Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Legacy of Ashes - Who Doesn't Hate the CIA?

The left hates it, the right hates it, the Zionists hate it, the anti-Zionists hate it. If you've got a political agenda of any kind, you probably hate the CIA.

Rosner chalks it up to the fact of repeatedly offering up bogus intelligence, but it's more than that. Institutions that operate under a veil of secrecy almost always lack accountability because real accountability is impossible without transparency, and thus these institutions tend to attract conspiracy theories and, over time, serious public malaise. I'm not sure there's a solution to this, since you can't really have an intelligence service that doesn't operate in secret... but anyway this is why it pays to be be skeptical of efforts to reform the US intelligence apparatus.
Link