Is it not time to dismantle the CIA? MJ Rosenberg A former US president wanted to break up the CIA after it strayed from its mission, engaging in strange activities. Its not as if we werent warned about the CIA. Some 50 years before the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 500-page report on torture, former President Harry Truman published an opinion piece in the Washington Post asserting that the CIA was out of control and calling for it to be broken up. Trumans column appeared on December 22, 1963, a month to the day following US President John F Kennedys assassination and 11 years after he himself moved out of the White House. Truman argued, as the president who authorised its establishment in 1947, that the CIA had strayed from the mission he had intended for it. He had favoured creation of the CIA so that a president would have one agency providing him with objective foreign intelligence, rather than having to rely upon the often conflicting information being served up by the Departments of State, Defense, and others who slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. CIAs job description I wanted and needed the information in its natural raw state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the president into unwise decisions ... Viewing intelligence gathering as its sole mission, Truman was disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. He said he had never had any thought that the CIA would involve itself in cloak and dagger operations. But it had which has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 16:20:46 +0000
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