Christopher Hitchens reckons the CIA should be scrapped for its many recent screwups, including the latest fiasco over the NIE report about Iran. I agree, although the question is largely academic: governments are not known for scrapping institutions that go awry. But the NIE fiasco – which actually might endanger our security since Iran is still trying to produce enriched uranium – does add to the impression that security services are in danger of becoming the problem, not the solution. And the recent issue surrounding alleged destruction of taped evidence of torture does not exactly square with an institution operating under the rule of law, as Andrew Sullivan has put it recently, although Sully has not drawn the logical inference that the CIA should be closed down.
Here is the crunch paragraph from the Hitchens piece. Read it all:
And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is worse than useless—it’s a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.
Question: should the same logic apply to MI-6?
Closing it down might well be in order, but then of course, what is left to deflect attention from where the real intelligence work is done. Well since I am saying that, it is probably not doing that job either.
It’s funny how the neocons and fellow travelers like Hitchens denounce everybody else for supposedly ignoring the ‘good news’ about Iraq, yet are very much against acknowledging any good news about Iran.
And hearing an ex-Commie like Hitchens accusing anybody else of treachery is a good laugh too. Being a Commie until you are about 17 is just about forgivable. You are prone to romantic delusions at that age. Being a Commie until you are about 50 signifies complete stupidity.
Abolishing the country’s major spy apparatus (if it were possible) would set us up for a series of foreign policy disasters from which it would take decades to recover, if at all.
It’s not a serious suggestion.
Hitch is still pissed off that his side lost the Cold War. Of course he’s going to be carrying an axe for the CIA.
I think that the CIA was a cold war creation which was designed fairly specifically for cold war tasks. I am not sure it did fight the cold war terribly effectively, but it may well have made sense to shut it down in 1994 and thinking clearly about what was needed to replace it. Doing something like this now that we are at a more delicate moment in history is a more difficult and riskier task, so it is a more questionable idea.
However, government bureaucracies very seldom do get shut down, however badly they have done their job. Self-justification often becomes their entire business.
This is an outrage and an insult!
Clouseau always gets his culprit.
What he lacks in perspicuity, he makes up for in good fortune.
May the ghost of Peter Sellers haunt Hitchen’s house, wreaking typical Clouseauian havoc, until Hitchen’s repents of this libel. (It might give him second thoughts about his athiesm, too.)
Cynic, that is bullshit and you know it; even the NIE report states that the enrichment process of uranium has not stopped in Iran. The Iranian regime has no peaceful, civilian need for such stuff; or do you imagine that Dinnerjacket wants to use it as salad dressing?
It might be good news if Iran has definitely stopped its weapons programmes; but then remember this – the NIE report claims it stopped in 2003, the same time that the Coalition toppled Saddam. Coincidence-maybe, maybe not.
JP,
As you well know the esteemed president of Iran was this Amazon Customer. He’s progressed from the mere ore to the hard stuff! Question is do the CIA also know? They need to, it might result in a quite literal shit-storm over Uranium enrichment…
Hitchens said:
He didn’t say we need no spying agency. He said we need a new, better, one. I fully agree.
Looks to me like this NIE report is politically motivated, and intended specifically to prevent any serious measures being taken against Iran. (Not that they were taken before the report…). Seems in this case the CIA sided with the enemy. Fine agency that. So, yes, closing it down is the least we could demand.
Also, as everyone said, it’s utterly useless. I don’t remember anything useful they ever did, starting with the Bay of Pigs. If anyone can remember something they did right, or what they do for a living, he is invited to comment.
Well there were those 400 attempts to kill Castro…
Er possibly not then.
If someone could see their way clear to shutting down the British Foreign Office at the same time.
They appear to think that their job is to assist foreigners in any way possible.
Good point.
Well, I was thinking along the same lines, but then I thought: what if they did some or many things right, and we just don’t know? Isn’t it supposed to be part of the very nature of such agencies? (I am being naive, right?) And, lastly, the NIE report: what if it is some kind of decoy? There is something very weird about the way it came out. OK, I better stop now.
“Petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn… We envision producing, as soon as possible, 23 000 megawatts of electricity using nuclear plants.”
-Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, 1974.
Perhaps Iran doesn’t need nuclear power. But if it doesn’t need it now, it certainly didn’t need it in the 1970s.
A Ford administration directive from 1976 however said: “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.” (I note Cheney wasn’t having convulsions about Muslims having nuclear technology back then).
So if the Shah didn’t need nuclear power, was he aiming to build nuclear weapons?
