Title: We don't need the CIA - The Chris Hedges Report
Show: The Real News Network
Date: 2022-08-12
URL: https://youtu.be/vhyQRc1vzkg
Duration: 34.0:00

---

[00:02] now you talk about terror [Music] what about for me [Music] i've been terrorized [Music] all my days [Music]

[00:34] welcome to the chris hedges report the cia from its inception carried out assassinations coups torture and illegal spying and abuse including of u.s 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

[01:05] appointed but this oversight largely collapsed following the attacks of 911 and the so-called 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 dollars a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the national security agency the cia and

[01:37] 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 counter-terrorist operations he led a series of military raids on al-qaeda safe houses in pakistan capturing dozens of suspects including the 2002 raid that

[02:09] captured abu zabeda 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 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

[02:39] for two and a half years joining me to 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 kiriako so john in theory the cia is subject to oversight by congress and uh the inspector general throughout the intelligence community but this oversight has been weakened almost to the point of non-existence and i wondered if you could talk about uh the nature of the oversight and the

[03:11] consequences of the lack of oversight sure chris first of all thanks for having me uh you're right about oversight oversight was a very serious thing uh beginning in 1975 and it was certainly serious uh through the reagan administration into the end of the 1980s there were members of the senate select committee on intelligence and the house permanent select committee on intelligence that took their oversight duties very very seriously and uh that uh that began to to weaken

[03:42] in in the 90s and then it changed utterly when when the 9 11 attacks took place uh now we've got these oversight committees that really act as little more than cheerleaders for the cia you know it's up to these these members of congress to tell the cia no you can't do that no you can't have a torture program or an illegal rendition program or an archipelago of secret prisons around the world you can't

[04:13] transform yourself without congressional approval into a paramilitary organization uh you can't set up an assassination squad that travels around the world to just carry out hits of people whose politics you don't like and we just don't get that kind of oversight anymore we had the feinstein report and the ci really effectively railroaded her didn't they oh yeah they did you'll recall too that john brennan when he was the cia director as that report was being researched and written ordered

[04:45] cia officers or cia contractors it's never really been clear to hack into the senate intelligence committee's computer system to see what it was that these these investigators were gathering and you know even though that was referred to the justice department in a crimes report there was never any investigation and certainly never a prosecution well i remember she was quite uh shaken by feinstein by that oh yes and gave a kind of very chilling press conference that basically said uh

[05:16] these people are unaccountable i i i remember correctly yeah you're exactly right in fact dianne feinstein had a reputation as being one of the most pro-cia members of the u.s senate and for her to go onto the floor of the senate and accuse in very plain english the cia director of committing a crime a felony was a very big deal it was a turning point for her and and what are so what are the consequences of essentially removing this kind of oversight yeah the the consequences of removing

[05:48] real oversight true oversight is you end up with a rogue organization the nature of the cia is to push the envelope the nature is to to see what it is that they can get away with um on the one hand on the other hand the nature is to try to recruit these members of the oversight committees to make them feel like they're one of the guys they're they're part of this secret team they're insiders they're all everybody's working together and that way you can get away with things that you otherwise

[06:19] wouldn't get away with or or wouldn't attempt well that's not what the role of an oversight committee is supposed to be the role of the oversight committee is to say no the role of the oversight committee is to say you can't do that because it's illegal and the committee just doesn't do things like that i'll give you one example when i got home from prison i was invited to a reception and there was a democratic senator at this at this party he was a member of the uh

[06:50] of the senate intelligence committee and uh he was not really happy to see me and i was perfectly happy making him feel uncomfortable so i walked right up to him and he said hello and i said hello senator and i knew him from when i was on the senate foreign relations committee staff i said senator i got to tell you i'm i'm disappointed uh that uh you know i couldn't count on your support when all of this went down and he got very angry and he said look it takes all my energy just to not lose my security clearance

[07:21] and man that made it completely clear to me that they're afraid of oversight they're afraid of being threatened by the cia they're afraid of losing their security clearances and so they they carry out this charade where they pretend to conduct oversight and then really behind closed doors they just do what the cia tells them to do that's what it's come down to i just have to go a little off topic because i

