I kind of always thought ticking time bomb was shorthand for a planned attack of some sort.
Like, 9/11 was technically a ticking time bomb. There were plane tickets purchased, training done, and money moved in such a way to make this possible, and there were people out there who knew the when, where and how of it all.
Had we captured one of these people based on intelligence of an upcoming attack (we had such evidence) - then the question is "should all bets be off if this guy knows how thousands of people are going to die and will not cooperate" -
I side with "no, we stand by our convictions and choose to not be monsters." - but let's not get wrapped up in the pedantry of a physical ticking time bomb.
Terrorists on that level aren't dumb. If we had snagged one of those guys it's likely the details of the attack would've changed to trip up the authorities. And all they'd need to do is go from a different airport, change the day or change the plan of attack slightly and that single guy's intel would be useless.
Just like if a US solider is captured they quickly change tactics to the point where his intel is useless to the enemy within a couple days.
I think you're overestimating the bomber's ability to react to changing plans, much less their intelligence. Basically, they can't. If things go wrong, they generally don't and can't change their plans at the last minute. This is, more or less, why we ended up catching multiple attempted bombers post 9/11 when their bombs failed to explode.
Most fo those attempted bombers were lone wolves who had zero idea what they were doing
the 9/11 hijackers were organized and used the old soviet cell system where no one knew more than they had to. You could've caught Bin Laden himself and he probably wouldn't have had specifics about how to catch these guys. Once deployed cells work more or less independently from leadership. It's a very hard system to crack.
It also probably isnt a good idea because all the talented people in the CIA wouldnt stick arround for the restructuring and would go to the highest bidder in the private sector.
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.
Where's the disagree button?
Expecting people to put up with shitty conditions because "they should be doing it for love, not money" is an attitude that everyone from social workers to not-for-profits to teachers to armed services has been fighting against.
It's just a variation of "You should be grateful to work here" which I repudiate under any circumstance.
The CIA contains, for example, talented torturers and talented manipulators of domestic politics and domestic public opinion. Are there good HUMINT people working there? 9/11 was a famous failure for them, of course. I don't know enough about the agency to judge. But I'm not convinced at all that we have the right kind of people working there. If the talented torturers leave, that's good, right?
The CIA has many talented people, some of whom are talented IT administrators fixing email complaints, some of whom do nothing but book hotel and flights for travelling officers, some of whom do nothing but crunch raw numbers which they have very little knowledge of what it refers to, and some of whom are torturers. There are over 20,000 people working in the CIA, the vast majority of whom have little to no interaction with operations (let alone torturing - a lot of that was outsourced to private contractors anyway), and the vast majority of whom would require a severance package if the CIA was reformed, may go to the private sector, and who are expected to come back to their old jobs after they've been destabilized twice and hopefully after "the bad guys" are weeded out? Hell no.
I'm not trying to make a "few bad apples" argument - I'm also of the opinion it's more of a "Bad Barrel" situation than a "Bad Apple" situation - I'm trying to paint a picture of what a clusterfuck dissolving the CIA would be. Paying out all these severances to staff, and then hoping they all the "Good Guys" walk back in X months later so you retain their skills and knowledge at roughly the same salary is a pipedream. Even if you quietly started rehiring immediately, I'd be willing to bet there'd be a not-insignificant number of non-ops people saying "Fuck that" and never coming back.
You're talking THOUSANDS of people in support functions, let alone IT, database, and sheer personal contact networks that would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild - not to mention all the foreign contacts who will be desperately hoping that the newbies who come in will eventually get back to them before the local organizations find out they used to provide intel to the US.
I was going to say leave them alone but it's not unlikely there are "bad apples" there too, and a few would a have a working relationship with those "bad apples" that need purging. The leadership over the divisions definitely needs purging asap. Not all of the "bad apples" did the torturing themselves they ordered flunkies to do it for them, either by outsourcing to other countries or what happened with Guantanamo - where soldiers did it, like Lynndie England.
In a May 11, 2004 interview with Denver CBS affiliate television station KCNC-TV, England reportedly said that she was "instructed by persons in higher ranks" to commit the acts of abuse for psyop reasons, and that she should keep doing it, because it worked as intended. England noted that she felt "weird" when a commanding officer asked her to do such things as "stand there, give the thumbs up, and smile". However, England felt that she was doing "nothing out of the ordinary".[16]
...and to top it all off, the torturers may not even leave! Because, hey, why would I take a 9-5 desk job when I can potentially be government-sponsored torturing again in 5 years time because we've got entire databases that no-one understands and we need HUMINT information fast.
Don't give them a choice, fire them. They're government employees, not kings. Surely there's a law for making them give us that vital intelligence. Reporters have gone to jail for not revealing their sources, these people would be threatening national security by extorting the government to do what they want. Or maybe extortion charges?
How far do you take this though? Because if you want to purge everyone with a "working relationship" you will very likely shitcan a lot of analysts that weren't directly involved in the "Enhanced Interrogation" program because they provided interrogators with PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements, I was Army MI so I'm not sure the CIA equivalent) and were in turn provided IIRs (reports based on interrogations).
The cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men...
So your stance is that everyone that works for an organization that had some people do some bad things that they weren't directly involved in should burn.
You might as well just burn down the entire U.S. government.
'Some bad things' being a euphemism for war crimes, torture, and insubordination over torture. And yes. I do believe any agency guilty of that should be abolished in whole rather than in part.
I think there need to be deep cuts in these organizations, but "burn it all" isn't a great solution. For starters, it begins with an ignorance of how interconnected organizations are.
No. It doesn't. I am well aware of what my position entails and would appreciate you not presuming that I am an idiot. The further into the report I get the more strongly I feel that the cost of abolition, the full weight of it and the institutional holes that would need to be filled, is entirely justified. Particularly since this isn't the first damning report on the CIA. The Church Committee, the 'Family Jewels' reports, as well as the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take.
"Based on my extensive career in intelligence and/or counter-terrorism?"
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Mr. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, [...] acknowledged that the agency's statistical analysis portrayed a stronger and larger [Soviet] economy than the one that existed in reality. "From a personal standpoint," he added, "I would contend also that our quantitative analysis always considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military."
During his confirmation hearings last fall, Mr. Gates was widely criticized for having promoted a view of an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles between 1986 and 1988, when he was a senior C.I.A. official. The agency was also faulted for exaggerating the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
It's okay to say torture is morally wrong, but if you don't have an intelligence background, you're not qualified to judge the quality of intelligence the CIA is providing. Reading a Tom Clancy novel does not give you an educated opinion on things you have no related background in.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
My bad. To clarify, I'm not advocating for the intelligence value of torture, which I've never seen a credible argument for, but the intelligence value of not burning down the CIA after giving people a 30 minute warning to evacuate the building, metaphorically or literally. Tellingly, the report does not call for the CIA to be disbanded.
Of course not. We're discussing what's really needed to solve this problem, the CIA is too properly protected with political cover to make the slightest accountability measures against. We can't even get the police from killing innocent people on camera and with Ferguson recently in the media, it'd be much harder to punish the CIA openly.
Realistically, disbanding the CIA would be functionally akin to a branding change with about as much impact.
Along with a mass reorganization, new institutional strictures that could serve a stronger bulwark against potential abuses (probably not, but we know for certain that the existing institutional checks were clearly insufficient), and whatever prophylactic effect mass firings would bring about for the new agency. But even if it did just amount to a brand change, we could use a new brand considering what the CIA is associated with. Even before torturing people to death got added to the list. If broader foreign policy tactics were also influenced for the better it would be an added boon.
It also probably isnt a good idea because all the talented people in the CIA wouldnt stick arround for the restructuring and would go to the highest bidder in the private sector.
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.
Where's the disagree button?
Expecting people to put up with shitty conditions because "they should be doing it for love, not money" is an attitude that everyone from social workers to not-for-profits to teachers to armed services has been fighting against.
It's just a variation of "You should be grateful to work here" which I repudiate under any circumstance.
The CIA contains, for example, talented torturers and talented manipulators of domestic politics and domestic public opinion. Are there good HUMINT people working there? 9/11 was a famous failure for them, of course. I don't know enough about the agency to judge. But I'm not convinced at all that we have the right kind of people working there. If the talented torturers leave, that's good, right?
The CIA has many talented people, some of whom are talented IT administrators fixing email complaints, some of whom do nothing but book hotel and flights for travelling officers, some of whom do nothing but crunch raw numbers which they have very little knowledge of what it refers to, and some of whom are torturers. There are over 20,000 people working in the CIA, the vast majority of whom have little to no interaction with operations (let alone torturing - a lot of that was outsourced to private contractors anyway), and the vast majority of whom would require a severance package if the CIA was reformed, may go to the private sector, and who are expected to come back to their old jobs after they've been destabilized twice and hopefully after "the bad guys" are weeded out? Hell no.
I'm not trying to make a "few bad apples" argument - I'm also of the opinion it's more of a "Bad Barrel" situation than a "Bad Apple" situation - I'm trying to paint a picture of what a clusterfuck dissolving the CIA would be. Paying out all these severances to staff, and then hoping they all the "Good Guys" walk back in X months later so you retain their skills and knowledge at roughly the same salary is a pipedream. Even if you quietly started rehiring immediately, I'd be willing to bet there'd be a not-insignificant number of non-ops people saying "Fuck that" and never coming back.
You're talking THOUSANDS of people in support functions, let alone IT, database, and sheer personal contact networks that would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild - not to mention all the foreign contacts who will be desperately hoping that the newbies who come in will eventually get back to them before the local organizations find out they used to provide intel to the US.
I was going to say leave them alone but it's not unlikely there are "bad apples" there too, and a few would a have a working relationship with those "bad apples" that need purging. The leadership over the divisions definitely needs purging asap. Not all of the "bad apples" did the torturing themselves they ordered flunkies to do it for them, either by outsourcing to other countries or what happened with Guantanamo - where soldiers did it, like Lynndie England.
In a May 11, 2004 interview with Denver CBS affiliate television station KCNC-TV, England reportedly said that she was "instructed by persons in higher ranks" to commit the acts of abuse for psyop reasons, and that she should keep doing it, because it worked as intended. England noted that she felt "weird" when a commanding officer asked her to do such things as "stand there, give the thumbs up, and smile". However, England felt that she was doing "nothing out of the ordinary".[16]
...and to top it all off, the torturers may not even leave! Because, hey, why would I take a 9-5 desk job when I can potentially be government-sponsored torturing again in 5 years time because we've got entire databases that no-one understands and we need HUMINT information fast.
