CHUD.com (courtesy Fred Badlisi) :
Q: My impression – and a lot of people share this – is that the CIA is a dangerous and possibly evil organization. At least that’s the emotional reaction.
Baer: That’s because you watch too many movies.
Q: Yeah, I was going to say, is there anything you can say to dissuade me from that?
Baer: It’s a bureaucracy. But the movie is looking at the evil side, which is that they’ve taken bad information to target someone overseas and kill him. The CIA does kill people, you have what is called lethal findings, in spite of 12333 Executive Order. You have the case of Khaddafi, you have the case in Yemen where they fired a missile into a car with 6 people and killed them all, they’re trying to kill bin Laden with Predators. It does happen.
My experience has been that the CIA gets into a bad position and does the wrong thing when it’s politicized. Look at the Bay of Pigs. If you look at the history of that, it wasn’t the CIA’s idea, it was Kennedy’s idea. It started with Eisenhower, he did it, he forced it through. It was done against the advice of the analysts on Cuba. Iraq – I know the name of every source they had on Iraq, and I know what they said. I knew before going into this war that that information was crap. They were using the National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 – I knew it. I knew that Chalabi and his sources were lying and making this stuff up. I knew that the Germans didn’t know, the French didn’t know. It was a supposition that he had weapons of mass destruction. That’s what should have been in the National Intelligence Estimate. You should have had some psychiatrist saying, ‘Well, knowing as much as we know about how Saddam thinks, I’ll bet he kept some weapons.’ That’s all it should have said, because we had no evidence. But the fact is that Cheny went to the CIA until he got what he wanted. It’s the politicization of the CIA.
Inside the CIA you’ve got basically liberal people – Democrats or moderate Republicans – that don’t like torture, they don’t putting lies on reports, and they don’t like subverting governments. It’s called action but neither is it covert nor is it action. It’s just a way to fill up space in the newspaper because it always gets leaked.