Cynic, I am sure all the points you make are correct; but getting back to the original point, it is not just “neocons” like Hitchens who have grounds to be appalled at the various screwups of the CIA: it has consistently failed to stop certain events that it is paid to stop. Did any senior executive heads roll after 9/11? Was there a complete overhaul of the CIA? If there was, I must have missed it.
Kim: I am not really very bothered about Hitchens’ ideological motivations; he was a Trot as a young man and no doubt said more than his fair share of batshit crazy things back then; the point is, he has eloquently nailed the threats that we face now. I am also unaware that “his” side lost the Cold War since I do not know of his support for the former Soviet Union, unless someone can give me convincing evidence to the contrary.
not that I’m a big fan of the CIA but I thought they were 1 of 2 dissenters noted in a footnote of the report. That being said it would probably be better if we outsourced to the mossad – after all we are just a puppet of the international jewish conspiracy. at least we’d might know where the bombs are.
Kim du Toit;
what happened to your blog?
Spidly: define “happened”?
It’s still here.
It interests me that people assume that if you argue for abolishment of a particular government agency, that you think that the activities the agency is intended to perform should no longer occur.
If you want to abolish the NHS, “You don’t want people to get medical care”
If you want to abolish the National Shoe Service, “You want to prevent people from having shoes”
If you want to abolish a corrupt Federal agency which is intended to perform the function of military intelligence (which is, being military, within the proper scope of government power), “You don’t want the government to have any intelligence”.
Actually, many of us want to abolish the CIA because it fails to be intelligent.
It’s also interesting that people on both sides of the various drives to go to war with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, North Korea, and whoever else we want to invade rate the accuracy of the output of the intelligence agencies by how well it conforms to their prejudices. So when the CIA releases a report which says that “Country X is doing Y”, the popular view of whether Country X is actually doing Y does not change … but the popular view of the accuracy of CIA data changes, based on the prevailing prejudices.
Exactly. Well put.
The issue with our Agency is not necessarily that it is functionally worthless; it is that too many elected people (and their voters), who were barely able to manage a political-campaign (or manage their checkbook), suddenly feel that they can direct the CIA’s efforts, and have some idea of how intelligence is gathered and used.
Furthermore, every single instance in which any one of you have heard *anything* about the CIA, or it’s operations, represents at most, 60% of the total scope. How many of you hold TS/Compartmentalised Security Clearances? Maybe one? Keep that in mind, because without the other 40%, you know nothing of the context, scope, or full outcome of anything the CIA has done, or is doing. You don’t know the recommendations the CIA may have made regarding anything at all; you have no clue as to how long an operation lasted or the total cost; at the end of the day, you’re fooling yourself.
You simply cannot have an educated, informed opinion or judgement about any organisation at all, that you no nothing about.
We have some facts, 9/11, Bay of pigs, India-Pakistan nukes, the fall of the USSR …. and a lot more, that were leaked (one thing the CIA does well).
You assume, probably without knowing, that they did some things right but keep mum about it. I assume that they would have managed to leak and boast of any succeses they may have had.
Anyway, their known failures are pretty big.
What unbelievable arrogance (or naiveté). This is, and for a long time has been, the very argument that keeps tyrannies in power. Nanny, or big brother, knows best what is good for you. Only “we” (the state apparatchiks) know the full story and only “we” have all the information to know what is best for you (the masses).
” – does add to the impression that security services are in danger of becoming the problem, not the solution. ”
6 years into this quagmire of a disaster of a war, the Samizdaters final notice the obvious. Sadly its only when the ‘security services’ are saying things that slow the progress of another huge wagonload of ragheads heading of to a mass grave. Cheers….
Then let them come forward and justify themselves. In a free society, there’s no place for them to insist that we should take their words for it.
Bitch all they want about cops, most libertarians will know that everything we do ends up subjected to public and judicial scrutiny. If the CIA can’t function in that environment then it becomes reasonable to ask what they’re trying to hide.
Cynic.
“Sabotage: America’s Ememies Within the C.I.A.” (Regnery Publishing 2007) was written by Rowan Scarborough before the recent NIE came out.
The C.I.A. is a rogue agency with a long record of undermining people, including the Directors of the C.I.A. itself, who do not fit in with its politial agenda.
As for Iran – it would be really nice if they put parts of their atomic weapons progam on hold in 2003.
Although the program could be restarted at any time, and they are still going ahead with the long range missiles and the enriching of uranium, I still hope that they did put parts of their program on hold in 2003.
Perhaps I was wrong to oppose going into Iraq in 2003 – after all this is the only event of that year that could have led to the Iranians putting parts of their program on hold.