Don't give them a choice, fire them. They're government employees, not kings. Surely there's a law for making them give us that vital intelligence. Reporters have gone to jail for not revealing their sources, these people would be threatening national security by extorting the government to do what they want. Or maybe extortion charges?
How far do you take this though? Because if you want to purge everyone with a "working relationship" you will very likely shitcan a lot of analysts that weren't directly involved in the "Enhanced Interrogation" program because they provided interrogators with PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements, I was Army MI so I'm not sure the CIA equivalent) and were in turn provided IIRs (reports based on interrogations).
The cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men...
So your stance is that everyone that works for an organization that had some people do some bad things that they weren't directly involved in should burn.
You might as well just burn down the entire U.S. government.
'Some bad things' being a euphemism for war crimes, torture, and insubordination over torture. And yes. I do believe any agency guilty of that should be abolished in whole rather than in part.
I think there need to be deep cuts in these organizations, but "burn it all" isn't a great solution. For starters, it begins with an ignorance of how interconnected organizations are.
No. It doesn't. I am well aware of what my position entails and would appreciate you not presuming that I am an idiot. The further into the report I get the more strongly I feel that the cost of abolition, the full weight of it and the institutional holes that would need to be filled, is entirely justified. Particularly since this isn't the first damning report on the CIA. The Church Committee, the 'Family Jewels' reports, as well as the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take.
"Based on my extensive career in intelligence and/or counter-terrorism?"
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Mr. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, [...] acknowledged that the agency's statistical analysis portrayed a stronger and larger [Soviet] economy than the one that existed in reality. "From a personal standpoint," he added, "I would contend also that our quantitative analysis always considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military."
During his confirmation hearings last fall, Mr. Gates was widely criticized for having promoted a view of an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles between 1986 and 1988, when he was a senior C.I.A. official. The agency was also faulted for exaggerating the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
It's okay to say torture is morally wrong, but if you don't have an intelligence background, you're not qualified to judge the quality of intelligence the CIA is providing. Reading a Tom Clancy novel does not give you an educated opinion on things you have no related background in.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
I disagree with that reading.
I think those reports clearly indicate that there were failures in analysis for those events but that they don't speak to the analysis in general - and they especially don't speak to the analysis in general benchmarked in general against comparable intelligence services. I would be willing to bet that if you got a dozen CIA reports, paired each one with a conflicting report from one of a dozen other countries with strong intelligence services, and then handed it to a random foreign analyst from a third country and asked them which they would prioritize - that the majority of those foreign analysts would go with the CIA report.
Yes, the CIA fucks up analysis, sometimes on a jaw dropping scale - 9/11 and the fall of the USSR being the two big examples given. But putting aside the argument whether torture is detrimental to the quality of those reports or not (and I maintain that it is detrimental), the CIA is still the best in the industry. They may have a poor "hit rate" compared with other sectors, such as news agencies, IT data brokers, or even Pew Polls, but if they have a .200 batting average then (outside of their local specializations, such as Israel within the Near East) everyone else is hitting .150. They might get it wrong when other agencies - sometimes many other agencies - get it right, but they are right more often than everyone else.
Would we like them to be better? Yes.Can they do better? Probably, but the standard that a lot of people have in their head is based more on fictional portrayals of intelligence agencies rather than grounded in reality. Removing torture from the CIA's behaviour isn't going to magically get them up to .999 - the impact on the quality of reports will likely be negligible. However, the impact on the people affected will certainly make torture's removal worthwhile.
It also probably isnt a good idea because all the talented people in the CIA wouldnt stick arround for the restructuring and would go to the highest bidder in the private sector.
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.
Where's the disagree button?
Expecting people to put up with shitty conditions because "they should be doing it for love, not money" is an attitude that everyone from social workers to not-for-profits to teachers to armed services has been fighting against.
It's just a variation of "You should be grateful to work here" which I repudiate under any circumstance.
The CIA contains, for example, talented torturers and talented manipulators of domestic politics and domestic public opinion. Are there good HUMINT people working there? 9/11 was a famous failure for them, of course. I don't know enough about the agency to judge. But I'm not convinced at all that we have the right kind of people working there. If the talented torturers leave, that's good, right?
The CIA has many talented people, some of whom are talented IT administrators fixing email complaints, some of whom do nothing but book hotel and flights for travelling officers, some of whom do nothing but crunch raw numbers which they have very little knowledge of what it refers to, and some of whom are torturers. There are over 20,000 people working in the CIA, the vast majority of whom have little to no interaction with operations (let alone torturing - a lot of that was outsourced to private contractors anyway), and the vast majority of whom would require a severance package if the CIA was reformed, may go to the private sector, and who are expected to come back to their old jobs after they've been destabilized twice and hopefully after "the bad guys" are weeded out? Hell no.
I'm not trying to make a "few bad apples" argument - I'm also of the opinion it's more of a "Bad Barrel" situation than a "Bad Apple" situation - I'm trying to paint a picture of what a clusterfuck dissolving the CIA would be. Paying out all these severances to staff, and then hoping they all the "Good Guys" walk back in X months later so you retain their skills and knowledge at roughly the same salary is a pipedream. Even if you quietly started rehiring immediately, I'd be willing to bet there'd be a not-insignificant number of non-ops people saying "Fuck that" and never coming back.
You're talking THOUSANDS of people in support functions, let alone IT, database, and sheer personal contact networks that would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild - not to mention all the foreign contacts who will be desperately hoping that the newbies who come in will eventually get back to them before the local organizations find out they used to provide intel to the US.
I was going to say leave them alone but it's not unlikely there are "bad apples" there too, and a few would a have a working relationship with those "bad apples" that need purging. The leadership over the divisions definitely needs purging asap. Not all of the "bad apples" did the torturing themselves they ordered flunkies to do it for them, either by outsourcing to other countries or what happened with Guantanamo - where soldiers did it, like Lynndie England.
In a May 11, 2004 interview with Denver CBS affiliate television station KCNC-TV, England reportedly said that she was "instructed by persons in higher ranks" to commit the acts of abuse for psyop reasons, and that she should keep doing it, because it worked as intended. England noted that she felt "weird" when a commanding officer asked her to do such things as "stand there, give the thumbs up, and smile". However, England felt that she was doing "nothing out of the ordinary".[16]
...and to top it all off, the torturers may not even leave! Because, hey, why would I take a 9-5 desk job when I can potentially be government-sponsored torturing again in 5 years time because we've got entire databases that no-one understands and we need HUMINT information fast.
Don't give them a choice, fire them. They're government employees, not kings. Surely there's a law for making them give us that vital intelligence. Reporters have gone to jail for not revealing their sources, these people would be threatening national security by extorting the government to do what they want. Or maybe extortion charges?
How far do you take this though? Because if you want to purge everyone with a "working relationship" you will very likely shitcan a lot of analysts that weren't directly involved in the "Enhanced Interrogation" program because they provided interrogators with PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements, I was Army MI so I'm not sure the CIA equivalent) and were in turn provided IIRs (reports based on interrogations).
The cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men...
So your stance is that everyone that works for an organization that had some people do some bad things that they weren't directly involved in should burn.
You might as well just burn down the entire U.S. government.
'Some bad things' being a euphemism for war crimes, torture, and insubordination over torture. And yes. I do believe any agency guilty of that should be abolished in whole rather than in part.
I think there need to be deep cuts in these organizations, but "burn it all" isn't a great solution. For starters, it begins with an ignorance of how interconnected organizations are.
No. It doesn't. I am well aware of what my position entails and would appreciate you not presuming that I am an idiot. The further into the report I get the more strongly I feel that the cost of abolition, the full weight of it and the institutional holes that would need to be filled, is entirely justified. Particularly since this isn't the first damning report on the CIA. The Church Committee, the 'Family Jewels' reports, as well as the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take.
"Based on my extensive career in intelligence and/or counter-terrorism?"
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Mr. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, [...] acknowledged that the agency's statistical analysis portrayed a stronger and larger [Soviet] economy than the one that existed in reality. "From a personal standpoint," he added, "I would contend also that our quantitative analysis always considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military."
During his confirmation hearings last fall, Mr. Gates was widely criticized for having promoted a view of an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles between 1986 and 1988, when he was a senior C.I.A. official. The agency was also faulted for exaggerating the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
It's okay to say torture is morally wrong, but if you don't have an intelligence background, you're not qualified to judge the quality of intelligence the CIA is providing. Reading a Tom Clancy novel does not give you an educated opinion on things you have no related background in.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
I disagree with that reading.
I think those reports clearly indicate that there were failures in analysis for those events but that they don't speak to the analysis in general - and they especially don't speak to the analysis in general benchmarked in general against comparable intelligence services. I would be willing to bet that if you got a dozen CIA reports, paired each one with a conflicting report from one of a dozen other countries with strong intelligence services, and then handed it to a random foreign analyst from a third country and asked them which they would prioritize - that the majority of those foreign analysts would go with the CIA report.
Yes, the CIA fucks up analysis, sometimes on a jaw dropping scale - 9/11 and the fall of the USSR being the two big examples given. But putting aside the argument whether torture is detrimental to the quality of those reports or not (and I maintain that it is detrimental), the CIA is still the best in the industry. They may have a poor "hit rate" compared with other sectors, such as news agencies, IT data brokers, or even Pew Polls, but if they have a .200 batting average then (outside of their local specializations, such as Israel within the Near East) everyone else is hitting .150. They might get it wrong when other agencies - sometimes many other agencies - get it right, but they are right more often than everyone else.
It also probably isnt a good idea because all the talented people in the CIA wouldnt stick arround for the restructuring and would go to the highest bidder in the private sector.
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.
Where's the disagree button?
Expecting people to put up with shitty conditions because "they should be doing it for love, not money" is an attitude that everyone from social workers to not-for-profits to teachers to armed services has been fighting against.
It's just a variation of "You should be grateful to work here" which I repudiate under any circumstance.
The CIA contains, for example, talented torturers and talented manipulators of domestic politics and domestic public opinion. Are there good HUMINT people working there? 9/11 was a famous failure for them, of course. I don't know enough about the agency to judge. But I'm not convinced at all that we have the right kind of people working there. If the talented torturers leave, that's good, right?
