Posts Tagged ‘Central Intelligence Agency’

Why the CIA Should Not Be Conducting Ops

The CIA is supposedly an Intelligence gathering branch of the civil service and was never intended to be an operational force. Not only has it become one but it is responsible for it’s own assessments. This is a doozy of a conflict of interest.

Ray McGovern, former Reagan intel staffer and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity argues that the CIA’s current joint intelligence and operations functions should be run by different agencies. He makes the solid argument that having the agency assess it’s own actions is not a good idea.

Think about it for a minute. You are ordered and given funding to conduct Predator attacks on “suspected al-Qaeda bases” in Pakistan. (U.S. armed forces cannot do it since the Pentagon is not supposed to be striking countries with whom we are not at war.) You salute, find some contractors to help, and conduct those attacks.
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CIA agents guilty of Kidnapping

This is a story that hasn’t received anywhere near as much attention as it should have:

An Italian judge has convicted 23 Americans – all but one of them CIA agents – and two Italian secret agents for the 2003 kidnap of a Muslim cleric.

BBC Article for a good medium length summary.

The CIA personnel were involved in the controversial, and to many of us, outrageous, extraordinary rendition program. The trial took place in Milan, Italy.

There is a line of thought that says this trial is purely symbolic and has no real relevance to US foreign policy (what used to be referred to as the Global War on Terror under Cheney/Bush). This is garbage, the real reasons that this hasn’t become bigger news are the residual fear that the so called liberal media has for anything with the Cheny/Bush brand on it combined with a lack of video of a line of spooks in Orange jump suits and shackles – no images = no story.
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