February 15, 2024
There are three basic problems with
the C.I.A.: its objectives, methods and unaccountability.
Its operational objectives are
whatever the C.I.A. or the president of the United States defines to be in the
U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law.
Its methods are secretive and
duplicitous.
Its unaccountability means that the
C.I.A. and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress
is a doormat, a sideshow.
As a recent C.I.A. director, Mike
Pompeo, said of his time at the C.I.A.:
“I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire
training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”
The C.I.A. was established in 1947
as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS had
performed two distinct roles in World War II, intelligence and subversion. The
C.I.A. took over both roles.
On the one hand, the C.I.A. was to
provide intelligence to the U.S. government. On the other, the C.I.A. was to
subvert the “enemy,” that is, whomever the president or C.I.A. defined as the
enemy, using a wide range of measures: assassinations, coups, staged unrest,
arming of insurgents, and other means.
It is the latter role that has
proved devastating to global stability and the U.S. rule of law. It is a role
that the C.I.A. continues to pursue today. In effect, the C.I.A. is a secret
army of the U.S., capable of creating mayhem across the world with no
accountability whatsoever.
When President Dwight Eisenhower
decided that Africa’s rising political star, democratically-elected Patrice
Lumumba of Congo was the “enemy,” the C.I.A. conspired in his 1961
assassination, thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. He would hardly
be the last African president brought down by the C.I.A.
In its 77-year history, the C.I.A.
has been held to serious public account just once, in 1975. In that year, Idaho
Sen. Frank Church led a Senate investigation that exposed the C.I.A.’s rampage
of assassinations, coups, destabilization, surveillance and Mengele-style
torture and medical “experiments.”
The exposé by the Church Committee
of the C.I.A.’s shocking malfeasance has recently been chronicled in a superb
book by the investigative reporter James Risen, The Last Honest Man: The
C.I.A., the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys ? and One Senator’s Fight to Save
Democracy.
That single episode of oversight
occurred because of a rare confluence of events.
In the year before the Church
Committee, the Watergate scandal had toppled Richard Nixon and weakened the
White House. As successor to Nixon, Gerald Ford was unelected, a former
congressman and reluctant to oppose the oversight prerogatives of the Congress.
The Watergate scandal, investigated
by the Senate Ervin Committee, had also empowered the Senate and demonstrated
the value of Senate oversight of executive branch abuses of power. Crucially,
the C.I.A. was newly led by Director William Colby, who wanted to clean up the
C.I.A. operations. Also, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, author of pervasive
illegalities also exposed by the Church committee, had died in 1972.
Hersh Exposes CIA Ops Against
Antiwar Movement
In December 1974, investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh, then as now a great reporter with sources inside the
C.I.A., published an account of illegal C.I.A. intelligence operations against
the U.S. anti-war movement.
The Senate Majority Leader at the
time, Mike Mansfield, a leader of character, then appointed Church to
investigate the C.I.A. Church himself was a brave, honest, intelligent,
independent-minded, and intrepid senator, characteristics chronically in short
supply in U.S. politics.
If only the C.I.A.’s rogue
operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by
the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the C.I.A. under the rule of
law and public accountability. But that was not to be.
The C.I.A. has had the last laugh —
or better said, has brought the world to tears —by maintaining its preeminent
role in U.S. foreign policy, including overseas subversion.
Since 1975, the C.I.A. has run
secretive operations backing Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan that utterly
wrecked Afghanistan while giving rise to Al-Qaeda.
The C.I.A. has likely run secretive
operations in the Balkans against Serbia, in the Caucuses against Russia and in
Central Asia targeting China, all deploying C.I.A.-backed jihadists.
In the 2010s, the C.I.A. ran deadly
operations to topple Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, again with Islamist jihadists.
For at least 20 years, the C.I.A.
has been deeply involved in fomenting the growing catastrophe in Ukraine,
including the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in
February 2014 that triggered the devastating war now engulfing Ukraine.
What do we know of these operations?
Only the parts that whistleblowers, a few intrepid investigative reporters, a
handful of brave scholars and some foreign governments have been willing or
able to tell us, with all of these potential witnesses knowing that they might
face severe retribution from the U.S. government.
No Restraint
There has been little-to-no
accountability by the U.S. government itself, or meaningful oversight or
restraint imposed by Congress. On the contrary, the government has become
ever-more obsessively secretive, pursuing aggressive legal actions against disclosures
of classified information, even when, or especially when, that information
describes the illegal actions by the government itself.
Once in a while, a former U.S.
official spills the beans, such as when Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed that he
had induced Jimmy Carter to assign the C.I.A. to train Islamic jihadists to
destabilize the government of Afghanistan, with the aim of inducing the Soviet
Union to invade that country.
In the case of Syria, we learned
from a few stories in The New York Times in 2016 and 2017 of the C.I.A.’s
subversive operations to destabilize Syria and overthrow Assad, as ordered by
President Barack Obama.
Here is the case of a dreadfully
misguided C.I.A. operation, blatantly in violation of international law, that
has led to a decade of mayhem, an escalating regional war, hundreds of
thousands of deaths, and millions of displaced people, and yet there has not
been a single honest acknowledgment of this C.I.A.-led disaster by the White
House or Congress.
Major Covert Role in Ukraine
In the case of Ukraine, we know that
the U.S. played a major covert role in the violent coup that brought down
Yanukovych and that swept Ukraine into a decade of bloodshed but to this day,
we don’t know the details.
Russia offered the world a window
into the coup by intercepting and then posting a call between Victoria Nuland,
then U.S. assistant secretary of state (now under-secretary of state) and U.S.
Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now assistant secretary of state), in
which they plot the post-coup government.
Following the coup, the C.I.A.
covertly trained special operations forces of the post-coup regime the U.S. had
helped bring to power. The U.S. government has been mum about the C.I.A.’s
covert operations in Ukraine.
We have good reason to believe that
C.I.A. operatives carried out the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, as
per Seymour Hersh, who is now an independent reporter. Unlike in 1975, when
Hersh was with The New York Times at a time when the paper still tried to hold
the government to account, the Times does not even deign to look into Hersh’s
account.
Holding the C.I.A. to public account
is of course a steep uphill struggle. Presidents and the Congress don’t even
try. The mainstream media don’t investigate the C.I.A., preferring instead to
quote “senior unnamed officials” and the official cover-up. Are the mainstream
media outlets lazy, suborned, afraid of advertising revenues from the
military-industrial complex, threatened, ignorant, or all of the above? Who
knows.
There is a tiny glimmer of hope.
Back in 1975, the C.I.A. was led by a reformer. Today, the C.I.A. is led by
William Burns, one of America’s long-standing leading diplomats. Burns knows
the truth about Ukraine, since he served as ambassador to Russia in 2008 and
cabled Washington about the grave error of pushing NATO enlargement to Ukraine.
Given Burns’ stature and diplomatic accomplishments, perhaps he would support
the urgently needed accountability.
The extent of the continuing mayhem
resulting from C.I.A. operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan,
Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths,
instability, and destruction unleashed by C.I.A. subversion continues to this
day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be
investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the
release of documents to enable democratic accountability.
Next year is the 50th anniversary of
the Church Committee hearings. Fifty years on, with the precedent, inspiration,
and guidance of the Church Committee itself, it’s urgently time to open the
blinds, expose the truth about the U.S.-led mayhem and begin a new era in which
U.S. foreign policy becomes transparent, accountable, subject to the rule of
law both domestic and international, and directed towards global peace rather
than subversion of supposed enemies.
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