The CIA has many talented people, some of whom are talented IT administrators fixing email complaints, some of whom do nothing but book hotel and flights for travelling officers, some of whom do nothing but crunch raw numbers which they have very little knowledge of what it refers to, and some of whom are torturers. There are over 20,000 people working in the CIA, the vast majority of whom have little to no interaction with operations (let alone torturing - a lot of that was outsourced to private contractors anyway), and the vast majority of whom would require a severance package if the CIA was reformed, may go to the private sector, and who are expected to come back to their old jobs after they've been destabilized twice and hopefully after "the bad guys" are weeded out? Hell no.
I'm not trying to make a "few bad apples" argument - I'm also of the opinion it's more of a "Bad Barrel" situation than a "Bad Apple" situation - I'm trying to paint a picture of what a clusterfuck dissolving the CIA would be. Paying out all these severances to staff, and then hoping they all the "Good Guys" walk back in X months later so you retain their skills and knowledge at roughly the same salary is a pipedream. Even if you quietly started rehiring immediately, I'd be willing to bet there'd be a not-insignificant number of non-ops people saying "Fuck that" and never coming back.
You're talking THOUSANDS of people in support functions, let alone IT, database, and sheer personal contact networks that would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild - not to mention all the foreign contacts who will be desperately hoping that the newbies who come in will eventually get back to them before the local organizations find out they used to provide intel to the US.
I was going to say leave them alone but it's not unlikely there are "bad apples" there too, and a few would a have a working relationship with those "bad apples" that need purging. The leadership over the divisions definitely needs purging asap. Not all of the "bad apples" did the torturing themselves they ordered flunkies to do it for them, either by outsourcing to other countries or what happened with Guantanamo - where soldiers did it, like Lynndie England.
In a May 11, 2004 interview with Denver CBS affiliate television station KCNC-TV, England reportedly said that she was "instructed by persons in higher ranks" to commit the acts of abuse for psyop reasons, and that she should keep doing it, because it worked as intended. England noted that she felt "weird" when a commanding officer asked her to do such things as "stand there, give the thumbs up, and smile". However, England felt that she was doing "nothing out of the ordinary".[16]
...and to top it all off, the torturers may not even leave! Because, hey, why would I take a 9-5 desk job when I can potentially be government-sponsored torturing again in 5 years time because we've got entire databases that no-one understands and we need HUMINT information fast.
Don't give them a choice, fire them. They're government employees, not kings. Surely there's a law for making them give us that vital intelligence. Reporters have gone to jail for not revealing their sources, these people would be threatening national security by extorting the government to do what they want. Or maybe extortion charges?
How far do you take this though? Because if you want to purge everyone with a "working relationship" you will very likely shitcan a lot of analysts that weren't directly involved in the "Enhanced Interrogation" program because they provided interrogators with PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements, I was Army MI so I'm not sure the CIA equivalent) and were in turn provided IIRs (reports based on interrogations).
The cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men...
So your stance is that everyone that works for an organization that had some people do some bad things that they weren't directly involved in should burn.
You might as well just burn down the entire U.S. government.
'Some bad things' being a euphemism for war crimes, torture, and insubordination over torture. And yes. I do believe any agency guilty of that should be abolished in whole rather than in part.
I think there need to be deep cuts in these organizations, but "burn it all" isn't a great solution. For starters, it begins with an ignorance of how interconnected organizations are.
No. It doesn't. I am well aware of what my position entails and would appreciate you not presuming that I am an idiot. The further into the report I get the more strongly I feel that the cost of abolition, the full weight of it and the institutional holes that would need to be filled, is entirely justified. Particularly since this isn't the first damning report on the CIA. The Church Committee, the 'Family Jewels' reports, as well as the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take.
"Based on my extensive career in intelligence and/or counter-terrorism?"
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Mr. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, [...] acknowledged that the agency's statistical analysis portrayed a stronger and larger [Soviet] economy than the one that existed in reality. "From a personal standpoint," he added, "I would contend also that our quantitative analysis always considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military."
During his confirmation hearings last fall, Mr. Gates was widely criticized for having promoted a view of an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles between 1986 and 1988, when he was a senior C.I.A. official. The agency was also faulted for exaggerating the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
It's okay to say torture is morally wrong, but if you don't have an intelligence background, you're not qualified to judge the quality of intelligence the CIA is providing. Reading a Tom Clancy novel does not give you an educated opinion on things you have no related background in.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
To be fair to Mr. Gates, it was standing policy to play up the "Red Menace" to justify Cold War spending since the end of WWII and Operation Gladio.
Besides that, yes many in the IC were wrong about the state of the Soviet Union at that time. I would suggest that part of that was a problem I pointed out earlier: Leadership asking for intelligence to support a pre-conceived narrative.
Being wrong happens because Intelligence collections and analysis is never absolute, but what is important is how often someone is wrong.
It also probably isnt a good idea because all the talented people in the CIA wouldnt stick arround for the restructuring and would go to the highest bidder in the private sector.
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.
Where's the disagree button?
Expecting people to put up with shitty conditions because "they should be doing it for love, not money" is an attitude that everyone from social workers to not-for-profits to teachers to armed services has been fighting against.
It's just a variation of "You should be grateful to work here" which I repudiate under any circumstance.
The CIA contains, for example, talented torturers and talented manipulators of domestic politics and domestic public opinion. Are there good HUMINT people working there? 9/11 was a famous failure for them, of course. I don't know enough about the agency to judge. But I'm not convinced at all that we have the right kind of people working there. If the talented torturers leave, that's good, right?
The CIA has many talented people, some of whom are talented IT administrators fixing email complaints, some of whom do nothing but book hotel and flights for travelling officers, some of whom do nothing but crunch raw numbers which they have very little knowledge of what it refers to, and some of whom are torturers. There are over 20,000 people working in the CIA, the vast majority of whom have little to no interaction with operations (let alone torturing - a lot of that was outsourced to private contractors anyway), and the vast majority of whom would require a severance package if the CIA was reformed, may go to the private sector, and who are expected to come back to their old jobs after they've been destabilized twice and hopefully after "the bad guys" are weeded out? Hell no.
I'm not trying to make a "few bad apples" argument - I'm also of the opinion it's more of a "Bad Barrel" situation than a "Bad Apple" situation - I'm trying to paint a picture of what a clusterfuck dissolving the CIA would be. Paying out all these severances to staff, and then hoping they all the "Good Guys" walk back in X months later so you retain their skills and knowledge at roughly the same salary is a pipedream. Even if you quietly started rehiring immediately, I'd be willing to bet there'd be a not-insignificant number of non-ops people saying "Fuck that" and never coming back.
You're talking THOUSANDS of people in support functions, let alone IT, database, and sheer personal contact networks that would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild - not to mention all the foreign contacts who will be desperately hoping that the newbies who come in will eventually get back to them before the local organizations find out they used to provide intel to the US.
I was going to say leave them alone but it's not unlikely there are "bad apples" there too, and a few would a have a working relationship with those "bad apples" that need purging. The leadership over the divisions definitely needs purging asap. Not all of the "bad apples" did the torturing themselves they ordered flunkies to do it for them, either by outsourcing to other countries or what happened with Guantanamo - where soldiers did it, like Lynndie England.
In a May 11, 2004 interview with Denver CBS affiliate television station KCNC-TV, England reportedly said that she was "instructed by persons in higher ranks" to commit the acts of abuse for psyop reasons, and that she should keep doing it, because it worked as intended. England noted that she felt "weird" when a commanding officer asked her to do such things as "stand there, give the thumbs up, and smile". However, England felt that she was doing "nothing out of the ordinary".[16]
...and to top it all off, the torturers may not even leave! Because, hey, why would I take a 9-5 desk job when I can potentially be government-sponsored torturing again in 5 years time because we've got entire databases that no-one understands and we need HUMINT information fast.
Don't give them a choice, fire them. They're government employees, not kings. Surely there's a law for making them give us that vital intelligence. Reporters have gone to jail for not revealing their sources, these people would be threatening national security by extorting the government to do what they want. Or maybe extortion charges?
How far do you take this though? Because if you want to purge everyone with a "working relationship" you will very likely shitcan a lot of analysts that weren't directly involved in the "Enhanced Interrogation" program because they provided interrogators with PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements, I was Army MI so I'm not sure the CIA equivalent) and were in turn provided IIRs (reports based on interrogations).
The cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men...
So your stance is that everyone that works for an organization that had some people do some bad things that they weren't directly involved in should burn.
You might as well just burn down the entire U.S. government.
'Some bad things' being a euphemism for war crimes, torture, and insubordination over torture. And yes. I do believe any agency guilty of that should be abolished in whole rather than in part.
I think there need to be deep cuts in these organizations, but "burn it all" isn't a great solution. For starters, it begins with an ignorance of how interconnected organizations are.
No. It doesn't. I am well aware of what my position entails and would appreciate you not presuming that I am an idiot. The further into the report I get the more strongly I feel that the cost of abolition, the full weight of it and the institutional holes that would need to be filled, is entirely justified. Particularly since this isn't the first damning report on the CIA. The Church Committee, the 'Family Jewels' reports, as well as the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take.
"Based on my extensive career in intelligence and/or counter-terrorism?"
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Mr. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, [...] acknowledged that the agency's statistical analysis portrayed a stronger and larger [Soviet] economy than the one that existed in reality. "From a personal standpoint," he added, "I would contend also that our quantitative analysis always considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military."
During his confirmation hearings last fall, Mr. Gates was widely criticized for having promoted a view of an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles between 1986 and 1988, when he was a senior C.I.A. official. The agency was also faulted for exaggerating the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
It's okay to say torture is morally wrong, but if you don't have an intelligence background, you're not qualified to judge the quality of intelligence the CIA is providing. Reading a Tom Clancy novel does not give you an educated opinion on things you have no related background in.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
I disagree with that reading.
I think those reports clearly indicate that there were failures in analysis for those events but that they don't speak to the analysis in general - and they especially don't speak to the analysis in general benchmarked in general against comparable intelligence services. I would be willing to bet that if you got a dozen CIA reports, paired each one with a conflicting report from one of a dozen other countries with strong intelligence services, and then handed it to a random foreign analyst from a third country and asked them which they would prioritize - that the majority of those foreign analysts would go with the CIA report.
