John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RAY McGOVERN IN CONSORTIUM
NEWS
Can Burns Change the CIA?
The hope is that diplomat William Burns, tapped for CIA
director by Joe Biden, will be able to change the culture at Langley and not be
subsumed by it.
Change the CIA?
Sorry, but that does seem a bit silly.
Like speaking of changing Dracula’s lifestyle.
The CIA does what it was designed and long-practiced to do.
Pure intelligence, from the beginning, was only a part of its mission. One side of the house, so to speak.
Dark operations and killing are the practices of more than 70 years.
At least sixty coups, including against a number of democratic states the US doesn’t happen to like. Countless dirty tricks, like Operation Phoenix in Vietnam with about forty thousand village leaders’ throats cut in the night. Many assassinations, including, almost certainly, an American President, John Kennedy. Hideous practices abroad do come home to roost as they become accepted as normal.
Today it even runs an industrial-scale extrajudicial killing operation. Thousands of legally innocent people, incinerated just by having their names put on a list. A great many bystanders, too. Absolutely no different than the practices of the old Argentine military junta in “disappearing” people by the thousands.
The disgusting practice in Argentina, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, of kidnaping citizens off the streets, drugging them, and tossing them, bound-up, from planes over the ocean, with relatives left to wonder and grieve over what happened to them, was well known to the CIA and approved of.
A good and just and free society just would not have a CIA. Its very existence is an indictment.
