This morning, I noted “Today’s Highlights in History” in the New York Times: On July 26, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.If you want to know if the CIA has fulfilled the mission for which it was created, check out Tom Engelhardt’s dispatch posted yesterday, Chalmers Johnson, Agency of Rogues, in which Johnson reviews Tom Weiner’s excellent book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.
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The long review is a good read. Having decided years ago that the CIA was composed of 98% incompetents, none of the revelations in it was surprising.
ReplyDeleteSome were amusing though: the CIA's subsidy of artists who paint in the style of abstract expressionism (I never liked that art form anyway) over Soviet Realism (which I view in the same vein, although not as good, as Diego Rivera's underappreciated and beautiful art); the second being the CIA's bugging of the bedroom of the US ambassador to Guatemala and upon hearing certain sounds decided she was having an affair with her secretary and spreading the rumor of that affair, only to find out later that she was cooing to her poodle, who happened to have the same name as her secretary.
The CIA is an absurdity.
Janie
The CIA was created to keep the empire in charge of the world by any means necessary. That job it has done, and done very well.
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