Yes, the CIA fucks up analysis, sometimes on a jaw dropping scale - 9/11 and the fall of the USSR being the two big examples given. But putting aside the argument whether torture is detrimental to the quality of those reports or not (and I maintain that it is detrimental), the CIA is still the best in the industry. They may have a poor "hit rate" compared with other sectors, such as news agencies, IT data brokers, or even Pew Polls, but if they have a .200 batting average then (outside of their local specializations, such as Israel within the Near East) everyone else is hitting .150. They might get it wrong when other agencies - sometimes many other agencies - get it right, but they are right more often than everyone else.
[Citation Needed]
Well, there's the ever-reliable "All Top Tens" List which puts CIA in #2. This is apparently based on the "US (or possibly "American") Crime News" which has no website and has not deigned to directly publish their report, which is the one most cited when googling "Best Intelligence Agencies". The Richest disagrees and puts the CIA at the top. Wikipedia certainly indicates that it's the largest and best funded. Although admittedly tenuous evidence, I'm confident it is correct and it puts my 50/50 bet into the realm where I'm going to walk away with your money.
Meanwhile I'll be pithy and point out that your statement:
the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take
In reply to the "not very good at intelligence" statement, you can cherry pick failures all day to make a statement that any entity or person is not good at their stated mission. A 100% "success" rate is unrealistic.
If that is your standard for existence we will be right back where we were pre WWII: No civilian intelligence services and almost non existent dedicated military intelligence services.
guys, I purposely delayed reading this report and this thread because I have barely recovered from the heartache of Ferguson. I just finished reading this thread from page 1 now and took another glass of whiskey, I just asdflsfjlafsdjafjlsdaf.
guys, I purposely delayed reading this report and this thread because I have barely recovered from the heartache of Ferguson. I just finished reading this thread from page 1 now and took another glass of whiskey, I just asdflsfjlafsdjafjlsdaf.
Well, this will surely not help your newfound drinking problem
A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.
In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”
I don't really see that as facile. Torture is torture, and if it was useful in any way whatsoever it would still be unacceptable. People genuinely don't care because it's not happening to them or people like them, which is the point that comic makes, and I agree with it.
guys, I purposely delayed reading this report and this thread because I have barely recovered from the heartache of Ferguson. I just finished reading this thread from page 1 now and took another glass of whiskey, I just asdflsfjlafsdjafjlsdaf.
Well, this will surely not help your newfound drinking problem
A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.
In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”
I don't really see that as facile. Torture is torture, and if it was useful in any way whatsoever it would still be unacceptable. People genuinely don't care because it's not happening to them or people like them, which is the point that comic makes, and I agree with it.
Just like we are now making excuses to justify specific torture actions that we have pursued against others as war crimes in the past.
guys, I purposely delayed reading this report and this thread because I have barely recovered from the heartache of Ferguson. I just finished reading this thread from page 1 now and took another glass of whiskey, I just asdflsfjlafsdjafjlsdaf.
Well, this will surely not help your newfound drinking problem
A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.
In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”
guys, I purposely delayed reading this report and this thread because I have barely recovered from the heartache of Ferguson. I just finished reading this thread from page 1 now and took another glass of whiskey, I just asdflsfjlafsdjafjlsdaf.
Well, this will surely not help your newfound drinking problem
A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.
In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”
Not worth it to take those polls as gospel when they only poll their readers/viewers.
it's a good thing that they didn't do that
The Post-ABC poll was conducted by telephone Dec. 11 to Dec. 14, among a random national sample of 1,000 adults. The poll had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
"by telephone" does introduce a certain bias, but they did a reasonable job at finding a good sample
guys, I purposely delayed reading this report and this thread because I have barely recovered from the heartache of Ferguson. I just finished reading this thread from page 1 now and took another glass of whiskey, I just asdflsfjlafsdjafjlsdaf.
Well, this will surely not help your newfound drinking problem
A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.
In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”
Not worth it to take those polls as gospel when they only poll their readers/viewers.
it's a good thing that they didn't do that
The Post-ABC poll was conducted by telephone Dec. 11 to Dec. 14, among a random national sample of 1,000 adults. The poll had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
"by telephone" does introduce a certain bias, but they did a reasonable job at finding a good sample
They aren't calling random numbers on the phone. "Random sampling " is just as often a random sample taken from a selected sample in political polls.
In regards to the claim that the CIA is the best in it's field... The past two years I've been reading numerous books about intelligence agencies. I've been reading books by people who used to work for intelligence agencies including people who had a career working for intelligence agencies outside of the US. In all of these books if the subject of the effectiveness of the CIA comes up relative to that of other intelligence agencies, it's said that the CIA is one of the least effective of the world's major intelligence agencies. One book that comes to mind in regards to this claim is The Fourth World War by David Andelman and Count De Marenches, the second of which is the former head of one of Frances intelligence agencies.
In the book he rates the intelligence agencies of the most powerful countries, he rates America's but particularly our CIA as being in dead last. He describes a CIA that is unprofessional, underpaid relative to the importance of the work they do, and staffed by people who have an extremely American-centric attitude. He goes to great lengths to explain in the book the work that other countries to do expose their agents to other cultures so that they can understand the motives of people from cultures that might have been alien to them prior to their work in intelligence. He says that America has avoided doing anything like this to a great extent, whereas agents from the UK or France spend at least two years in a foreign country learning the language and the customs of other people prior to doing any intelligence work. The effect of this is that our CIA agents according to him, are largely unable to understand the motives of foreigners in general.
He also says that there is less cooperation between American intelligence agencies and the rest of the world, because of the greater extent to which our intelligence agencies are political tools. That the world's leading intelligence agencies go to great lengths to avoid sharing information with ours because the second they do the information gets shared with politicians who end up sharing this information to all sorts of people at private cocktail parties. He describes this as being a uniquely American problem.
I've read books by several people who used to work for the CIA or foreign intelligence agencies where they say almost exactly the same thing. The CIA collects an incredible amount of information that dwarfs whatever any other intelligence agency in the world collects, and this has been true since at least the 1990's if not the 1980's. But it is completely inept at doing any of the kinds of things it's supposed to do with it. It's terrible at keeping secrets, it's terrible at keeping it's agents from selling state secrets for cash, and it's terrible at using that information to our advantage.
In this book and in The Company Man by John Rizzo a similar, if not the same story is described. That for most of the 1980's one low level agent who was a known alcoholic, drove extremely expensive cars, and wore some of the world's most expensive shoes and watches, was responsible for selling most of our secrets to the soviets. There were mole hunts in the CIA through out this period where people were investigated based on little or no evidence and often times they lost their job without any evidence of wrong-doing, but one low level agent who was not a particularly well functioning alcoholic managed to escape scrutiny even though there were a lot of fairly obvious signs he was selling state secrets.
Part of the problem had to do with bad document management. There are lists of secret documents such as manuals that describe how our satellites function. These manuals are supposed to be inventoried every month or so, so that it will be known if they've been stolen, and an investigation can begin but that's not actually something that happens. One day they do a real inventory, and find out that these secret documents are missing from almost every facility that is supposed to have one. Books by people who formerly worked for the CIA are chucked full of stories like this.
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guys, I purposely delayed reading this report and this thread because I have barely recovered from the heartache of Ferguson. I just finished reading this thread from page 1 now and took another glass of whiskey, I just asdflsfjlafsdjafjlsdaf.
Well, this will surely not help your newfound drinking problem
A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.
In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”
Not worth it to take those polls as gospel when they only poll their readers/viewers.
it's a good thing that they didn't do that
The Post-ABC poll was conducted by telephone Dec. 11 to Dec. 14, among a random national sample of 1,000 adults. The poll had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
"by telephone" does introduce a certain bias, but they did a reasonable job at finding a good sample
They aren't calling random numbers on the phone. "Random sampling " is just as often a random sample taken from a selected sample in political polls.
That for most of the 1980's one low level agent who was a known alcoholic, drove extremely expensive cars, and wore some of the world's most expensive shoes and watches, was responsible for selling most of our secrets to the soviets. There were mole hunts in the CIA through out this period where people were investigated based on little or no evidence and often times they lost their job without any evidence of wrong-doing, but one low level agent who was not a particularly well functioning alcoholic managed to escape scrutiny even though there were a lot of fairly obvious signs he was selling state secrets.
I suspect this CIA employee the author is referring to is Aldrich Ames.
He wasn't exactly a low level nobody that no one knew, his father worked for the Directorate of Operations, and he had some good postings. Part of his motivation for turning was financial, but I would argue that he was also motivated to turn by how he likely felt he was treated early in his career in regards to evaluations and promotions. And yes, he did have a heavy drinking problem later in his career.
I will heartily agree with the claim that the IC (at least the military services) discourages foreign travel and contacts. Unfortunately I think the reason this is, rightly or wrongly, is security. Though, at least in guidelines published on their website, CIA specifically does look positively on travel and temporary living abroad.
It also probably isnt a good idea because all the talented people in the CIA wouldnt stick arround for the restructuring and would go to the highest bidder in the private sector.
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.
Where's the disagree button?
Expecting people to put up with shitty conditions because "they should be doing it for love, not money" is an attitude that everyone from social workers to not-for-profits to teachers to armed services has been fighting against.
It's just a variation of "You should be grateful to work here" which I repudiate under any circumstance.
The CIA contains, for example, talented torturers and talented manipulators of domestic politics and domestic public opinion. Are there good HUMINT people working there? 9/11 was a famous failure for them, of course. I don't know enough about the agency to judge. But I'm not convinced at all that we have the right kind of people working there. If the talented torturers leave, that's good, right?
The CIA has many talented people, some of whom are talented IT administrators fixing email complaints, some of whom do nothing but book hotel and flights for travelling officers, some of whom do nothing but crunch raw numbers which they have very little knowledge of what it refers to, and some of whom are torturers. There are over 20,000 people working in the CIA, the vast majority of whom have little to no interaction with operations (let alone torturing - a lot of that was outsourced to private contractors anyway), and the vast majority of whom would require a severance package if the CIA was reformed, may go to the private sector, and who are expected to come back to their old jobs after they've been destabilized twice and hopefully after "the bad guys" are weeded out? Hell no.
I'm not trying to make a "few bad apples" argument - I'm also of the opinion it's more of a "Bad Barrel" situation than a "Bad Apple" situation - I'm trying to paint a picture of what a clusterfuck dissolving the CIA would be. Paying out all these severances to staff, and then hoping they all the "Good Guys" walk back in X months later so you retain their skills and knowledge at roughly the same salary is a pipedream. Even if you quietly started rehiring immediately, I'd be willing to bet there'd be a not-insignificant number of non-ops people saying "Fuck that" and never coming back.