[07:53] thought you might know and it's always fascinated me why they took down petraeus because it appears he was clearly taken down yeah you know i've i've gone over this in in my head many many times um petraeus was not a political figure um and i'll tell you there's there's kind of a history at the cia of having weak directors who used to be generals or admirals

[08:24] and the way it was always told to me was you don't want a military man in a position like that because military people have have gotten where they have gotten with four shiny stars on their shoulders by saying yes sir for the previous 30 or 35 years and you don't want somebody to say yes sir you want somebody to say mr president let me tell you what it is we want to do and why we want to do it where you're telling the president

[08:56] what intelligence policy is going to be and generals and admirals normally don't do things like that they don't stand up to presidents and i always wondered if if that plus the fact that he was just not a political player was what eventually did him in well having spent a lot of time in the military i found the iq levels diminished the higher you went up isn't that the cia functions as both an intelligence gathering

[09:26] organization and an organization that carries out operations and i wondered how this dual focus affects the kinds of intelligence it gathers yeah good question you know before 9 11 the whole purpose of operations was to gather intelligence you implemented an operation because it was going to provide you with a new line of information because the job of a cia officer is to recruit spies to steal

[09:56] secrets and then you pass those secrets to the analysts so that they can provide the best possible analysis to the policy makers to make the best possible policy in a perfect world that's that's why the cia exists but that changed after 9 11. so you've got you've got a handful of analysts now whose job it is to recruit spies to steal secrets to influence policy and then most of the directorate of operations to do counter terrorism counter

[10:27] narcotics counter proliferation uh to go out there you know shooting people up or snatching people off the streets to render them to to third countries it's it's just a completely different place you mentioned in your intro that the cia is now a paramilitary organization i've been making that complaint for many many years that's exactly what it is it's a paramilitary organization and so the people that the cia is hiring now the people you know most of us used to be hired right out of graduate school

[10:59] because we had advanced degrees from good schools and we spoke foreign languages that's really not who they're looking for anymore they're looking for people who were navy seals green berets you know special operations forces they they maybe did a rotation of the cia on uh on loan from special operations command you're looking for people who can jump out of planes rough it in the jungle or the desert kill people and then exfiltrate themselves so the cia

[11:31] really has changed quite dramatically since 9 11. so i'm wondering if there isn't a danger that intelligence gets distorted and contaminated to justify operations oh very very much so you know the night that we captured abu zabeda that was that was obviously the biggest night of my career and it was one of the most important nights of of my life to tell you the truth not just because of the excitement of capturing someone that we had hunted for for six weeks um

[12:03] and this is going to sound kind of silly but what i was the most excited about was in the abu zabeta raid we had um captured uh confiscated a copy of the al-qaeda training manual in a safe house that was occupied by three members of the lashkar lashkar-e-tayaba pakistani militant group terrorist group this was the very first time that we were able to tie lashkar-e-tayaba to al-qaeda

[12:36] so analytically this was a gigantic leap forward in our understanding of how terrorist groups worked i was the only person who cared nobody cared all they wanted to know was who we caught and who they were with when we caught them that was it now the analysts were very very excited because this answered so many questions where was lashkar tayaba getting their their weapons and ammunition who was funding them we

[13:07] always feared it was isi it turned out it wasn't diocy it turned out it was al qaeda but how did they make the connection what was the the rat line between the two organizations the analysts were fascinated by this but in the directorate of operations nobody cared so there was this move away from analysis there was a move away from understanding the enemy and the goal really was to just kill or capture and then move on to the next target so the national security act 1947 that

[13:38] established the cia defined its function as combining compiling and analyzing raw intelligence to make it useful to the president the cia reports to the president it was supposed to be civilian nonpartisan free from the vested interests of the military-industrial complex can you explain how it evolved into what's become the executive branch's private army oh yeah you know when i first started at the cia i was told what you just read

[14:08] uh nonpartisan in all capital letters i sat near a woman in 1995 1996 who had a bob dole for president bumper sticker very discreetly in her cubicle and not only was she ordered to take it down but uh but she was reprimanded for bringing politics into the office i sat next to people for years and never had the foggiest idea if they were democrats or republicans or

