Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to "Shocking", my foot.

Re: CIA
Tom Brosz — (archived)

<The CIA and Ollie North were trafficking in drugs, and using the profit to buy arms for the Contras.

This sounds juicy, but is of course not true. The truth is not that much better: that the CIA was dealing with characters (Contras and others) who may have themselves been dealing drugs to buy arms. Whether the CIA knew of this, and if so, on what levels, is still under argument. A good article on this can be found in that noted right-wing rag, Mother Jones.

This is not as interesting as the image of Ollie personally packing plastic bags with cocaine, but it is a lot more accurate.

During the Cold War, the CIA often dealt with sleazebags at many levels, some of which were certainly engaged in criminal activities. There were many things that the agency did that were not things to be proud of. Whether this was justified by the larger picture of preventing Soviet conquest of the planet is certainly arguable, and I'm not going to try to settle that question here.

Shocked by this and other things, we made rules for the CIA preventing it from employing drugrunners, terrorists, and other creeps as informants or non-CIA agents.

Later, after Sept. 11, everyone screamed at the CIA, asking them where the hell their informants were. So it goes.

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