My favorite part is when they lie to the president and Congress. Like, it's not enough that they do dogshit evil for the US government, they have to do dogshit evil against it as well? Is evil just the highest goal of the CIA? Is the agency just staffed with sociopaths?
... don't answer that, actually.
Letting the CIA develop a culture of criminality and invulnerability was a fucking mistake. Tear it down. Start over from the ground up.
Yes, absolutely. The culture of criminality and invulnerability is not even helpful to their job. Running drugs to fund black sites where they torture people for shits and giggles is not actually in any way vital to the purported functions of the CIA. More oversight would do them good.
Unless you're asking if tearing it down and rebuilding it can be done without a period of reduced efficacy, in which case, no, that's a price that would have to be paid.
Nope. And their shenanigans killing some people isn't a problem on a bigger scale. They have done more good than evil and as long as it's a net positive its ok.
Russia in Africa? If you want to make this argument do not forget, that the greatest neocolonialistic forces in Africa are European countries, France, UK etc
Yes, but Russia doesn't do it for colonialism but world destabilization. China loans money to poor countries so to keep them indebted and dependent. """Communist""" countries nowadays really do suck. Capitalism is bad too but not at that level of bad.
China unironically has been more helpful to African development in the past few decades than Europe in the past few centuries. Mostly because China wants Africa to be turned into a prosperous region and serve as customers to China meanwhile the west has been focused on wealth extraction from day one.
The Australian government of the time was very left wing, doing things like creating universal healthcare and education.
Whitlam was threatening to shut down Pine Gap, the joint Australian-US spy station in the middle of Australia, and a key location for the CIA’s information gathering efforts in Asia.
The Governor-General of the time, John Kerr, had known ties to known CIA-backed organisations.
The US in the lead-up to the Dismissal appointed as its ambassador to Australia a man who has known connections to a coup in Indonesia, and he was also the ambassador to South Korea during a coup there.
Whitlam even threatened to reveal the identities of CIA agents in Australia.
A US military contractor has spoken out and said that the CIA internally referred to the Governor General as "our man Kerr".
The US had many clear motives for wanting this. They had the means thanks to Kerr. And they were afforded the opportunity by the Senate deadlock. There are certainly a few reasons to say otherwise, but at the very least it’s impossible to dismiss the theory as crackpot.
I'm not saying they wouldn't happily get back into the business of helping to undermine and overthrow democratically elected regimes if they thought they had a good reason, just that they haven't really done so since the end of the cold war.