[14:39] independents or whatever they were it was never raised it was never important because we had the mission and you know i don't mean to keep coming back to 911 but on the day that 9 11 that the attacks took place everything changed everything and so it became you know it really did become the president's private army i i remember i remember uh executive order one two three three three being written in stone

[15:11] it was one of the very first things we were briefed on when we were hired into the agency that we cannot kill people we do not and will not kill people and we will not task others with killing people well within just days of the 911 attacks one two three three three was um was rescinded and all of a sudden we started setting up uh assassination squads when i was in the cia's counter-terrorism center i sat i don't know 20 feet away from a guy

[15:44] who was very friendly he would come in and say good morning every day morning guys i'd say good morning morning rick how are you doing how was your weekend how are your kids and then he would disappear for a week two weeks at a time and we just all assumed he was going tdy temporary duty like we all did i made 25 international trips in in the one year after the 9 11 attacks and then finally one day i said to the guy i sat next to what exactly does he do here like he's i see him all the time he's

[16:15] very friendly but i don't really know what he does and my friend was kind of exasperated he said john he's in charge of the special activities division you get it special activities and i said uh of course so he would he would just get on a plane go to some foreign country kill people get back on the plane and come home and just wait for the next assignment i had um i had worked in the middle east for a little while with uh

[16:45] with a contractor an old timer legendary figure by the name of billy wah uh books have been written about billy he's such a legendary figure in the korean war the vietnam war uh the guy had been around for for decades and um and then he just kind of dropped out of sight so i ran into him in the hall about six weeks after 9 11 and i said hey billy haven't seen you in ages where have you been and he looked around and he said he whispered to me i've been in afghanistan

[17:16] i said yeah what are you doing in afghanistan and he looked at me like i was crazy he said i've been killing people what do you think i've been doing and see i had been volunteering to go to afghanistan repeatedly like every few days i'd go into the deputy director of counterterrorism uh the counter-terrorism center's office saying i really want to go to afghanistan you have to send me to afghanistan my arabic is fluent and i'm thinking who do they have i mean there are only half a dozen of us that spoke arabic who did they have doing these interrogations well it

[17:48] was that conversation in the hall that made me realize they're not interrogating anybody they're just killing them so they didn't need linguists and former analysts like me they needed people who could pull a trigger have zero remorse and then go to the next target and pull the trigger there too so after 9 11 i was based in paris covering al qaeda in europe and north africa and i worked a lot with french intelligence i'm only going to repeating what they said um

[18:18] i i having spent 20 years abroad i can tell you once an intelligence service resorts to torture its intelligence functioning has broken down uh that's what you do as a last resort uh the french argued that they were the only intelligence service that had human assets inside of al-qaeda uh and that the united states uh was completely blind that it relied primarily on electronic eavesdropping um but didn't had not built up the kind of human

[24:58] said that quote america's failed policies in afghanistan flowed in part from the uh compartmented top secret isolation in which the cia always sought to work uh i was in the balkans when the cia was kidnapping all sorts of mujahideen many of them were from egypt they were sent on black flights back to egypt i think almost all of them were killed uh and then we saw of course the u.s embassy bombings in kenya and tanzania 98 that was 224

[25:29] dead the attack on the us's coal to most americans that came out of nowhere to those of us who were overseas uh we we saw this as blowback can you talk about that phenomena yeah this this was truly blowback uh blowback is is essentially an unintended consequence but really what it is is the consequence of poor planning and poor execution you know the cia one of the things that the cia is is always guilty of is

[26:00] is poor planning uh it was drilled into us as soon as as soon as we went into operations that you have to have a plan and then you have to have a plan b c and d and that's great when you're sitting in a conference room or you know writing it in a report but it's it's just not really the way things work in real life and even if you do have a plan b c and d that's not necessarily to say that the policymakers do and that uh that they're going to

[26:31] do something that you think is the right thing to do afghanistan is probably the worst uh example of blowback in our modern history where you know we had this obsession with communism i think most americans don't understand really the governments and the cia's obsession with communism right up until the end the end of communism uh in europe and so in this obsession with communism

