Okay then.
When are y’all going to realise that competence is not a virtue when it is allied with fascism?
At this point, anything that weakens the American state is a win for humanity.
.
No, not just a couple of administrations ago. Every modern administration. Torture is not the only crime of the CIA.
The current administration is exceedingly unlikely to shift the CIA to a less evil trajectory. Haspel is not stupid enough to be unaware of this.
See this thread:
https://twitter.com/ybbkaren/status/996501375914795009?s=21
Haspel has not apologised for being a torturer. She has not even admitted her crime.
It was not always so, and it does not need to be so. To quote Truman:
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
Excerpt from Limit CIA Role To Intelligence by Harry S Truman
ElQuesero:
I don’t think she’d be getting elevated to this role if HRC had won the election, but this one I feel like I can file under the “elections have consequences” folder. Like Chris Christie killing the ARC commuter tunnel & rail system upon becoming NJ governor. It’s of a different character than DeVos’s confirmation, or Scott Pruitt’s, which I do not consider simply a pair of “elections have consequences” moments.
Your country has spent the last two decades routinely kidnapping, murdering and torturing people across the globe in large numbers. If you find this to be a matter which you can casually dismiss as part of the normal give and take of routine politics, it does not reflect well upon your apparent ethical standards.
Yes.
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