Former CIA Officer: Treat Domestic Extremism as an Insurgency | Hacker News Reader

Former CIA Officer: Treat Domestic Extremism as an Insurgency

npr.org

21 pointsTriv88815 comments

Funny how the people NPR was excoriating as torturers and incompetents a decade ago for their role in the Iraq War are now considered trustworthy intelligence experts. Even trustworthy enough to advise on how to prosecute a campaign against an "insurgency" in our own domestic population! What could go wrong?

Any government funded news outlet is going to be biased in favor of its funders. PBS, NPR, and other publicly funded news outlets are grateful to the liberals and the media establishment for keeping them in business all these years. I imagine there are exceptional journalists at NPR that have to tow the line and not favor, give comfort, shelter, or aide or any positivity what so ever to conservatives. They might lose their job, and I sense it has always been that way.

Never let a situation go by if it can be exploited to strip Americans of their rights.

Specifically what rights?

The first and second amendment are good examples. There are bills in the House attacking them both in different ways using fringe people/groups as justification.

Your rights stop where their feelings begin. That is how your rights are viewed by the left. You have a right to keep and bear arms. You do not have the right to free healthcare, free education, or free property. Yet many on the left want to treat rights as not inalienable, but malleable depending on the person who is exercising them.

Huh, this sort of rhetoric seems like it will only provoke the opposite of what they wa...

wait a second...

so, arm and fund them?

You're probably going to get downvoted for that, but I, too, find it ironic that someone in the CIA said this, given their history of funding several terrorist groups to help act as a insurgency to overthrow foreign governments not aligned with America.

> You're probably going to get downvoted for that, but I, too, find it ironic that someone in the CIA said this, given their history of funding several terrorist groups to help act as a insurgency to overthrow foreign governments not aligned with America.

It's only really ironic if you look at it shallowly (e.g. treating all "insurgencies" as equivalent). Obviously the CIA doesn't think about it that way, given how their job forces them to operate in a gray area.

Treat and fight them like the US continues to treat and fight the Taliban?

CIA officers should mind their business. Their role is to collect information on foreign environments not give opinions.

> CIA officers should mind their business. Their role is to collect information on foreign environments not give opinions.

Obviously not. If they just dumped a bunch of raw information on decision-makers, their output would probably be worse than useless. If I were a leader, I'd want to be provided with different opinions and options about a given situation, especially if I had to make a lot of decisions or make them quickly.

It's interesting that so many in the intelligence community do not mind their business, and instead involve themselves in election tampering, subversive acts against citizens, spying on citizens, overthrowing foreign countries, and last but not least, just f**kin with the other side.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-software-blew-up-russian-ga...

"Former CIA Officer".

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