Over the last year, my views on the overall morality and honesty of the CIA have grown increasingly firm. I used to know nothing, now I have done light study of the larger mistakes of the general intelligence community in the United States. As a reaction to finding out massive areas of dishonesty, rampant immorality, and complete disregard for the rights of the American public, my mind has gone sour towards the CIA. 

Last night, my friend was watching a documentary on osama bin Laden, who I instinctively assumed was less of a threat than he was painted as, primarily because I believed WMD’s were a lie used to get America into a war. After watching the doc, I still feel the WMD argument was overstated to encourage war (and I have good data on this based off the events of the years prior to this war, which included the complete destruction of the nuclear program by the UN after the gulf war), but I have a new perspective on the CIA and intelligence agencies in general, particularly in light of the post 911 era they existed in. 

Through my shallow investigation and ongoing exposure to the worst of the worst in the CIA, I forgot that they spent the post 911 decade in constant fear of another horrible attack on America and they were working tirelessly against groups who openly expressed deep hatred for America and our allies. When I made a joke about bin Laden being a CIA asset (based on the fact that America armed and trained the Mujahideen to help them take on Soviets and many of Al qaida’s weapons were remnants of this war), my friend seemed offput and commented on how horrible bin Laden was. I assumed this was just an immune response to a narrative contrary to what the media presented, but after watching the film I completely get it.

While I retain my belief that Al-qaida’s sole motivation was not “they hate our freedom”, I now recognize that the religious extremism was truly a driving factor and Bin Ladens views on our support for wars in his land and his distate for our non-theocratic government resulted in him being a mass murdering piece of shit. I try to avoid statements like that since they are invariably subjective and heavily charged with emotion, but I now stand by it. 

In summary, I believe the CIA is full of humans, most of whom I genuinely believe want to protect America and its interests. High level officials in the CIA and government are far too comfortable with massaging the facts to increase support for the 30% of their decisions and initiatives that the public gets to see. Operation Iraqi freedom was both a logical reaction to the horrors of holy war and anti-american sentiment, and a see through attempt to “liberate natural resources”. I now see that it is CRITICAL to view historic events both through the “objective” lens of  hindsight with all the data available, but also through the more subjective lens of its time period, to get a full understanding of the social and emotional context in which life occurs.

TLDR: Hindsight is 2020, the fog of war is real, I must acknowledge both pieces of this to get to a real picture of history and the United States’ role in shaping  it. 

PS: I know basically nothing, I am still learning, I am constantly wrong, I am working on being okay with that.