A big problem is our morality. In general the US is too nice and there are simply too many "watchdog" groups that we let have their way with the goverment. The CIA is supposed to be our super-nasty, super-ruthless, dirty tricks force. Yet people are able to keep forcing their records to the public eye, and every time they do anything especially nasty or ruthless there is a public outcry and the goverment is more than willing to sell them up the river.
Bill Clinton was able to put so much money into the economy largely because he cut intelligence services to the bone, argueing that we didn't need the CIA given our satellites and such. Of course if you don't have a man on the ground/inside then you don't have anything and this is how we were so heavily blindsided with 9/11. It's also part of the entire problem with "The War On Terror" given that Bush pretty much had to rebuild our intelligence assets from the ground up (which caused much discussion about a so called 'Intelligence Czar').
How many of you on these forums are liberals who complain about things like secret spy trials, Gitmo, and the torturing of suspects? Congrats, you are officially part of why we are getting murdered in the intelligence game. It's too easy for people to find out about this stuff, and simply put when they do, the CIA is too accountable.
I mean it's like this. Some CIA guy fingers a terrorist, and the dude is picked up. Well now all of a sudden people are going to scream and yell about the rights of the guy they picked up. A problem compounded by the fact that an undercover CIA guy can't really come
out for a public trial without blowing his cover. What evidence he collected is also not going to be for public consumption because to do so would "out" any kind of methods good enough to have beaten the terrorist to begin with. Not to mention the fact that there are people dumb enough to think that spies should follow the existing search laws and such, which frankly defeats the entire purpose.
Plus once you have the guy, what do you do with him? Information is time sensitive and honestly all of these "humane interrogation methods" and "establishing trust and a friendly rapport with the captive" don't matter when you need information right now. By the time you get what you want to know (if you do) the camp/leader/whatever your after will probably be gone.
Forget Castro, if we decided to try whacking inconveinent world leaders nowadays American Citizens would have a heart attack. We're stupid enough to think it's basically okay for the Russians to try and kill people to sway elections (like they tried to do in Ukraine) but it's not okay for us to do the same thing.
I think a lot of Americans want to think that there is some kind of ultra-secret squad beyond the CIA that is doing this stuff anyway, when in reality I don't think there really is, or at least not on the nessicary level going by the results we're seeing.
The truth is that we either need to make our spies and agents above the law (ie a Liscence to Kill) OR we're going to fail epically. I think a line needs to be drawn between civilian authority and Espionage and a lot of the current "rights" need to be suspended when dealing with matters of international signifigance.
Of course the neighsayers will bring up things like the Waffen SS, and other such groups, forgetting of course that there have been many intelligence agencies that have had similar authority and managed to fit into a middle ground between what we have now, and black clad secret police disappearing innocent people by night.
-
On a side note, I would think that the whole idea of going out on patrol would be to intentionally do it at the worst possible times, to draw out the "bad" dudes that make those times dangerous and terminate them with extreme predjudice.
But what the heck do I know. I still believe that the purpose of our military is to kill people and break things. Naive flower that I am.
>>>----Therumancer--->
Bill Clinton was able to put so much money into the economy largely because he cut intelligence services to the bone, argueing that we didn't need the CIA given our satellites and such. Of course if you don't have a man on the ground/inside then you don't have anything and this is how we were so heavily blindsided with 9/11. It's also part of the entire problem with "The War On Terror" given that Bush pretty much had to rebuild our intelligence assets from the ground up (which caused much discussion about a so called 'Intelligence Czar').
How many of you on these forums are liberals who complain about things like secret spy trials, Gitmo, and the torturing of suspects? Congrats, you are officially part of why we are getting murdered in the intelligence game. It's too easy for people to find out about this stuff, and simply put when they do, the CIA is too accountable.
I mean it's like this. Some CIA guy fingers a terrorist, and the dude is picked up. Well now all of a sudden people are going to scream and yell about the rights of the guy they picked up. A problem compounded by the fact that an undercover CIA guy can't really come
out for a public trial without blowing his cover. What evidence he collected is also not going to be for public consumption because to do so would "out" any kind of methods good enough to have beaten the terrorist to begin with. Not to mention the fact that there are people dumb enough to think that spies should follow the existing search laws and such, which frankly defeats the entire purpose.
Plus once you have the guy, what do you do with him? Information is time sensitive and honestly all of these "humane interrogation methods" and "establishing trust and a friendly rapport with the captive" don't matter when you need information right now. By the time you get what you want to know (if you do) the camp/leader/whatever your after will probably be gone.
Forget Castro, if we decided to try whacking inconveinent world leaders nowadays American Citizens would have a heart attack. We're stupid enough to think it's basically okay for the Russians to try and kill people to sway elections (like they tried to do in Ukraine) but it's not okay for us to do the same thing.
I think a lot of Americans want to think that there is some kind of ultra-secret squad beyond the CIA that is doing this stuff anyway, when in reality I don't think there really is, or at least not on the nessicary level going by the results we're seeing.
The truth is that we either need to make our spies and agents above the law (ie a Liscence to Kill) OR we're going to fail epically. I think a line needs to be drawn between civilian authority and Espionage and a lot of the current "rights" need to be suspended when dealing with matters of international signifigance.
Of course the neighsayers will bring up things like the Waffen SS, and other such groups, forgetting of course that there have been many intelligence agencies that have had similar authority and managed to fit into a middle ground between what we have now, and black clad secret police disappearing innocent people by night.
-
On a side note, I would think that the whole idea of going out on patrol would be to intentionally do it at the worst possible times, to draw out the "bad" dudes that make those times dangerous and terminate them with extreme predjudice.
But what the heck do I know. I still believe that the purpose of our military is to kill people and break things. Naive flower that I am.
>>>----Therumancer--->
