Reply #112: All of which was ordered and approved by our wonderful elected officials.

[Leopolds Ghost]

I will say this: going after the CIA in public and singling them out for
scorn is a masterful counterintelligence technique. Talk about creating
a tar baby for people to wrap their arms around.

Why not simply let the government's actions speak for themselves
and asked, who aided and abetted them. The answer is everyone
in power. The whole culture of government encouraged and demanded it.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, The government as a whole is to blame for the actions of its lieutenants on the field. The government is primarily concerned with a monopoly on the use of force. Maybe that would not be true if we were more of a direct democracy, but look what happened to Athens. I'm not sure what the solution is.

Bottom line is, our government has been run by corporations since shortly after the Civil War, because the people running the corporations are extremely wealthy and the extremely wealthy, when and where they exist, have followed the "golden rule" throughout history. He who has the gold makes the rules.

Singling out the 2% of CIA agents who are actual spies is silly. Their entire JOB, as requested by our elected officials, is to spy on and, occasionally, kill people.

For one thing, most of the CIA assets BY DESIGN were always hard-core criminals, blackmailable or bribable officials. That's where human sources come from. You think the CIA goes around and just throws money at whoever wants to spy on the local government? If they do that, it certainly isn't the sign of an all-powerful, intelligent group of spies. No, they look for people with ulterior motives and pay THEM to collect information, the same way detectives use snitches.

And the assets are the ones who get their hands dirty -- while our elected officials look the other way and pretend they are "friends of America" and arrange to put them in power, even if they turn out to be Iranian double agents like Chalabi.

You think Hillary or any elected opposition leader attacked Chalabi when he was in favor with us? No, because they had inside info that he was a US agent and attacking him would be a political assault on the CIA's intelligence gathering techniques (and they knew all too well that the analysis side of the CIA thought he was full of shit, and sure enough, he turned out to be an Iranian double agent, didn't he?)