Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency enmeshed itself in politics taking credit for the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran and of murdering President Salvador Allende in Chile. It was active in Laos and Vietnam, and it helped to plan and carry out the invasion of Cuba in 1960-61. It was the Central Intelligence Agency that supported the local police intelligence and Pentagon aid to armies in neo-fascist Latin America. It was the Central Intelligence Agency and not pervasive internal discontent, that turned the contras into an army. The CIA became bag men for the funding of the right-wing death squads that murdered Catholic priests, nuns and social workers in Central America.
These are the normal and unavoidable consequences of the basic principles of capitalist production as they work themselves out in our global, technological time. It is the "free" economy of the United States that drove the CIA to diabolical excess and like Oliver North, thank God for the privilege.
John Stockwell, former CIA official and author, writes that "It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms. "Stockwell said elsewhere that "Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn."
The Central Intelligence Agency is of course, the most highly secret agency of the federal government. They ran afoul when they became a law unto themselves, operating independently even of the President. No longer. The CIA today has no illussions of an idealistic society of peace through democracy. No matter how pure their motives are, they are under the spell of the Neocons in Washington. Operating under the direction of the President, the CIA may perform acts which would otherwise not be authorized or approved, thus avoiding the constitutional limitation placed on executive decisions and actions in the foreign policy field.
There are a growing number of Americans with the belief that the Central Intelligence Agency is the root cause of all of our problems of political immorality.
The Central Intelligence Agency is the American international intelligence. The CIA was first established in 1947, under the direction of the National Security Council by Harry Truman. Under John Foster Dulles, the CIA became a major force in formulating and executing foreign policy. Independent of the Congress, it was not limited by our treaty obligations and constantly interfered in the affairs of foreign nations.
[178, 187, 249, 255]
