Posted on 11/18/2023 3:10:38 PM PST by Retain Mike
Finding Bin Laden meant getting a source inside Al Qaeda at a level high enough to know his physical location. It took almost a decade for the CIA, with all its resources, to acquire such a source, even though this was probably the CIA’s single highest priority.
More recently, in 2020, we found ourselves amidst a worldwide pandemic that originated in China. Despite attempts to characterize this as a natural outbreak of a disease found in bats, it has become abundantly clear that COVID-19 was the product of gain-of-function research in a bio lab in Wuhan, China. It has also become clear that there were numerous warning signs regarding the dangers of the work and substandard lab practices in Wuhan. Biological warfare threats are real and have been considered so for many years. Collecting intelligence about both state-sponsored and terrorist biological warfare programs is one of the CIA’s top priorities. The existence of the lab from which COVID emerged was not a secret. Neither was the fact that the Chinese were working overtime to make coronaviruses more dangerous to humans.
Yet we received no warning prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. When people began to get sick here and around the world, the CIA could apparently provide no useful information regarding the origins of the disease. Even now, years later, it seems unable to tell us precisely how the pandemic began. We had no sources inside China’s top bio lab. We apparently have no sources there now.
(Excerpt) Read more at imprimis.hillsdale.edu ...
I think he does a good job of describing how operations should be done.
I think he is a bit optimistic to think any administration would tackle the problem.
Read the real history of the CIA and its original charter, 1947 National Security Act.
They have been exceeding their Charter since day one. One of the main reasons Kennedy was killed.
Maybe they do know, but they don’t want us to know.
They are way more Agency than they are Intelligence. That’s what’s wrong with ‘em. Wild Bill Donovan must be spinning in his grave.
I got this mostly good essay in the mail from Hillsdale. I thought the beginning lines were unintentionally hilarious:
“The CIA was created after World War II with one overriding primary mission—to prevent a reoccurrence of what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. We were never going to allow an enemy to surprise us on that scale again.”
Of course FDR had been warned multiple times about the Pearl Harbor attack, and apparently wanted it to happen. Is it possible that Mr Faddis, after 20 years at the CIA, is uninformed about that reality?
The CIA could start on it’s very long and difficult redemption route by turning their very blurry spyglass on a dork last name of Soros. The whole family. Well?
When the French ratcheted-up their extradition efforts, the CIC decided it was too risky to continue to use him for intelligence purposes, or turn him over to the French, as they were afraid he knew too much about the operations of the CIC. In 1951, they helped Barbie, and his family escape to South America via the U.S.A.'s "ratline."
Under the name Klaus Altmann, Barbie settled his family in La Paz, Bolivia. For the next 20 years, he got close to the ruling party of Bolivia, was a successful shipping trade businessman, and arms dealer. He secured Bolivian citizenship, and a diplomatic passport that allowed him to travel to Europe and the United States unimpeded. In 1971, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld identified Altmann as Barbie, and located him, then living in Peru, and began a massive public outcry about bringing him to justice. Barbie then returned to Bolivia because his government ties kept him safe, until Bolivia's government fell in 1980, and in 1983, the new government arrested him, and sent him to France.
This is only one example of the nefarious activities that the then CIC, and now CIA have been involved in since its inception in WWII. They have never been held accountable for anything they have done that has harmed this country, and the American people. They coddled war criminals, assassinated foreign leaders and an American President, and have deliberately started wars. It needs to be completely dismantled, and thorough investigations conducted of the activities they have been involved in since the organization first came on the scene.
“re-habbing” corrupted federal agencies is magical thinking
JFK wanted to break the agency into a thousand pieces.
His mistake was saying that out loud to Allen Dulles before firing Dulles.
Fatal error.
(Then Dulles got to investigate himself as part of the Warren Commission....clever!)
"More recently, in 2020, we found ourselves amidst a worldwide pandemic that originated in China. Despite attempts to characterize this as a natural outbreak of a disease found in bats, it has become abundantly clear that COVID-19 was the product of gain-of-function research in a bio lab in Wuhan, China. It has also become clear that there were numerous warning signs regarding the dangers of the work and substandard lab practices in Wuhan. Biological warfare threats are real and have been considered so for many years. Collecting intelligence about both state-sponsored and terrorist biological warfare programs is one of the CIA’s top priorities. The existence of the lab from which COVID emerged was not a secret. Neither was the fact that the Chinese were working overtime to make coronaviruses more dangerous to humans."