You're talking THOUSANDS of people in support functions, let alone IT, database, and sheer personal contact networks that would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild - not to mention all the foreign contacts who will be desperately hoping that the newbies who come in will eventually get back to them before the local organizations find out they used to provide intel to the US.
I was going to say leave them alone but it's not unlikely there are "bad apples" there too, and a few would a have a working relationship with those "bad apples" that need purging. The leadership over the divisions definitely needs purging asap. Not all of the "bad apples" did the torturing themselves they ordered flunkies to do it for them, either by outsourcing to other countries or what happened with Guantanamo - where soldiers did it, like Lynndie England.
In a May 11, 2004 interview with Denver CBS affiliate television station KCNC-TV, England reportedly said that she was "instructed by persons in higher ranks" to commit the acts of abuse for psyop reasons, and that she should keep doing it, because it worked as intended. England noted that she felt "weird" when a commanding officer asked her to do such things as "stand there, give the thumbs up, and smile". However, England felt that she was doing "nothing out of the ordinary".[16]
...and to top it all off, the torturers may not even leave! Because, hey, why would I take a 9-5 desk job when I can potentially be government-sponsored torturing again in 5 years time because we've got entire databases that no-one understands and we need HUMINT information fast.
Don't give them a choice, fire them. They're government employees, not kings. Surely there's a law for making them give us that vital intelligence. Reporters have gone to jail for not revealing their sources, these people would be threatening national security by extorting the government to do what they want. Or maybe extortion charges?
How far do you take this though? Because if you want to purge everyone with a "working relationship" you will very likely shitcan a lot of analysts that weren't directly involved in the "Enhanced Interrogation" program because they provided interrogators with PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements, I was Army MI so I'm not sure the CIA equivalent) and were in turn provided IIRs (reports based on interrogations).
The cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men...
So your stance is that everyone that works for an organization that had some people do some bad things that they weren't directly involved in should burn.
You might as well just burn down the entire U.S. government.
'Some bad things' being a euphemism for war crimes, torture, and insubordination over torture. And yes. I do believe any agency guilty of that should be abolished in whole rather than in part.
I think there need to be deep cuts in these organizations, but "burn it all" isn't a great solution. For starters, it begins with an ignorance of how interconnected organizations are.
No. It doesn't. I am well aware of what my position entails and would appreciate you not presuming that I am an idiot. The further into the report I get the more strongly I feel that the cost of abolition, the full weight of it and the institutional holes that would need to be filled, is entirely justified. Particularly since this isn't the first damning report on the CIA. The Church Committee, the 'Family Jewels' reports, as well as the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take.
"Based on my extensive career in intelligence and/or counter-terrorism?"
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Mr. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, [...] acknowledged that the agency's statistical analysis portrayed a stronger and larger [Soviet] economy than the one that existed in reality. "From a personal standpoint," he added, "I would contend also that our quantitative analysis always considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military."
During his confirmation hearings last fall, Mr. Gates was widely criticized for having promoted a view of an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles between 1986 and 1988, when he was a senior C.I.A. official. The agency was also faulted for exaggerating the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
It's okay to say torture is morally wrong, but if you don't have an intelligence background, you're not qualified to judge the quality of intelligence the CIA is providing. Reading a Tom Clancy novel does not give you an educated opinion on things you have no related background in.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
I disagree with that reading.
I think those reports clearly indicate that there were failures in analysis for those events but that they don't speak to the analysis in general - and they especially don't speak to the analysis in general benchmarked in general against comparable intelligence services. I would be willing to bet that if you got a dozen CIA reports, paired each one with a conflicting report from one of a dozen other countries with strong intelligence services, and then handed it to a random foreign analyst from a third country and asked them which they would prioritize - that the majority of those foreign analysts would go with the CIA report.
Yes, the CIA fucks up analysis, sometimes on a jaw dropping scale - 9/11 and the fall of the USSR being the two big examples given. But putting aside the argument whether torture is detrimental to the quality of those reports or not (and I maintain that it is detrimental), the CIA is still the best in the industry. They may have a poor "hit rate" compared with other sectors, such as news agencies, IT data brokers, or even Pew Polls, but if they have a .200 batting average then (outside of their local specializations, such as Israel within the Near East) everyone else is hitting .150. They might get it wrong when other agencies - sometimes many other agencies - get it right, but they are right more often than everyone else.
[Citation Needed]
Sure. They [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] in [redacted] when [redacted].
Again, people who have actually worked with them don't find them useless. But it is impossible to make that case without a top secret clearance.
It's infuriating how our media is refusing to report on specifics beyond water boarding
Yeah. If people are going to support weird ass stuff, they should know they are supporting weird ass stuff. Even if they don't oppose torture for its own sake, they should at the least be uncomfortable shoving things up people's rectums that don't belong there.
It also probably isnt a good idea because all the talented people in the CIA wouldnt stick arround for the restructuring and would go to the highest bidder in the private sector.
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.
Where's the disagree button?
Expecting people to put up with shitty conditions because "they should be doing it for love, not money" is an attitude that everyone from social workers to not-for-profits to teachers to armed services has been fighting against.
It's just a variation of "You should be grateful to work here" which I repudiate under any circumstance.
The CIA contains, for example, talented torturers and talented manipulators of domestic politics and domestic public opinion. Are there good HUMINT people working there? 9/11 was a famous failure for them, of course. I don't know enough about the agency to judge. But I'm not convinced at all that we have the right kind of people working there. If the talented torturers leave, that's good, right?
The CIA has many talented people, some of whom are talented IT administrators fixing email complaints, some of whom do nothing but book hotel and flights for travelling officers, some of whom do nothing but crunch raw numbers which they have very little knowledge of what it refers to, and some of whom are torturers. There are over 20,000 people working in the CIA, the vast majority of whom have little to no interaction with operations (let alone torturing - a lot of that was outsourced to private contractors anyway), and the vast majority of whom would require a severance package if the CIA was reformed, may go to the private sector, and who are expected to come back to their old jobs after they've been destabilized twice and hopefully after "the bad guys" are weeded out? Hell no.
I'm not trying to make a "few bad apples" argument - I'm also of the opinion it's more of a "Bad Barrel" situation than a "Bad Apple" situation - I'm trying to paint a picture of what a clusterfuck dissolving the CIA would be. Paying out all these severances to staff, and then hoping they all the "Good Guys" walk back in X months later so you retain their skills and knowledge at roughly the same salary is a pipedream. Even if you quietly started rehiring immediately, I'd be willing to bet there'd be a not-insignificant number of non-ops people saying "Fuck that" and never coming back.
You're talking THOUSANDS of people in support functions, let alone IT, database, and sheer personal contact networks that would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild - not to mention all the foreign contacts who will be desperately hoping that the newbies who come in will eventually get back to them before the local organizations find out they used to provide intel to the US.
I was going to say leave them alone but it's not unlikely there are "bad apples" there too, and a few would a have a working relationship with those "bad apples" that need purging. The leadership over the divisions definitely needs purging asap. Not all of the "bad apples" did the torturing themselves they ordered flunkies to do it for them, either by outsourcing to other countries or what happened with Guantanamo - where soldiers did it, like Lynndie England.
In a May 11, 2004 interview with Denver CBS affiliate television station KCNC-TV, England reportedly said that she was "instructed by persons in higher ranks" to commit the acts of abuse for psyop reasons, and that she should keep doing it, because it worked as intended. England noted that she felt "weird" when a commanding officer asked her to do such things as "stand there, give the thumbs up, and smile". However, England felt that she was doing "nothing out of the ordinary".[16]
...and to top it all off, the torturers may not even leave! Because, hey, why would I take a 9-5 desk job when I can potentially be government-sponsored torturing again in 5 years time because we've got entire databases that no-one understands and we need HUMINT information fast.
Don't give them a choice, fire them. They're government employees, not kings. Surely there's a law for making them give us that vital intelligence. Reporters have gone to jail for not revealing their sources, these people would be threatening national security by extorting the government to do what they want. Or maybe extortion charges?
How far do you take this though? Because if you want to purge everyone with a "working relationship" you will very likely shitcan a lot of analysts that weren't directly involved in the "Enhanced Interrogation" program because they provided interrogators with PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements, I was Army MI so I'm not sure the CIA equivalent) and were in turn provided IIRs (reports based on interrogations).
The cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men...
So your stance is that everyone that works for an organization that had some people do some bad things that they weren't directly involved in should burn.
You might as well just burn down the entire U.S. government.
'Some bad things' being a euphemism for war crimes, torture, and insubordination over torture. And yes. I do believe any agency guilty of that should be abolished in whole rather than in part.
I think there need to be deep cuts in these organizations, but "burn it all" isn't a great solution. For starters, it begins with an ignorance of how interconnected organizations are.
No. It doesn't. I am well aware of what my position entails and would appreciate you not presuming that I am an idiot. The further into the report I get the more strongly I feel that the cost of abolition, the full weight of it and the institutional holes that would need to be filled, is entirely justified. Particularly since this isn't the first damning report on the CIA. The Church Committee, the 'Family Jewels' reports, as well as the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take.
"Based on my extensive career in intelligence and/or counter-terrorism?"
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Mr. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, [...] acknowledged that the agency's statistical analysis portrayed a stronger and larger [Soviet] economy than the one that existed in reality. "From a personal standpoint," he added, "I would contend also that our quantitative analysis always considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military."
During his confirmation hearings last fall, Mr. Gates was widely criticized for having promoted a view of an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles between 1986 and 1988, when he was a senior C.I.A. official. The agency was also faulted for exaggerating the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
It's okay to say torture is morally wrong, but if you don't have an intelligence background, you're not qualified to judge the quality of intelligence the CIA is providing. Reading a Tom Clancy novel does not give you an educated opinion on things you have no related background in.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
I disagree with that reading.
I think those reports clearly indicate that there were failures in analysis for those events but that they don't speak to the analysis in general - and they especially don't speak to the analysis in general benchmarked in general against comparable intelligence services. I would be willing to bet that if you got a dozen CIA reports, paired each one with a conflicting report from one of a dozen other countries with strong intelligence services, and then handed it to a random foreign analyst from a third country and asked them which they would prioritize - that the majority of those foreign analysts would go with the CIA report.
