How to Eliminate the CIA

Dear Mr. President,

Your nomination of Dr. Death as Head Spook at the CIA has caused a lot of speculation about whether he’ll return the agency to its traditional role—stealing state secrets from other countries. Are they serious? Do they really think the architect of drone wars, targeted assassinations and kill lists is going back to petty theft? That the guy who helped you transform the CIA from a bunch of hapless bozos into long distance video-gamers is going back to stealing state secrets? A guy who can monitor anyone anywhere without restraint is going back to tapping a few phones in embassies and government offices? No way! The spooks have gone big time; they’re not about to give up their Predators and Reapers, their Hellfires and computer screens. They’re addicted to violence and that’s a hard habit to kick. An op-ed in this morning’s New York Times, “Secret Double Standard” by Ted Gup, focused on the double standard that exists within the agency, where Jose Rodriguez, as a Deputy Director at the CIA, illegally ordered videotapes of torture destroyed and is now a published author and public speaker and the CIA has no beef with him, but John Kiriakou, a critic of torture, is facing 30 months in prison for revealing the name of a covert agent to a reporter even though the agent’s name was never made public. (Not to mention Scooter Libby, convicted of the same crime but thanks to Bush’s pardon, never spent a day in jail.) From the op-ed article, it’s clear the CIA has lost its moral center—assuming it ever had one—and their primary job, stealing secrets, has, in the words of present and former CIA-ers, “atrophied.” Then I read about the “judge”—U.S. Army Col. Denise Lind—presiding over the military court martial—aka, kangaroo court—of Bradley Manning, calling his treatment in Kuwait and Quantico “illegal” and reducing any prison sentence by 112 days (a moot point if he gets life) but refusing to dismiss the trumped-up charges against him. And then it hit me, a way to cut spending. If the main job of the CIA is stealing secrets, fund Wikileaks, pay bounties to those who provide them video, audio and documents that reveal state secrets, and presto! no need for the CIA. Think of the money you can save, Mr. President, not to mention disbanding an agency with a long history of ineptitude, failure, and human rights violations. Of course, you’d have to dismantle them as a paramilitary force too, and that might be a challenge, but it makes perfect sense to me.