW DELHI: The Richard Nixon administration in the US had initiated a "covert action plan" in collusion with Gen Yahya Khan's government in Pakistan in 1971 to encourage a separatist movement in Punjab, a former top officer of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) has said.
UNQUOTE
The CIA are bunch of hooligans out of control. What they were doing was pointless as well as expensive and dangerous to the locals.
 
CIA Torture Victim Confessed To Attacking Bank Founded AFTER His Arrest! [ 18 March 2007 ]
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Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's alleged confession testimony has been thoroughly discredited after it emerged that one of the targets he identified, the Plaza Bank, was not founded until 2006, four years after the alleged Al-Qaeda mastermind's arrest. KSM was arrested in March 2003. According to the Plaza Bank's website, the organization was founded in early 2006, making it impossible for KSM to have even known of the bank's existence before 2003, never mind plotted against it.
UNQUOTE
Have the twerps who run the CIA got what it takes to organize an orgy in a brothel? I doubt it. Pravda didn't swallow this tosh either - see Torture Victim Confesses to Everything He is Ordered To - The Independent played it for laughs.
 
The CIA are major criminals  [ 16 January 2007 ]
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A Milan prosecutor is making the CIA nervous. Despite the opposition of his own government he wants to indict 26 US agents and five Italian secret agents for the kidnapping of a terror suspect. Rome and Washington would prefer that the embarrassing trial would just go away. The extraordinary renditions program is turning into an embarrassment for the CIA.
UNQUOTE
Kidnapping is major crime. Torture ditto. Outsourcing it to uncivilized countries makes sense until people babble. Then there is the CIA's large scale narcotic smuggling. See Politics of Heroin. I don't think the Gestapo did that but they got a much worse press. The CIA criminals are worried. They got the frequent flier miles but they are going to be thrown to the wolves long before Bush and Wolfowitz. See also:-
High-flying lifestyle of the CIA's rendition men [ 27 October 2006  ]
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In January 2004 a crew of CIA agents checked into the five-star Marriott Son Antem golfing resort in Palma for a well-deserved rest. The agents had just flown from Rabat in Morocco to Afghanistan and back to Algeria - a gruelling 8,000-mile journey - and were looking forward to luxuriating in the hotel's spa where, as the brochure put it, they could "journey to deep inner peace".
UNQUOTE
Their prisoners of course were treated like the Gestapo's victims and no doubt the criminals will walk free with inflation proof government pensions.
 
Former CIA pilot describes his cocaine deliveries [ 18 September 2006 ]
Is this a fantasy? It should be but it is not. See the Politics of Heroin He was also flying guns to Fidel Castro. Remember that the CIA backed Saddam Hussein and Afghan rebels too. You might think that they are criminal incompetents.
PS A C130 Hercules can carry 64 men or a LOT of cocaine.
 


As you look at the trail of disasters you just  might whether to spend your money on something else.

 

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.

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Updated  on Thursday, 12 June 2008 09:53:35