They have certainly worked together with drug cartels and organized crime, including spying on the DEA in Washington, and turning over information on informants to their pet cartels, to said informants can be tortured to death. This is a matter of semantics, but at least arguably true.
Do you have any evidence that this is true?
The CIA is an organ of the United States government, with all the moral baggage that implies. Despite what you may have seen in the Jason Bourne movies, they are first and foremost an Intelligence agency. Their primary business is to learn the secrets of our adversaries; and as all countries have laws protecting state secretes this job requires them to break the laws of other nations.
I for one see nothing wrong with this. In a representative democracy we elect leaders to make decisions that can affect the lives of millions. It is essential that those decisions be made in light of the best possible information.
Unfortunately the temptation has often been for those same leaders to try and use the skills and resources necessary for this important job to other purposes. For decades American presidents have fallen into the James Bond myth of the secret agent as a kind of jet setting international commando, rather than a particularly ruthless sort of investigative journalist with a very selective readership.
The historical record will show that in the course of waging secret wars at the behest of of thirteen presidents they did things that, as agents of a democracy, they had no business doing, things that have left a stain on our country’s reputation.
Nevertheless, that is not all that the record will show.
They have aided those resisting Soviet imperialism in Europe, and those who collaborated with US imperialism in Latin America. The funded the Socialist party in France, and helped to murder members of the Socialist party in Chile. They likely saved democracy in Italy, and destroyed in in Iran. They bloodied their hands in south east Asia, even while their spy planes gathered intelligence that helped to avert a nuclear war. And they have protected Americans form the scourge of international terrorism, while they reduced themselves to brutal methods little better than those of our enemies.
But they did these things because they were ordered to do them by the men chosen by the American people to make those decisions. To single out the CIA and call them criminals ignores that they are acting on behalf of the constitutionally elected commanders-in-chief, and ultimately those that elected them. Sure they’re sons of bitches, but they are our sons of bitches.
It would be tempting to believe that the evil done by our government is the work of some secret cabal undermining the will of the people, but it isn’t. It’s is the work of civil servants who respond to the demands of a public who wan’t absolute security, and don’t care to know the ugly details of how it is provided.