Yes, the CIA fucks up analysis, sometimes on a jaw dropping scale - 9/11 and the fall of the USSR being the two big examples given. But putting aside the argument whether torture is detrimental to the quality of those reports or not (and I maintain that it is detrimental), the CIA is still the best in the industry. They may have a poor "hit rate" compared with other sectors, such as news agencies, IT data brokers, or even Pew Polls, but if they have a .200 batting average then (outside of their local specializations, such as Israel within the Near East) everyone else is hitting .150. They might get it wrong when other agencies - sometimes many other agencies - get it right, but they are right more often than everyone else.
[Citation Needed]
Sure. They [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] in [redacted] when [redacted].
Again, people who have actually worked with them don't find them useless. But it is impossible to make that case without a top secret clearance.
It's infuriating how our media is refusing to report on specifics beyond water boarding
Yeah. If people are going to support weird ass stuff, they should know they are supporting weird ass stuff. Even if they don't oppose torture for its own sake, they should at the least be uncomfortable shoving things up people's rectums that don't belong there.
This is also an issue. Someone with a clearance is legally obligated not to talk about classified material.
Someone isn't going to risk their freedom to convince people that CIA isn't incompetent with anything other than open source information when whistle blowers are being imprisoned for divulging criminal or immoral activity because it involves classified information.
I do agree that more information should be talked about by the media. People supporting this program because they think it is just stress positions and water boarding would likely have something to think about if the full extent of methods used was discussed (food in the butt).
To be honest I don't think they would change opinion, if someone thinks its okay to drown people there isn't a lot of torture methods that should dissuade their support. That said yes, the media should bring all the facts to the table.
He also says that there is less cooperation between American intelligence agencies and the rest of the world, because of the greater extent to which our intelligence agencies are political tools. That the world's leading intelligence agencies go to great lengths to avoid sharing information with ours because the second they do the information gets shared with politicians who end up sharing this information to all sorts of people at private cocktail parties. He describes this as being a uniquely American problem.
Eh... I'm not going to quibble about the source material. I'll readily acknowledge that my "evidence" was flimsy at best and I was mainly annoyed at Moniker making sweeping "they're terrible at their job" statements without providing a basis for comparison.
However, I will say that if the above paragraph is true then that indicates that any attempts to keep the CIA (or NSA for that matter) in check by increased oversight are doomed to failure. You'd have to rework the entire US political system at the same time, and we know that ain't going to happen.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Again, people who have actually worked with them don't find them useless.
Right but that is a terrible argument because there would almost surely be a pretty heavy bias there. Those directly or indirectly involved in any organization or undertaking are almost always of the opinion that their actions and those of people they know are useful and have an effect, regardless of whether it's true or not. That is how people work. It's not just some cynical attempt to protect their job either, it's just a perfectly normal rationalization. If you are doing something you must be doing it for a reason (otherwise you'd be an idiot) and that reason must be that what you are doing works.
I mean shit, this thread is about a perfect example of that. Despite actual evidence showing that torture doesn't work the CIA is still arguing that it totally works because recognizing that it doesn't work would mean recognizing that all that work they have done was completely useless.
It also probably isnt a good idea because all the talented people in the CIA wouldnt stick arround for the restructuring and would go to the highest bidder in the private sector.
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.
Where's the disagree button?
Expecting people to put up with shitty conditions because "they should be doing it for love, not money" is an attitude that everyone from social workers to not-for-profits to teachers to armed services has been fighting against.
It's just a variation of "You should be grateful to work here" which I repudiate under any circumstance.
The CIA contains, for example, talented torturers and talented manipulators of domestic politics and domestic public opinion. Are there good HUMINT people working there? 9/11 was a famous failure for them, of course. I don't know enough about the agency to judge. But I'm not convinced at all that we have the right kind of people working there. If the talented torturers leave, that's good, right?
The CIA has many talented people, some of whom are talented IT administrators fixing email complaints, some of whom do nothing but book hotel and flights for travelling officers, some of whom do nothing but crunch raw numbers which they have very little knowledge of what it refers to, and some of whom are torturers. There are over 20,000 people working in the CIA, the vast majority of whom have little to no interaction with operations (let alone torturing - a lot of that was outsourced to private contractors anyway), and the vast majority of whom would require a severance package if the CIA was reformed, may go to the private sector, and who are expected to come back to their old jobs after they've been destabilized twice and hopefully after "the bad guys" are weeded out? Hell no.
I'm not trying to make a "few bad apples" argument - I'm also of the opinion it's more of a "Bad Barrel" situation than a "Bad Apple" situation - I'm trying to paint a picture of what a clusterfuck dissolving the CIA would be. Paying out all these severances to staff, and then hoping they all the "Good Guys" walk back in X months later so you retain their skills and knowledge at roughly the same salary is a pipedream. Even if you quietly started rehiring immediately, I'd be willing to bet there'd be a not-insignificant number of non-ops people saying "Fuck that" and never coming back.
You're talking THOUSANDS of people in support functions, let alone IT, database, and sheer personal contact networks that would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild - not to mention all the foreign contacts who will be desperately hoping that the newbies who come in will eventually get back to them before the local organizations find out they used to provide intel to the US.
I was going to say leave them alone but it's not unlikely there are "bad apples" there too, and a few would a have a working relationship with those "bad apples" that need purging. The leadership over the divisions definitely needs purging asap. Not all of the "bad apples" did the torturing themselves they ordered flunkies to do it for them, either by outsourcing to other countries or what happened with Guantanamo - where soldiers did it, like Lynndie England.
In a May 11, 2004 interview with Denver CBS affiliate television station KCNC-TV, England reportedly said that she was "instructed by persons in higher ranks" to commit the acts of abuse for psyop reasons, and that she should keep doing it, because it worked as intended. England noted that she felt "weird" when a commanding officer asked her to do such things as "stand there, give the thumbs up, and smile". However, England felt that she was doing "nothing out of the ordinary".[16]
...and to top it all off, the torturers may not even leave! Because, hey, why would I take a 9-5 desk job when I can potentially be government-sponsored torturing again in 5 years time because we've got entire databases that no-one understands and we need HUMINT information fast.
Don't give them a choice, fire them. They're government employees, not kings. Surely there's a law for making them give us that vital intelligence. Reporters have gone to jail for not revealing their sources, these people would be threatening national security by extorting the government to do what they want. Or maybe extortion charges?
How far do you take this though? Because if you want to purge everyone with a "working relationship" you will very likely shitcan a lot of analysts that weren't directly involved in the "Enhanced Interrogation" program because they provided interrogators with PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements, I was Army MI so I'm not sure the CIA equivalent) and were in turn provided IIRs (reports based on interrogations).
The cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men...
So your stance is that everyone that works for an organization that had some people do some bad things that they weren't directly involved in should burn.
You might as well just burn down the entire U.S. government.
'Some bad things' being a euphemism for war crimes, torture, and insubordination over torture. And yes. I do believe any agency guilty of that should be abolished in whole rather than in part.
I think there need to be deep cuts in these organizations, but "burn it all" isn't a great solution. For starters, it begins with an ignorance of how interconnected organizations are.
No. It doesn't. I am well aware of what my position entails and would appreciate you not presuming that I am an idiot. The further into the report I get the more strongly I feel that the cost of abolition, the full weight of it and the institutional holes that would need to be filled, is entirely justified. Particularly since this isn't the first damning report on the CIA. The Church Committee, the 'Family Jewels' reports, as well as the straightforward fact that they are not very good at intelligence and analysis (even ignoring 9/11, which is a much more defensible lapse, they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union) makes me feel all the more confident that abolition is the best route to take.
"Based on my extensive career in intelligence and/or counter-terrorism?"
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Mr. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, [...] acknowledged that the agency's statistical analysis portrayed a stronger and larger [Soviet] economy than the one that existed in reality. "From a personal standpoint," he added, "I would contend also that our quantitative analysis always considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military."
During his confirmation hearings last fall, Mr. Gates was widely criticized for having promoted a view of an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in more than a dozen speeches and articles between 1986 and 1988, when he was a senior C.I.A. official. The agency was also faulted for exaggerating the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
It's okay to say torture is morally wrong, but if you don't have an intelligence background, you're not qualified to judge the quality of intelligence the CIA is providing. Reading a Tom Clancy novel does not give you an educated opinion on things you have no related background in.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
I disagree with that reading.
I think those reports clearly indicate that there were failures in analysis for those events but that they don't speak to the analysis in general - and they especially don't speak to the analysis in general benchmarked in general against comparable intelligence services. I would be willing to bet that if you got a dozen CIA reports, paired each one with a conflicting report from one of a dozen other countries with strong intelligence services, and then handed it to a random foreign analyst from a third country and asked them which they would prioritize - that the majority of those foreign analysts would go with the CIA report.
Yes, the CIA fucks up analysis, sometimes on a jaw dropping scale - 9/11 and the fall of the USSR being the two big examples given. But putting aside the argument whether torture is detrimental to the quality of those reports or not (and I maintain that it is detrimental), the CIA is still the best in the industry. They may have a poor "hit rate" compared with other sectors, such as news agencies, IT data brokers, or even Pew Polls, but if they have a .200 batting average then (outside of their local specializations, such as Israel within the Near East) everyone else is hitting .150. They might get it wrong when other agencies - sometimes many other agencies - get it right, but they are right more often than everyone else.
[Citation Needed]
Sure. They [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] in [redacted] when [redacted].
Again, people who have actually worked with them don't find them useless. But it is impossible to make that case without a top secret clearance.
It's infuriating how our media is refusing to report on specifics beyond water boarding
Yeah. If people are going to support weird ass stuff, they should know they are supporting weird ass stuff. Even if they don't oppose torture for its own sake, they should at the least be uncomfortable shoving things up people's rectums that don't belong there.
If this were the case we'd have problems with the prison system. Instead, we make jokes about it.
He also says that there is less cooperation between American intelligence agencies and the rest of the world, because of the greater extent to which our intelligence agencies are political tools. That the world's leading intelligence agencies go to great lengths to avoid sharing information with ours because the second they do the information gets shared with politicians who end up sharing this information to all sorts of people at private cocktail parties. He describes this as being a uniquely American problem.
