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Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Should We Abolish the CIA?


Should We Abolish the CIA?

At the Congress for Cultural Freedom's second Berlin conference, June 1960* (Wikimedia Commons)
By Norman Birnbaum - July 9, 2014

In April, the New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti reported an apprehension within the CIA that paramilitary operations, drone strikes, abductions, and killings have diverted the Agency from the purpose for which it was originally founded in 1947. It was supposed to give the government and the nation authoritative analyses of long-term trends in the world—and to get backstage to identify the important actors in the many political dramas enthralling us. The reporter said an effort at returning to the Agency’s earlier mission was imminent.
That is likely to be a case of love’s labor lost. The CIA’s record of prophecy is convincingly unimpressive. It failed to anticipate, among other events, Khruschev’s repudiation of Stalinism, the Hungarian rising of 1956, Castro’s triumph, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Czech experiment in socialism with a human face, the Sino-Soviet conflict, the democratic revolution in Portugal in 1974, the strength of Vietnamese resistance to the US, and the western European movements against nuclear weaponry, not to mention the opening of the Berlin Wall and all that followed.http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/should-we-abolish-the-cia

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