CIA intelligence failures
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CIA intelligence failures are, in John Kiriakou's account, not episodic but constitutive. Asked how national security could be safeguarded and the next 9/11 prevented, he calls it "really the $64,000 question" and then states his standing view: "my official position is that since the CIA was founded in 1947, it has missed every major world event. Every last one of them."

The list he gives runs "from, you know, the establishment of the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the Soviet Union uh the Iran hostage crisis 9/11. I mean, you name it, they got it wrong."

Why money is not the remedy

From the record he draws a budgetary conclusion: "So, spending more money, throwing money at the CIA and NSA and DOD, that's not the answer." His alternative is a change of posture rather than of capability, "To prevent the next 9/11, maybe we shouldn't have, you know, 200 bases in 144 countries pissing people off and trampling on their civil rights and their civil liberties." He extends the same argument to American support for Israel, saying the United States should not "get in bed with the Israelis and just allow them to commit genocide against innocent Palestinian civilians."

The absence of accountability

Kiriakou treats accountability as a separate failure and a worse one, describing "a cowardly political system in this country where there is no accountability." His test case is 9/11 itself: "did literally anybody lose their job even for 9/11? Of course not. They all got promoted. They all got rich. They all went on to the boards of directors of, you know, intelligence community contractors and defense contractors. Everybody got rich. Everybody in Congress that was asleep at the switch got reelected." His conclusion is institutional: "We need We need to start back from scratch again."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- Abolish the CIA
- 9/11 Commission
- Presidents and the CIA