Eh... I'm not going to quibble about the source material. I'll readily acknowledge that my "evidence" was flimsy at best and I was mainly annoyed at Moniker making sweeping "they're terrible at their job" statements without providing a basis for comparison.
He also says that there is less cooperation between American intelligence agencies and the rest of the world, because of the greater extent to which our intelligence agencies are political tools. That the world's leading intelligence agencies go to great lengths to avoid sharing information with ours because the second they do the information gets shared with politicians who end up sharing this information to all sorts of people at private cocktail parties. He describes this as being a uniquely American problem.
Eh... I'm not going to quibble about the source material. I'll readily acknowledge that my "evidence" was flimsy at best and I was mainly annoyed at Moniker making sweeping "they're terrible at their job" statements without providing a basis for comparison.
com·par·i·son
kəmˈperəsən/
noun
1. the act or instance of comparing. "they drew a comparison between Gandhi's teaching and that of other teachers"
synonyms: juxtaposition, collation, differentiation "a comparison of the results"
an analogy. "perhaps the best comparison is that of seasickness"
the quality of being similar or equivalent. "if you want a thrill, there's no comparison to climbing on a truck and going out there on the expressway"
synonyms: resemblance, likeness, similarity, correspondence, correlation, parallel, parity, comparability
"there's no comparison between them"
2. GRAMMAR The formation of the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs
Rockefeller Commission Report - Not a comparison of US Intelligence to other intelligence services
Pike Committee - Not a comparison of US Intelligence to other intelligence services
Family Jewels - Not a comparison of US Intelligence to other intelligence services
Select Committee Study on Detention and Interrogation - Not a comparison of US Intelligence to other intelligence services
Carnegie Report - NOT A COMPARISON OF US INTELLIGENCE TO OTHER INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
CIA Director admitting failures - NOT A COMPARISON OF US INTELLIGENCE TO OTHER INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
This is why I made the baseball analogy - the all time leader for batting average is Ty Cobb with .366. If you compared his average with the worst NBA Freethrow Shooter (currently Dwight Howard with .463) you'd think Ty Cobb was terrible - he fails almost 2/3 of the time! You need to provide A BASIS OF COMPARISON to be able to say definitively that the CIA is bad at analysis. Which you did not do, and still have not done.
Because, you know what I canlistmanyreferencesshowingthatotheragenciesareterribleaswell. Just looking what both of us have linked, we can't say that the CIA is better or worse than other agencies (although I will point out that I linked more than you, nyah! :P )
Thank you to Cantelope who actually understands what the word means and actually provided some useful information.
He also says that there is less cooperation between American intelligence agencies and the rest of the world, because of the greater extent to which our intelligence agencies are political tools. That the world's leading intelligence agencies go to great lengths to avoid sharing information with ours because the second they do the information gets shared with politicians who end up sharing this information to all sorts of people at private cocktail parties. He describes this as being a uniquely American problem.
Eh... I'm not going to quibble about the source material. I'll readily acknowledge that my "evidence" was flimsy at best and I was mainly annoyed at Moniker making sweeping "they're terrible at their job" statements without providing a basis for comparison.
However, I will say that if the above paragraph is true then that indicates that any attempts to keep the CIA (or NSA for that matter) in check by increased oversight are doomed to failure. You'd have to rework the entire US political system at the same time, and we know that ain't going to happen.
We also have limitations on sharing intelligence with other countries (Five Eyes, tear lines with named countries etc.) for the same reason these sources allege to avoid sharing with us.
Also, if they think their intelligence services aren't also tools of their political leaders they are either lying or delusional.
At any given period in my life I have known more 'Nam vets than people my own age.
That isn't very far-fetched. The Bush Administration is being rehabilitated as we speak and eventually they're either going to have to say that the Coalition won but was stabbed in the back by the ICC, or that the troops were cowardly weaklings. The second one has the benefit of making people feel good about veteran homelessness, so guess which one we're going with.
e:Just realized it was about the hypocrisy of torture-supporters. Nope, they don't give a shit about their countrymen, just like they didn't give a shit about New York. They just wanted an excuse to cheer on pain and destruction directed at someone other than themselves.
I stand by my earlier remark that Americans support torture because it is not happening to them or people like them. The word "criminal" in America has taken on a quality of estrangement/alienation. If you commit a crime, you might as well not be human anymore.
It's super off-topic to talk about prison conditions, though. Suffice to say that I firmly believe that if a person or a member of their family that they cared about got tortured, that person would immediately and dramatically shift their position to one of anti-torture, at least insofar as they or people like them are concerned. I would like to say that such an experience would turn someone against all torture across the board, but I think that's a little naive.
At any given period in my life I have known more 'Nam vets than people my own age.
That isn't very far-fetched. The Bush Administration is being rehabilitated as we speak and eventually they're either going to have to say that the Coalition won but was stabbed in the back by the ICC, or that the troops were cowardly weaklings. The second one has the benefit of making people feel good about veteran homelessness, so guess which one we're going with.
e:Just realized it was about the hypocrisy of torture-supporters. Nope, they don't give a shit about their countrymen, just like they didn't give a shit about New York. They just wanted an excuse to cheer on pain and destruction directed at someone other than themselves.
I know it is off topic so I will keep my reply short:
This would be similar to the situation Russian Afghanistan veterans faced after after some time into the occupation and after the Soviets withdrew (there was a social stigma they faced, even the officer corps, and even while they were still in service).
I think that would play out differently here in the U.S. for two reasons:
1. Military service and the military is venerated heavily in pop culture because the pop culture image can be better controlled than reality
2. There is a huge cultural and social divide between our military and civilian populations (the military culture is more than partially to blame for this gap) so the stigma that would come from this type of IO campaign would probably be minimal because there is already a social gap between military and civilian populations
edit: to clarify
NSDFRand on
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kaleeditySometimes science is more art than scienceRegistered Userregular
At least the CIA has softened up a bit since the (warning: wiki link describes details on rape-torture-murder) Phoenix Program days.
I stand by my earlier remark that Americans support torture because it is not happening to them or people like them. The word "criminal" in America has taken on a quality of estrangement/alienation. If you commit a crime, you might as well not be human anymore.
It's super off-topic to talk about prison conditions, though. Suffice to say that I firmly believe that if a person or a member of their family that they cared about got tortured, that person would immediately and dramatically shift their position to one of anti-torture, at least insofar as they or people like them are concerned. I would like to say that such an experience would turn someone against all torture across the board, but I think that's a little naive.
Again, I think the two are connected more than we would like to admit - consider the case of Jon Burge, Chicago's torture cop. Even when his actions came to light, little was done - he ran the clock out on criminal charges for torturing confessions, and even after a perjury conviction, the police refused to recind his pension.
I stand by my earlier remark that Americans support torture because it is not happening to them or people like them. The word "criminal" in America has taken on a quality of estrangement/alienation. If you commit a crime, you might as well not be human anymore.
It's super off-topic to talk about prison conditions, though. Suffice to say that I firmly believe that if a person or a member of their family that they cared about got tortured, that person would immediately and dramatically shift their position to one of anti-torture, at least insofar as they or people like them are concerned. I would like to say that such an experience would turn someone against all torture across the board, but I think that's a little naive.
Again, I think the two are connected more than we would like to admit - consider the case of Jon Burge, Chicago's torture cop. Even when his actions came to light, little was done - he ran the clock out on criminal charges for torturing confessions, and even after a perjury conviction, the police refused to recind his pension.
Yeah. The impulse to think "It's ok cause they are bad people" is exactly the same in both cases.
I still remember that whole Mancow thing where he was comparing waterboarding to "splashing water in your face". Then he got a guy to do it to him as a demonstration and declared it's definitely torture in about 45 seconds
Hitchens (IIRC) did it too to prove it wasn't torture... and then recanted that view after it fucked him up permanently and he developed PTSD.
Also, I took a peek through the thread here and I'm glad we've already covered Krauthammer being an asshole on WaPo. Apparently he took a break from typing out his pro-Isreal stock in trade to visit this on us.
The most liked comment involved a self-identified Jew asking him if he didn't learn a fucking thing from the Holocaust. Warmed my heart to see that.
When did Hitchens recant his story? Or is that sarcssm.
Posts
I think you're overestimating the bomber's ability to react to changing plans, much less their intelligence. Basically, they can't. If things go wrong, they generally don't and can't change their plans at the last minute. This is, more or less, why we ended up catching multiple attempted bombers post 9/11 when their bombs failed to explode.
the 9/11 hijackers were organized and used the old soviet cell system where no one knew more than they had to. You could've caught Bin Laden himself and he probably wouldn't have had specifics about how to catch these guys. Once deployed cells work more or less independently from leadership. It's a very hard system to crack.
Based on sum total of decades worth of investigations into the CIA by various Federal oversight committees, commissions, and Inspector Generals that I referenced in the quoted text; as well as the rather clear failures of analysis that I have also referenced several times already?
New York Times:
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was more accurately predicted by academic economists looking at publicly available information to get published in journals than by the CIA and whatever intelligence gathering they were spending the black budget on getting and analyzing. Missing, say, 9/11 is a pretty major lapse, but given the nature of non-state actors and everything else involved it's an understandable failure. Keeping an eye on the damn Ruskies is basically what the CIA was created to do, and theoretically should have been specialists at. They fucked it up in every way possible.
And fuck you for suggesting that I would read Tom Clancy novels. There's being a goose and then there's that.
Along with a mass reorganization, new institutional strictures that could serve a stronger bulwark against potential abuses (probably not, but we know for certain that the existing institutional checks were clearly insufficient), and whatever prophylactic effect mass firings would bring about for the new agency. But even if it did just amount to a brand change, we could use a new brand considering what the CIA is associated with. Even before torturing people to death got added to the list. If broader foreign policy tactics were also influenced for the better it would be an added boon.
I think those reports clearly indicate that there were failures in analysis for those events but that they don't speak to the analysis in general - and they especially don't speak to the analysis in general benchmarked in general against comparable intelligence services. I would be willing to bet that if you got a dozen CIA reports, paired each one with a conflicting report from one of a dozen other countries with strong intelligence services, and then handed it to a random foreign analyst from a third country and asked them which they would prioritize - that the majority of those foreign analysts would go with the CIA report.