Wait, what? The CIA didn't know that Fauci deliberately subverted the law to resume funding Wuhan? The freaking CIA directed Fauci to do it!
"Yet we had not a single source inside that organization capable of warning us of the 9/11 attacks that would kill almost 3,000 Americans."
This isn't true. The Gorelick Wall was used as "Squirrel!" to distract from the fact that the agencies were fully aware of Operation Bojinka in its Pacific incarnation, and did nothing to stop even that, which was (briefly) disrupted only by the Pinoy popo stumbling onto a chemical fire.
Sorry, this guy is a simp. I hoped he would wrap it up into some Hitchens-style brilliant punch-down but it was "Gee we can just fix the Company with some glue and good thoughts..."
Just, no.
Reinhard Gehlen, a general in Hitler’s military intelligence, kept all the files he’d accumulated in the war, and used them to cut a deal with American intelligence, and eventually vaulted his way into heading the German intelligence agency. Many of his agents and informants had been in the SS or other Nazi organizations and escaped prosecution. It was said that Gehlen had created a “state within the state.” There’s a documentary about him on TubiTV.
Start a new agency, fire every one in the old one.
A good old fashioned soviet style purge for the soviets.
Yet another example of how these intelligence agencies have failed the American people since they began. It sickens me to no end that this country found it more important to coddle Nazi war criminals, claiming it was to gain intelligence on its so-called enemies, and all these years later, we still have no idea whether any of that "intelligence" these war criminals supposedly gathered, ever had a positive effect in the war against communism, or any other threats against this country. I've come to the conclusion that it was all a ruse, and a waste of time, because while we were fighting the commies in proxy wars overseas since Korea, the commies simply waltzed into this country, and took it over, without ever having to fire a shot. This country is so compromised, it will never recover.
Harry Truman Writes:
By Harry S Truman
Copyright, 1963, by Harry S Truman
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President’s performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what’s worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being “upset.”
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
Both the Russkies and the Chinese demand we continue to give full support to one their most reliable tools...
By the time the OSS was wound down and the CIA was stood up, the intel community was infested by elitists who were already too comfortable operating outside the law.
A pocket nuke.
Socialism is a system that concentrates power, which politicizes everything. Therefore, power freaks are inclined to be socialists because there is never enough power to sate a self-aggrandizing power freak.
One of the requisite talents of a field agent Mr. Faddis conveniently omitted is that they must be convincing liars. That is a problem when one must rely upon the information field agents supply, not to mention have confidence in their loyalties when the temptations of power are so great.
In other words, there is no way to "reform" an organization operating pursuant to those social principles. This country no longer has a culture of patriotism with which to supply such people.
Aside from the latest stupidity of hiring based on Kolor, Kink, and/or Kin (rich connected daddy) the whole premise is out of date. The odd Iranian nuclear scientist flipped will unlikely have insider information about 'where and when'. Finding the lone wolf is a waste of time. For the FBI and for the CIA. It turns into 'get the lone wolf to 'do something/anything which rewards the paper pushers but doesn't do crap to defend the country.
Example: Some compromised foreign informer tells a CIA agent that teams of terrorists are being sent to the US to cause chaos. OK, billions of dollars later some internet jockey sitting in his parent's basement points out thousands of Middle easterners and Chinese are crossing into the Southern border into the US and many of them are of military age and appear to be crossing in teams. Many on terrorist watch list are apprehended - many not caught..
So who gives a damn if some 'art-form' CIA agent risks his life to discover the obvious?
Our enemies want to damage our country. They're not subtle. They;re flying operatives to central American then 'walking them across a river'. Why use the river route? To fool the idiots in the press and DC into thinking they 'risk their lives to be free'.
What crap.
A better use of the billions we give the CIA to protect us is to tackle the obvious (big impact FIRST) Stop the open border policy and alert the president and the press that bad people are crossing into our country and it needs to be stopped. Push common sense into the bureaucratic CIA...
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