Why the Very First Thing the Next President Must Do is Destroy the CIA, Immediately, Completely and Permanently

Because if you wait even so much as a day, they've got you by the short hairs.

Martin Longman at Political Animal:

Shortly before he died in July 1988, former CIA officer David Atlee Phillips said that “My final take on the assassination [of JFK] is there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.” He left an unpublished book which was supposed to be fictional in which he wrote “I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald… We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba… I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president’s assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.” For those who think the CIA played a part in the assassination of JFK, David Atlee Phillips has long been one of the prime suspects, but you don’t have to subscribe to such conspiracy theories to understand that no leader of any country will lightly take on their own intelligence agencies and hold them accountable for actions they may have taken with a prior executive’s approval.

These type of considerations, more than the self-serving motivations attributed to President Obama by Conor Friedersdorf, probably explain why John Brennan isn’t being fired. Without question, John Brennan should be fired. That he isn’t being fired shows that the president is simply afraid to fire him. Friedersdorf explains this fear as trepidation that Brennan will spill damaging secrets that make Obama look like some kind of war criminal himself. I think the fear is more related to the kind of murderous rage than might ensue if the CIA is held to account for their performance in the aftermath of 9/11. Whether this fear is well-founded or not, it is not irrational. Just look at what the CIA has already done to try to cover its tracks.

What was the last thing the CIA did right?  When was the last time the CIA proved itself an asset to American Democracy?  When has the CIA ever been anything but a bumbling, torturing cesspool of assholes? Never, right?  NEVER.

If the next President of the United States does nothing else but eliminate the CIA and send its officers to the Hague for trial as war criminals, that president will deserve memorialization on Mt. Rushmore.