Yes, the CIA fucks up analysis, sometimes on a jaw dropping scale - 9/11 and the fall of the USSR being the two big examples given. But putting aside the argument whether torture is detrimental to the quality of those reports or not (and I maintain that it is detrimental), the CIA is still the best in the industry. They may have a poor "hit rate" compared with other sectors, such as news agencies, IT data brokers, or even Pew Polls, but if they have a .200 batting average then (outside of their local specializations, such as Israel within the Near East) everyone else is hitting .150. They might get it wrong when other agencies - sometimes many other agencies - get it right, but they are right more often than everyone else.
Would we like them to be better? Yes. Can they do better? Probably, but the standard that a lot of people have in their head is based more on fictional portrayals of intelligence agencies rather than grounded in reality. Removing torture from the CIA's behaviour isn't going to magically get them up to .999 - the impact on the quality of reports will likely be negligible. However, the impact on the people affected will certainly make torture's removal worthwhile.
[Citation Needed]
To be fair to Mr. Gates, it was standing policy to play up the "Red Menace" to justify Cold War spending since the end of WWII and Operation Gladio.
Besides that, yes many in the IC were wrong about the state of the Soviet Union at that time. I would suggest that part of that was a problem I pointed out earlier: Leadership asking for intelligence to support a pre-conceived narrative.
Being wrong happens because Intelligence collections and analysis is never absolute, but what is important is how often someone is wrong.
Meanwhile I'll be pithy and point out that your statement: doesn't even have that.
If that is your standard for existence we will be right back where we were pre WWII: No civilian intelligence services and almost non existent dedicated military intelligence services.
Compromise: Report only waterboarding, but go back to pundits voluntarily being waterboarded on live TV. Repeat for 24 hour news cycle.
Well, this will surely not help your newfound drinking problem
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Facile? Yes, but I think there's something to it.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Torture has a higher approval rating than the president and congress combined.
Torture 2016.
Just like we are now making excuses to justify specific torture actions that we have pursued against others as war crimes in the past.
Edit : http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/12/16/National-Politics/Polling/release_376.xml
Also, looking at those questions, they're skewed badly to one side and still only barely managed to do their job.
it's a good thing that they didn't do that
"by telephone" does introduce a certain bias, but they did a reasonable job at finding a good sample
They aren't calling random numbers on the phone. "Random sampling " is just as often a random sample taken from a selected sample in political polls.
In the book he rates the intelligence agencies of the most powerful countries, he rates America's but particularly our CIA as being in dead last. He describes a CIA that is unprofessional, underpaid relative to the importance of the work they do, and staffed by people who have an extremely American-centric attitude. He goes to great lengths to explain in the book the work that other countries to do expose their agents to other cultures so that they can understand the motives of people from cultures that might have been alien to them prior to their work in intelligence. He says that America has avoided doing anything like this to a great extent, whereas agents from the UK or France spend at least two years in a foreign country learning the language and the customs of other people prior to doing any intelligence work. The effect of this is that our CIA agents according to him, are largely unable to understand the motives of foreigners in general.
He also says that there is less cooperation between American intelligence agencies and the rest of the world, because of the greater extent to which our intelligence agencies are political tools. That the world's leading intelligence agencies go to great lengths to avoid sharing information with ours because the second they do the information gets shared with politicians who end up sharing this information to all sorts of people at private cocktail parties. He describes this as being a uniquely American problem.
I've read books by several people who used to work for the CIA or foreign intelligence agencies where they say almost exactly the same thing. The CIA collects an incredible amount of information that dwarfs whatever any other intelligence agency in the world collects, and this has been true since at least the 1990's if not the 1980's. But it is completely inept at doing any of the kinds of things it's supposed to do with it. It's terrible at keeping secrets, it's terrible at keeping it's agents from selling state secrets for cash, and it's terrible at using that information to our advantage.
In this book and in The Company Man by John Rizzo a similar, if not the same story is described. That for most of the 1980's one low level agent who was a known alcoholic, drove extremely expensive cars, and wore some of the world's most expensive shoes and watches, was responsible for selling most of our secrets to the soviets. There were mole hunts in the CIA through out this period where people were investigated based on little or no evidence and often times they lost their job without any evidence of wrong-doing, but one low level agent who was not a particularly well functioning alcoholic managed to escape scrutiny even though there were a lot of fairly obvious signs he was selling state secrets.
Part of the problem had to do with bad document management. There are lists of secret documents such as manuals that describe how our satellites function. These manuals are supposed to be inventoried every month or so, so that it will be known if they've been stolen, and an investigation can begin but that's not actually something that happens. One day they do a real inventory, and find out that these secret documents are missing from almost every facility that is supposed to have one. Books by people who formerly worked for the CIA are chucked full of stories like this.
Somebody please tell me how much to increase/reduce my trust in the numbers thank you.
He wasn't exactly a low level nobody that no one knew, his father worked for the Directorate of Operations, and he had some good postings. Part of his motivation for turning was financial, but I would argue that he was also motivated to turn by how he likely felt he was treated early in his career in regards to evaluations and promotions. And yes, he did have a heavy drinking problem later in his career.
I will heartily agree with the claim that the IC (at least the military services) discourages foreign travel and contacts. Unfortunately I think the reason this is, rightly or wrongly, is security. Though, at least in guidelines published on their website, CIA specifically does look positively on travel and temporary living abroad.
Sure. They [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] in [redacted] when [redacted].
Again, people who have actually worked with them don't find them useless. But it is impossible to make that case without a top secret clearance.
Yeah. If people are going to support weird ass stuff, they should know they are supporting weird ass stuff. Even if they don't oppose torture for its own sake, they should at the least be uncomfortable shoving things up people's rectums that don't belong there.
This is also an issue. Someone with a clearance is legally obligated not to talk about classified material.
Someone isn't going to risk their freedom to convince people that CIA isn't incompetent with anything other than open source information when whistle blowers are being imprisoned for divulging criminal or immoral activity because it involves classified information.
I do agree that more information should be talked about by the media. People supporting this program because they think it is just stress positions and water boarding would likely have something to think about if the full extent of methods used was discussed (food in the butt).
However, I will say that if the above paragraph is true then that indicates that any attempts to keep the CIA (or NSA for that matter) in check by increased oversight are doomed to failure. You'd have to rework the entire US political system at the same time, and we know that ain't going to happen.
Right but that is a terrible argument because there would almost surely be a pretty heavy bias there. Those directly or indirectly involved in any organization or undertaking are almost always of the opinion that their actions and those of people they know are useful and have an effect, regardless of whether it's true or not. That is how people work. It's not just some cynical attempt to protect their job either, it's just a perfectly normal rationalization. If you are doing something you must be doing it for a reason (otherwise you'd be an idiot) and that reason must be that what you are doing works.
I mean shit, this thread is about a perfect example of that. Despite actual evidence showing that torture doesn't work the CIA is still arguing that it totally works because recognizing that it doesn't work would mean recognizing that all that work they have done was completely useless.
If this were the case we'd have problems with the prison system. Instead, we make jokes about it.
I apologize that my listing several(pdf) decades(pdf) worth(pdf) of(pdf) oversight(pdf) investigations(okay, this one isn't an oversight report) into how terrible the CIA is, as well as providing several specific examples (one accompanied by the 1991 call for the CIA's dissolution by Senator Moynihan, who does have Clearance and the other requirements you demand to speak on the issue), doesn't seem to amount to much. I'll try to be more substantive in future posts.
Pike Committee - Not a comparison of US Intelligence to other intelligence services
Family Jewels - Not a comparison of US Intelligence to other intelligence services
Select Committee Study on Detention and Interrogation - Not a comparison of US Intelligence to other intelligence services
Carnegie Report - NOT A COMPARISON OF US INTELLIGENCE TO OTHER INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
CIA Director admitting failures - NOT A COMPARISON OF US INTELLIGENCE TO OTHER INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
This is why I made the baseball analogy - the all time leader for batting average is Ty Cobb with .366. If you compared his average with the worst NBA Freethrow Shooter (currently Dwight Howard with .463) you'd think Ty Cobb was terrible - he fails almost 2/3 of the time! You need to provide A BASIS OF COMPARISON to be able to say definitively that the CIA is bad at analysis. Which you did not do, and still have not done.
Because, you know what I can list many references showing that other agencies are terrible as well. Just looking what both of us have linked, we can't say that the CIA is better or worse than other agencies (although I will point out that I linked more than you, nyah! :P )
Thank you to Cantelope who actually understands what the word means and actually provided some useful information.
We also have limitations on sharing intelligence with other countries (Five Eyes, tear lines with named countries etc.) for the same reason these sources allege to avoid sharing with us.
Also, if they think their intelligence services aren't also tools of their political leaders they are either lying or delusional.
At any given period in my life I have known more 'Nam vets than people my own age.
That isn't very far-fetched. The Bush Administration is being rehabilitated as we speak and eventually they're either going to have to say that the Coalition won but was stabbed in the back by the ICC, or that the troops were cowardly weaklings. The second one has the benefit of making people feel good about veteran homelessness, so guess which one we're going with.
e:Just realized it was about the hypocrisy of torture-supporters. Nope, they don't give a shit about their countrymen, just like they didn't give a shit about New York. They just wanted an excuse to cheer on pain and destruction directed at someone other than themselves.
It's super off-topic to talk about prison conditions, though. Suffice to say that I firmly believe that if a person or a member of their family that they cared about got tortured, that person would immediately and dramatically shift their position to one of anti-torture, at least insofar as they or people like them are concerned. I would like to say that such an experience would turn someone against all torture across the board, but I think that's a little naive.
I know it is off topic so I will keep my reply short:
This would be similar to the situation Russian Afghanistan veterans faced after after some time into the occupation and after the Soviets withdrew (there was a social stigma they faced, even the officer corps, and even while they were still in service).
I think that would play out differently here in the U.S. for two reasons:
1. Military service and the military is venerated heavily in pop culture because the pop culture image can be better controlled than reality
2. There is a huge cultural and social divide between our military and civilian populations (the military culture is more than partially to blame for this gap) so the stigma that would come from this type of IO campaign would probably be minimal because there is already a social gap between military and civilian populations
edit: to clarify
Again, I think the two are connected more than we would like to admit - consider the case of Jon Burge, Chicago's torture cop. Even when his actions came to light, little was done - he ran the clock out on criminal charges for torturing confessions, and even after a perjury conviction, the police refused to recind his pension.
Yeah. The impulse to think "It's ok cause they are bad people" is exactly the same in both cases.
When did Hitchens recant his story? Or is that sarcssm.