For Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, an RPI academic board member, the CIA has botched its mission, post 9/11, and has reached what he called “the pinnacle of incompetence,” to where it has become a detriment to the United States. In a recent interview on the Real News Network, Wilkerson advised that this incompetence was not only about the recent Senate torture report. The Senate report, according to Wilkerson, gives us only a very limited view of how the CIA botched its mission, but even that glimpse is a good start if the mistakes are to be corrected.
Program host Paul Jay makes an excellent point in response, which is how can one be so up in arms over the torture of perhaps hundreds of individuals when one does not condemn illegal US wars that have been responsible for the deaths of perhaps a million people directly and indirectly. Said Jay, “if we are going to have a foreign policy rooted in ‘we’ve got to dominate the globe’…rooted in we need to be a global empire, then you had better be willing to have atrocities committed by state security services.”
Both host and guest agreed, however, that it is the covert action part of the CIA that is the main problem and that the original 1947 Act that created the CIA did not allow for the operational side of the agency.
Paul Jay finishes the segment:
My major point is this: don’t–and I’m talking to the people in Congress who voted for the Iraq War Resolution; I’m talking for people even like President Obama that was opposed to the war and then defends that war–don’t cry so many tears about the torture when you’re defending the death of maybe a million people killed in a war that was illegal.
Watch the conversation here:
