The CIA and the New Dialect of Power | Hacker News Reader

The CIA and the New Dialect of Power

americanaffairsjournal.org

34 pointstablespoon22 comments

I just got done reading Sarah Chayes's excellent book Thieves Of State. She spent significant time working with the USA military in Afghanistan and she devotes substantial time to the idea that the CIA is a rogue agency that often undermines the USA military and undercuts the goals of the USA State Department. Her stories are really shocking, including many months spent setting up a sting to take down a vast network of corruption in Afghanistan, only to have the whole sting sabotaged at the last moment, because it turned out that many of the people who were taking bribes were taking bribes from the CIA, and the CIA had refused to share that information with the USA military. If the subject interests you, I posted a long excerpt here:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/thieves-of-state-part-8-of-...

This is why the DIA was created, all too often other OGAs (Other Government Agencies) would have alternative agendas and it would get US military personal killed.

Directorate S by Steve Coll is another good read if anyone's interested in reading about the inter agency culture of USA specifically pertaining to the war on terror in Afghanistan.

What relevancy does this political op-ed have on hacker news? None.

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Modern leftist progressivism is practically indistinguishable from Bush-era neo-con ideology. Is it really any wonder that secretive parts of the deep state can indifferently adopt either? This kind of 'horseshoe-model' politics is not exactly uncommon, either - it is quite normal for the radical extremes to meet.

Lots of interesting words in your comment. Can you elaborate on what the first sentence means?

Can you provide some examples where the modern leftist progressive is indistinguishable from a bush era neo-con?

Notably the architects, of the foreign policy blunders of the Bush Administration such as Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan (Project for a New American Century) have gravitated toward the left and its foreign policy. You'd have to be 40 years old to understand the significance of these players and one advantage of being a politician - is that there is a new generation that forgets. These players are anti-trump Hero's in today's media, but they were proponents of brutal wars 20 years ago.

Nitpicking: whenever I see some US personality labeled as "leftist" I must remember that we still live in a post-truth society where ideology is stronger than wikipedia. Translation: 90% of what is labeled "left" in the US would be by definition centre-right. Notice I left out 10% where "leftists" probably deserve their label, but hey let's not murk our clean-cut ideologies (and their scare-words) with too much exactitude...

Dick Cheney is now a leftist progressive? Bill Kristol is now a leftist progressive?

Are you sure about that? Being anti-trump doesn't make one a leftist progressive.

I didn't use the word progressive.

Apparently anything that doesn't support Trump is left.

That was a gish gallup.

I think there is some value in understanding that the CIA is a large enough organization that it does not act with a single mind, nor a single culture. The article attacks the monoculture idea from media well but never matures it.

It unfortunately gets very bogged down in tying the CIA to conspiracies and things the author doesn't care for, in very loose ways that seem more akin to threads on a blackboard than an actual chain of cause and effect.

The CIA has earned a suspicious reputation. It isn't tinfoil hat territory to suspect the CIA is involved with a secret conspiracy because that is their SOP. They must be involved in dozens right this second.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies

Therefore any conspiracy that we can propose the CIA is involved in must be true.

I am imagining the CIA being involved in... hm.. yes, I'm getting an image of bears. Bears being trained to sabotage Russian airbase fuel supplies.

We have many examples of this happening. We know the CIA employs animal handlers. We know bears are very trainable. Given the CIA's use of Dolphins, it isn't a leap to recruiting Russian bears.

You sound like an ex-MKUltra subject.

Anyway, it should be clear to anyone reading that you are committing a number of informal fallacies. You can be confident that the CIA is conducting secret conspiracies without knowing what they are. You can also speculate what they are by observing the CIA's behavior and observing the world. Just because there isn't proven public knowledge doesn't mean the secret thing is not actually happening.

Why train bears? They already have Ukranian Nazis, less people will complain when they get shot.

I think the article is pretty spot on, and this is the second time when I go through it. For crying out loud, the State Deparment now has a LGTBQ+ spokesperson (nothing unusual about that) who is a “former” CIA member (that is, or rather was, unusual). The same spokesperson who had this attitude [1] recently, i.e. the professional higher-than-thou attitude that the article writes about.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=xuvb3FEHz3U

You'll forgive me if I'm critical of using Russia Times's reporting on Russian Disinformation ops. Yes, people in government argue loudly - that doesn't help your case as far as I can tell.

My companies LGBTQ+ spokesperson used to be a rodeo clown. Does this mean Rodeo clowns are being trained in subterfuge and corporation espionage to spread LGBTQ ideology?

No, it means people change jobs.

I’m on a phone with a small screen (iPhone SE), just copy-pasted the first YT link that google gave me. You can search for the name of the spokesperson (Ned Price) and that of the journalist (Matt Lee) and (hopefully) you’ll get the same video from other, non-Russian, sources.

Yeah, I don't trust and wouldn't use RT at all for any purpose, but appears they just posted a legitimate video that just happens to fit their agenda. Here's the same thing from CSPAN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DTSSvtg19I.

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