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 He left an unpublished book which was supposed to be fictional in which he wrote “I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald… We gave him the mission of killing Fidel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.

The Real Petraeus Scandal: the CIA's Secret Killer Drones

We've turned local police forces - the ones we created "to serve and protect" into militarized brutes that view citizens as terrorists-until-proven-otherwise, so why not hand over to our supposed spy agency all the murderous dirty work we don't want citizens finding out about?  Our citizens, that is; foreign citizens get to see it up close and personally.

 

Kevin Drum:

Robert Wright, in an obvious effort to use Petraeusgate to draw attention to a boring subject that has nothing to do with sex, says the real scandal here isn't Petraeus leaving the CIA, it's the fact the he arrived there in the first place:

When, in the fall of 2011, David Petraeus moved from commanding the Afghanistan war effort to commanding the CIA, it was a disturbingly natural transition. I say "natural" because the CIA conducts drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and is involved in other military operations there, so Petraeus, in his new role, was continuing to fight the Afghanistan war. I say "disturbingly" because this overlap of Pentagon and CIA missions is the result of a creeping militarization of the CIA that may be undermining America's national security.

The militarization of the CIA raises various questions. For example, if the CIA is psychologically invested in a particular form of warfare—and derives part of its budget from that kind of warfare—can it be trusted to impartially assess the consequences, both positive and negative, direct and indirect?

And then there's the transparency question. [A piece in the Washington Post] noted concerns among some activists that "the CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The CIA doesn't officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules." Indeed, only a few months ago, in compliance with the War Powers Resolution, the Obama administration reported (vaguely) on targeted killings in Somalia and Yemen that had been conducted by the military, but not on those conducted by the CIA.

....The circumstances of Petraeus's departure from the CIA are a little alarming; you'd rather your chief spy not be reckless. But the circumstances of his arrival at the CIA a year ago were more troubling. Yet no alarm was sounded that was anywhere near as loud as the hubbub surrounding Petraeus now. That's scandalous.

As near as I can tell, drone warfare was largely handed over to the CIA precisely in order to avoid normal military accountability. That really is scandalous, but it attracted only fleeting notice. It's probably too much to hope that the Petraeus scandal will cause anyone to rethink this, but rethink it we should. Wright has more at the link.

I don't give a flying fuck what Petraeus fucks. I care a very great deal who he orders killed. Shame on our pathetic excuse for national media that I get far too much information about the former, and next to none about the latter.

Assassinations R Us

Along with Glenn Greenwald and PZ Myers, Talking Points Memo is one of the blogs in which the comments are not to be missed.

Zach Roth's piece today on the CIA's secret assassination program got speculation running rife about likely victims over the last eight years.

The Washington Post reports today on how the program had been revived and then put on hold several times since 2001. But it also says, referring to the "presidential finding" with which President Bush authorized the program in 2001:

The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency's actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.

"No geographical limitations" presumably means that operations could potentially be carried out in countries, friendly or unfriendly, that are far from any war zone -- including even the US itself. And it seems likely that they would be carried out without notifying the foreign country in question.

Of course, we've frequently, and quite openly, used the military to carry out attacks on specific Qaeda leaders -- even before 9/11. But using the CIA to do so, and with such broad authority to operate anywhere in the world, as this program seems to have given the agency, would appear to take things into a different realm.

Zach didn't know the half of it.

Commenter FPN:

How about some of the people targeted may not have "just" been "high value" Al Qaeda, but high ranking members of a royal family/intelligence:

"On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 43, and on July 23, 2002, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud was killed in a car accident at the age of 41. A week later, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir was found dead, having "died of thirst" at the age of 25. Prince Turki was fired from his position as head of Saudi Intelligence on September 1, 2001, and became the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain in 2002.

On February 20, 2003, Pakistani air force chief Mir, his wife, and fifteen others were killed in a plane crash.

None of this appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report, though it might have been planned for that document. This is because the Bush administration censored 28 pages of material about Saudi connections to 9/11 from the report on the grounds of national security."

Commenter martin dreadnought:

Again, the crux of this entire story is not that Cheney himself was involved, it's a question of who was targeted and why.

We already know of many deaths which came at convenient times for the Bush administration. I'm not sure I need to go through all of these again, but just a few of them would be Paul Wellstone, Pat Tillman, Dr. David Kelly, Bruce Ivins, and the DC Madam Debra Palfrey.

All of these people had the ability to cause significant damage to the Bush administration and every one of them died a suspicious death. I think the chances of all of these deaths happening in a vaccuum are close to nil.

Commenter danger:

Could also include Nicola Calipari, Benazir Bhutto, the guy at Minot AFB in the nuke transport snafu, and to a lesser extent Rafik Hariri and even Alexander Litvinenko.

Should also point out that in the case of Calipari, the real target would have been Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who as a feminist, pacifist communist who openly sided with the Iraqi people before she was kidnapped would have definitely been a thorn in the side to the administration.

Commenter MyMY:

This clearly demands thorough investigation!

The last word to commenter Mr. E:

Or at the very least, I wide re-airing of Wag the Dog.

The Moral Relativity of Investigations

As with all things related to Dick Cheney, nobody gets to the filthy heart of the latest obscenity like the Rude Pundit.

Yet, bizarrely, some Republicans are saying there shouldn't be an investigation into the potential that the CIA was putting together a death squad and that the Vice President told the CIA to lie to Congress about it. It's as if they're throwing up their hands in a comical "what can you do?" gesture, as if they're saying, "Well, that's just Cheney," and a laugh track will play to cover their asses.

SNIP

There's your scales of Republican justice: travel office employees fired? It's a crisis that demands millions of dollars spent to discover nothing. Potential secret CIA death squads and the involvement of at least the Vice President in lying to Congress in violation of the law? Nah, why bother? Let's move forward, not look back.

Yet the very nature of investigation and criminal proceedings is to look backward, with the knowledge that the past very much impacts the present. If Attorney General Eric Holder does go forward with a probe of Bush-era torture policies and if Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats are serious about looking into the CIA/Cheney story, then we will be making baby steps back to being a nation that actually gives a flying rat's fuck about the laws we pass.

And if we don't look back, if we simply attempt to bury the past in our inexorable march forward with the knowledge that unpunished crimes have been committed, then we, all of us, become co-conspirators. We all carry that burden then, that we know we are a country that has done wrong, but we are unwilling to prove it and punish those who ordered the commission of crimes in our name.

Read the whole thing. Warning: Opening sexual metaphor is Triple-X rated.