A Quote by Medea Benjamin
The CIA runs the drone program in Pakistan solely, not with the military. Then there's a joint CIA-military program in Yemen, then the CIA is involved in a lot of use of spy drones around the world and in the proliferation of bases.
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There's been a coup, have you heard? It's the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They're the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries. ... And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve. ... And yet think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They're in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators ... We need to take out the CIA.
Armed drones have become Barack Obama's way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting 'boots on the ground.' For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.
What's less well known is that the CIA's executive management staff is far more concerned with selecting the right candidates to serve as CIA officers than it is about selecting agents overseas. The CIA dedicates a huge portion of its budget figuring how to select, control, and manage its own work force. It begins with instilling blind obedience. Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a sacred chain of command that cannot be violated. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it. Or you're out.
The CIA is absolutely out of control. The CIA has been on a killing spree... The CIA has become a death squad and to see these films [ like Zero Dark Thirty] get so much acclaim at the time when the CIA is in its rogue killing phase is very disturbing.
Because of the terrorist threat, the FBI and CIA have become as important as the military in preserving our freedom. Yet while thanking our military is standard practice in American life, no one thinks of thanking the FBI, the CIA, or the rest of the intelligence community for keeping us safe since 9/11.
I wrote a letter to the CIA on my manual college typewriter. I mailed it to CIA with my resume. I didn't have an address. So I just put, 'CIA. Washington, D.C.'
If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.
We know that, immediately after 9/11, the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly, there is no paper trail.
Just consider the CIA and its effort to suppress the Senate's review of its torture program. Take in the fact that we live in a country that a) legalized torture and b) where no one was ever held to account for it, and now the government's internal look at what happened is being suppressed by the CIA. That's a frightening landscape to be in.
One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.
Everything the CIA does is deniable. It's part of its Congressional mandate. Congress doesn't want to be held accountable for the criminal things the CIA does. The only time something the CIA does become public knowledge - other than the rare accident or whistleblower - is when Congress or the President think it's helpful for psychological warfare reasons to let the American people know the CIA is doing it.
After a short period of time in Pakistan, it's clear that drones are not a security solution. If you believe in drones, the original idea was to go after so-called high-value targets, which according to the NYU-Stanford study 2% of the people killed by drones are high-value targets - now, who are all the rest of the people? Well, it's a secret program, so therefore the CIA doesn't have to tell us anything, yet they claim that with each attack they're getting militants. Now we have people coming forward, saying, actually, no we're not terrorists.
People went out there and they wrote articles and went on television shows saying that I am an operative that the CIA who used Jon Stewart to recruit me. So Jon Stewart, who actually - a guy from America was used by the CIA in order to recruit me for the CIA and be - make me a CIA agent to use sarcasm to bring down the government and bring down the country because this was all, of course, part of a worldwide conspiracy against the country.
There is a real attempt to sanitize the CIA killings and to glorify the CIA and to give it a new face. That's what happened with Zero Dark Thirty, that's what happened with Michelle Obama... When she appeared my jaw dropped; I couldn't believe it... These were really a disgusting propaganda films, glorifying the role of the CIA.
It appears that legal positions that you have supported have been used by the administration, the military, and the CIA to justify torture and Geneva Convention violations by military and civilian personnel.
We knew that if the photos of CIA officers conducting authorized EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques) ever got out, the difference between a legal, authorized, necessary, and safe program and the mindless actions of some MPs (military police) would be buried by the impact of the images.
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