On Nov 20, 2015, at 9:15 AM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

One I ran into one conspiracy nut recently who stated flatly that the CIA was the most incompetent organization ever created. I replied, "Well, since it's an organization devoted to conducting classified operations, it's been around for some sixty years and the public has only ever heard about a handful of it's failures, then I would say that it's *very* competent at one of two things: either *actually* performing it's mission or else covering up that it *isn't* performing it's mission.”


The US has done human intelligence pretty badly in the 20th and 21st centuries; we’re much better at sigint. 

Go read ‘Legacy of Ashes’ by Tim Weiner for an eye-opening look into the CIA’s history. (he was, amazingly, given pretty much free reign through the agency’s archives for that book, and it is NOT a particularly flattering picture) The agency has mainly been very good at covering up it’s failures and inflating it’s successes.

Most of our successful intelligence over the cold war and since has come out of the NSA.  (James Bamford is the author here to read: Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory is the essential ‘NSA Trilogy’)

[NOTE: I considered bringing up Charlie Wilson's War as an example of a spectacularly successful covert CIA operation, but then I decided that since Wilson had to almost bodily drag the agency into that effort and further that the U.S. government subsequently and equally spectacularly failed to win the peace would have rather undermined my point.]  

Yeah. I think that the dictionary links to that little contretemps as an example under the definition of ‘blowback’ :-/ 

obTrav. Maybe THIS is why the Imperium "doesn’t meddle in member states’ affairs"…they eventually and painfully learned their lesson?

-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs