The Chris Hedges Report Podcast: John Kiriakou, who was the CIA’s Chief of Counterterrorism Operations in Pakistan, and Chris Hedges discuss why the CIA needs to be abolished.
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast: John Kiriakou, who was the CIA’s Chief of Counterterrorism Operations in Pakistan, and Chris Hedges discuss why the CIA needs to be abolished.
The CIA has evolved into a rouge and unaccountable paramilitary force that overthrows governments, carries out kidnapping, practices torture in black sites and engages in targeted assassinations.
Appears in this episode
The CIA, from its inception, carried out assassinations, coups, torture, and illegal spying and abuse, including of US citizens, many of which were exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House. Congress attempted to enact laws to curb the widespread criminal activity by the CIA. Senate and House intelligence oversight committees were created and after the Iran-Contra scandal a statutory Inspector General at the CIA was appointed. But this oversight has largely collapsed following the attacks of 9/11 and the so-call war on terror. The activities of the CIA have once again reverted to the shadows. The CIA, at the same time, has transformed itself into a paramilitary organization, with its own armed units and drone program. The US allocates a secret black budget of about $ 50 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress. John Kiriakou worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004, first as an analyst, and later as a counterterrorism operations officer overseas in Bahrain, Athens, and Pakistan, where he was the CIA’s Chief of Counterterrorist Operations. He led a series of military raids on Al Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan capturing dozens of suspects, including the 2002 raid that captured Abu Zubaydah, then thought to be the third ranking member of Al Qaeda. He was also the first CIA officer to publicly confirm that the CIA waterboarded prisoners, and that such an action was torture. He also confirmed that torture was an official U.S. government policy, rather than wrongdoing by a few rogue agents. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration and was sent to prison for two-and-a-half years. Joining me to the discuss the CIA, how it has evolved, how it sees its mission, what it does, how it works, and the effects of its clandestine operations around the globe is John Kiriakou.
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast: John Kiriakou, who was the CIA’s Chief of Counterterrorism Operations in Pakistan, and Chris Hedges discuss why the CIA needs to be abolished.
Kiriakou says everything changed after 9/11. I agree. Perhaps we should focus on the unanswered questions around the WTC destruction and not accept the usual explanation that sent us down the road of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture, renditions, black sites and so on.
If we had jumped on the remarkable demolition of Building #7 and asked how did this happen? How was this possible? We could begin to assign different causes to that disaster instead of blindly following willful ignorance artfully composed.
That means you Mr.Hedges, along with Chalmers Johnson and Chomsky. Good people who I feel let us down in this crucially important area.
There is so much wrong with cia devotee Kiriakou's argument it appears difficult to know where to begin, yet it isn't difficult it is in fact easy, start at the foundation argument 'Why have a CIA' ?
Kiriakou argues that other amerikan agencies do it better, they are more efficient and efficacious etc. Telling the world that the cia gets it wrong and needs improvement doesn't get to the heart of anything really.
The real issue of 'we don't need a cia' must always be 'WTF is any government in the 21st century doing advancing the cause of imperialism?" Whatever other nations choose to do domestically should be no business of anyone other than that nation's citizens. Surely if some fascist administration somewhere is doing terrible things to some of its citizens, the only credible opponents to that can come from those nations who are known not to interfere in other nations politics and/or economics.
In fact that is where Kiriakou's support of Cigar Bill Clinton shows Kiriakou's clay feet. Clinton didn't oppose the cia because he was opposed to imperialism per se, he opposed cia practices because he saw them as old-fashioned, that it was no longer necessary to militarily impose control of another nation, because the 'new way' of imperialism was to control other nations economically by owning their elites via the world bank & imf, both puppets of amerika, rather than trying to bring nations in line with crude military methods.
Of course Clinton was being just as short-sighted; economic control also has limitations - see Saudi involvement in 911, Saudi Arabia's vast wealth and amerika's dependence upon that wealth means it isn't subject to simple economic string pulling.
When will these arsehole tools of amerika's oligarchs finally realise that imperialism is the real villain, all imperialism ever achieves is the same repression at home that the imperialist occupier claims to be fighting abroad?
The ludicrous situation where those humans elected to represent amerikan citizens tasked with overseeing the cia are controlled by way of "security clearances" says it all. I realise that those subjected to amerikan imperialist indoctrination will struggle to agree with this but any person elected to Congress/ the Senate must automatically have the right to see any document produced by any amerikan government institution, regardless of that institution's allegations, that something less than that is the antithesis of democracy.