Reading "Bay of Pigs". Maybe we should just disband the CIA.

"Bay of Pigs...the Untold Story" by Peter Wyden.

I know this is ancient history for most of you, but I lived it.
My ANG squadron was involved, but a couple of years before I joined.
I did fly with a few of the pilots who participated in the 'invasion'.
They would never talk about it.

Anyway...the point of this is that the CIA dreamed up this fiasco and it was a total clusterf*ck from top to bottom, beginning to end.

I think the faces may have changed, but the mindset is still the same.
And I think they get us into way more trouble than they keep us out of.

Interesting too that some of the same Bay of Pigs CIA bright boys also show up in the Watergate fiasco about 10 years later.

And now we have this lovely 'slam dunk' 'war(?)' in Iraq.
And where's Osama?
The parallels and similarities between 40 years ago and now are just uncanny.
:eyes:

this for a long time; Defund the CIA! Defund the FBI!

is only one part of the intelligence community. I am not making a comment on if it should or should not be disbanded. Just pointing out that it makes up about 15% of the US's foreign intellience community.

:spank:

about. Besides, all the CIA seems to be good for is creating enemies that attack us.

They're all worthless. Anyone remember Saddam's WMD's? Unless these agencies are reconstituted on a basis that yields reliable results, they're a menace to Americans and to world peace. To hell with them.

the real problem with the Iraq Intelligence was not the CIA as much as it had the same problem all of the Republican agencies are having right now - they are lead by crony politicians cherry picked to never question Bush. Look at the head of NASA and how he is denying climate change. Look at FEMA and their bungling of NOLA/Katrina. I would think the Plame issue would highlight this.

We need intelligence services. What we don't need are those that step over their bounds, who try to subvert democracy in the name of winning the game, such as Operation Ajax, PBSUCCESS, Iran-Contra, etc.

... and I know there are people doing their jobs as best they can. But some agencies just get so rotten they have to be pulled down. I think the WMD "intelligence" alone calls for that. FEMA too. The science agencies still have enough functioning brain cells to be saved with audacious weeding of the garbage appointees. Either way, there'll have to be a heck of a purge all round to clear W's trash out of the nation's executive & policy bodies.

The problems with the CIA are much deeper than just one administration.

The reason they thought it would be such a good idea to get rid of Castro was that they had just been so successful in doing the same thing in Guatemala.

The CIA was able to engineer a coup to get rid of a guy (forgot the names involved) we didn't like and replace him with one we did.

I won't get into the details, you can read the book if you're curious.
But...it was like "Gee, that worked so well with the Guats, lets do it with the Cubans."

Completely failing to realize that the Cuban situation was far, far different from what had happened in Guatemala. And they were told, repeatedly, by people who knew, that the type of operation they had in mind had zero chance of success in Cuba.

In fact, many in the CIA refused to have anything to do with it.

Will we (they) EVER figure out that maybe the answer to all of our annoyances and perceived 'fears' is NOT 'regime change'?

in Iran, Guatemala (President Arbenz), and likely elsewhere.

Or, is that a group known world wide as a bunch of murderous thugs who are adept at torture and subverting governments who dare to oppose the American Empire?

But your government wants you to know Oswald was really the lone assassin, and anything else is just a nut-job conspiracy theory.

It was kinda weird for me to hear all the DUers ranting about how the Republicans were destroying the CIA by outing Plame. I loathe the bastards regardless of partisan advantage. All you have to do is look at the ageny's history.

was here: a U.S. submarine would surface and launch fireworks to scare them into rising against the Antichrist Castro.
Operation Good Times: faked photographs of a fat Castro at a buffet with naked women during a time of rationing
Operation Dirty Trick: blame Castro for electromagnetic interference if John Glenn died on landing
The Pentagon proposed faking an attack on Guantánamo Bay. Operation Remember the Maine would sink an empty ship and hold fake funerals, possibly publishing obituary lists of imaginary sailors: they had no qualms about using U.S. newspapers to launch war.
and of course...
Operation Northwoods: use MiGs painted in Cuban colors to shoot down a warplane or an airliner—“real or simulated.” Simply the open planning of such an act reveals a great deal about the Pentagon.
and this was on top of all the assassination attempts and the eager transformation of Latin American militaries into lean, mean, coup-launching machines and death squads. One Washington official in the 1910s believed Britain was training the U.S. to replace it as the next global empire.

...the data collection and analysis side (think Plame, Ray McGovern, etc.), and the "covert operations" side, the one former DEA agent Michael Levine (http://www.expertwitnessradio.org/) has referred to as "frat boys with guns and no honor".