[27:02] and this this willingness or readiness to drive out the soviets and drive them out of afghanistan at all costs we made a deal with the devil and then when the russians were finally driven out of afghanistan rather than to try to work with a new afghan government you know to to enhance infrastructure or agriculture or education we just walked away it was as simple as that

[27:34] there was no plan b or the plan ended with the defeat of the soviet union in afghanistan and so here here we've radicalized these people we've pumped hundreds of millions probably billions of dollars worth of of weapons and ammunition and mines and rockets and you name it uh into this country and then we just abandoned them

[28:05] so uh there there should have been no surprise when they morphed into the taliban with the help of the pakistani government and the pakistani intelligence service the isi like what did we think was going to happen and then by the time you know 9 11 happened it was it was just too late i want a central senator daniel patrick moynihan argued that the agency should be dismantled because as he wrote it produced

[28:37] catastrophically wrong national intelligence estimates including of course failing to predict the father shaw collapse of the soviet union uh throughout the reagan and bush administration overstated the size of the soviet economy by at least 50 percent uh it led the government on a weapon spending spree that left us the world's largest debtor nation uh and then of course we have the disastrous intelligence on iraq and non-existence of weapons of mass description i wonder if do we need a cia that so regularly

[29:09] underperforms in comparison to what's often available from scholars and journalists and if we do what should be done to reform the cia i i feel very strongly that we do not need a cia i think that if we ever did need a cia it's long overstate it's uh it's welcome uh and you look at redundancy and intelligence around the us government too chris you've got the state department's bureau of intelligence and research which does

[29:39] uh all kinds of of intelligence analysis uh you've got the defense department's dhs defense human services they recruit spies to steal secrets just like the cia does you have nsa uh doing all of the electronic eavesdropping you have darpa developing the next generation of whatever it is that they do it's so secret we don't even know what what it is that they're working on uh we've got

[30:10] think tanks uh most of which are funded and financed by the big defense contractors we don't we don't need a cia and to tell you the truth there's a there's a major book waiting to be written on the cia's analytic failures you know we talk all the time about the cia's operational failures those are very well documented legacy of ashes is one of the best books i've ever read but what we don't talk about is the cia's analytic failures and if you go

[30:41] back really to the founding of the cia in 1947 they've either missed or gotten gotten the analysis wrong on every major event i mean we can go back to the suez crisis we can go back to the berlin airlift uh through uh the iraq war and everything that came after they they're wrong about everything and and there's never a price to pay for that they just move on to the next crisis and and then get that wrong well

[31:11] my favorite obsession is they trot out what the cardinal in prague uh who's been uh of course worked over to say what the communist regime wants him to say and everybody in the cia thinks that the soviets have figured out the drugs for mind control uh which sends them off on you know dropping even to their own agents giving them lsd tabs some of them jump out of hotel windows and kill themselves um steve kinser wrote a good book on this called poisoner in chief uh but i think that's

[31:43] what comes when there's no accountability and also the kinds of figures dulles you know these are uh very problematic people oh problematic people who do not have the country's best interests at heart dulles is probably the best uh example of this dulles dulles saw the cia as his own fiefdom and what president eisenhower wanted from him was immaterial

[32:15] uh he and his brother colluded and conspired on on myriad operations and foreign policy issues and they didn't care what eisenhower had to say about it well they were just gangsters for wall street weren't they that's exactly what they were yeah yes so i have to ask this question since i know oliver stone he's convinced the cia killed jfk i've never seen that so is david talbott and others i i've never seen any evidence that backs it up but what do you think um oliver once

[32:48] yelled at me that i was full of [ __ ] because i said that uh i said i don't know oliver i just can't wrap my brain around it i i i hope not i hope you're wrong i said i i haven't seen any evidence of it it's certainly an interesting story but i said you know maybe maybe you should look at the santo trafficante and the role of the mafia in the death of kennedy and then he exploded you're so full of [ __ ] so i i never i've never bought it but uh i was curious what you thought all right

[33:19] i want to thank the real news network and its production team cameron grenadino adam coley dwayne gladden and kayla rivera you can find me at chrishedges.substance.com [Music]

[33:58] you
