Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Dismantle the CIA

A couple of days ago, I tweeted the following:

I had long suspected that the CIA was an out of control agency with actors operating in spite of presidential executive orders and congressional oversight.  Gary Webb exposed their involvement in drug smuggling.  And now we have confirmed reports of torture that went beyond even what the Bush administration officially allowed.

It would have been one thing if the US government allowed torture of prisoners.  While we can debate the morality of it, if the government made it legal as a tactic to be used against prisoners of war to garner information, there would have been no problem.

But torture is not legal in the United States.  All agencies are forbidden from using torture against prisoners of all types, regardless of nationality or threat level.  This is a simple and indisputable fact.

Of course, the stated reason against torture is not a moral one, but a utilitarian one where torture does not produce good results in interrogation.  God forbid our government actually take a moral stance on something that is clearly immoral.  That would be the establishment of religion or some other nonsense.

Sarcasm aside, the simple fact is that the CIA was not supposed to use torture methods at all.  Even the Bush administration tried to call waterboarding and other torture techniques “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  It wasn’t until he left office that he said it was torture.  Talk about political spin.

But they were lying even to the Bush administration about what they were doing.  Behind the scenes, they were ritualistically torturing prisoners of war for what appears to be the sheer fun of it.  Seriously, I doubt you could get much more information from someone after waterboarding him 163 times.  At that point, it is merely an exercise in sadism.

What is worse is the fact that they were lying to the extent that they were.  The Bush administration and much of Congress had their back and they still lied to them.  Yet, in spite of this, nobody is being indicted for perjury, a very serious offense against Congress as Roger Clemens found.  Ironic that Congress cares more about lying about steroid use than about it’s own agencies lying to them about their day-to-day operations.

The fact is this: the CIA is a rogue agency that does not answer to Congressional oversight or Presidential authority.  They are a covert government unto themselves and routinely use their powers to commit horrendous crimes against humanity.  I would say that this latest escapade is a fairly recent phenomenon but it is not.  Look up the facts surrounding the MKUltra project, a program designed to traumatize children into become adults with multiple personalities disorder or Gary Webb’s report on CIA drug-running.

The entire agency needs to be dismantled, their top officials prosecuted for war crimes, and their assets, official or otherwise, need to be sold to pay down the national debt.  They do nothing to prevent wars and atrocities and instead engage in their own.  They are 7 times the sons of Hell than the people they target.

It is high time that the American people push to have them shut down completely.