Reddit reviews Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
We found 18 Reddit comments about Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIAWe found 18 Reddit comments about Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Thing is, MKULTRA was actually one of the more conservative things done by the CIA.
Intelligence is broken up into many categories; the broadest are HUMINT (HUMan INTelligence), SIGINT (SIGNals INTelligence) and IMINT (IMaging INTelligence). The United States has always had an inventive and ambitious culture and we tend to "invent" our way out of problems so it's no surprise that we've been a dominant force in SIGINT and IMINT since The Great War. The NSA - warrantless wiretapping, Semantic Forest, ECHELON and all the rest have SIGINT pretty well wrapped up while the NRO has both passive and active IMINT technologies unparalleled by anyone in the world. HUMINT, though...
Keep in mind that the United States didn't really become an ascendant world power until WWII. We wouldn't have been in WWI if it hadn't been advantageous to the British, who hacked our own telegraph wires to convince us that the Mexicans were going to form a treaty with the Kaiser to invade the US from the south. That relationship continued; after all, we were a fresh and shiny new world power and we were going toe-to-toe with regimes that had a tradition of tradecraft and skullduggery going back to the Roman Empire.
HUMINT in the United States, then, was kind of a "gentleman's club" of well-heeled, bad-mannered men who hung out with the British and French to pick up whatever bad habits they felt like giving us in hopes of picking up a little Machiavellian mastery. This is how we ended up with a guy named - I shit you not - Wild Bill Donovan creating the OSS, which eventually became the CIA.
And in the early days, things were pretty raucous. Policy was determined at dinner parties - if you wanted to rule the world, you came from the right family, attended the right prep schools, signed on with Wild Bill and drowned your liver several times a week as you sat around deciding how many ex-pats to parachute behind the Iron Curtain without any support whatsoever so they could end up shot (unofficial estimates put the number in the thousands). The OSS/CIA/State Department was so woefully out of their league that the Holy Grail of Soviet Foreign Policy, that which governed all HUMINT behavior until the fall of the Iron Curtain, was one that said the Soviets are crazy, they'll never see sense, wall them off and eventually they'll go away.
Meanwhile, the British were busy not sucking at HUMINT and, fresh and shiny new, a bunch of clever European ex-pats headed down to the Middle East and kicked the Palestinians out and those guys were useful, too. So, for 30 years, the British and Israelis led us around by a chain in our nose, giving us whatever HUMINT they found useful and receiving our SIGINT and ELINT in return. The shit we didn't know during the cold war would fucking curl your toes. The CIA was a profound failure from beginning to end and, as they didn't have to run for re-election and had very, VERY little oversight, were the primary motive force in shaping the modern world. You can blame the CIA for:
...the list goes on.
Something to keep in mind: Dick Cheney is... likely not a good person. There's no doubt that he led us directly into needless, endless war. However, when the former DCI of the CIA was running the country and led us into war with Iraq, the CIA had no.fucking.clue about any of the truly hardcore shit Iraq had going on until we had troops on the ground. So when the CIA said "we don't see any evidence for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq" ole Dick had no particular reason to value their opinion. After all, they'd yet to find evidence of jack shit in 50 years of operation.
TL;DR - The CIA was a lot more Austin Powers than James Bond.
The CIA's history is a Legacy of Ashes. It's a bit like how:
Certainly there are other ridiculous/damaging examples. This is the stuff politicians & bureaucrats do when they can do it secretly & without accountability, and why efforts like Wikileaks are so important.
Don't mean to derail, but I'm going to plug Legacy of Ashes
Americans have no idea how much damage the CIA has done to foreigners and to our image. It is a must read; especially now.
You can bet your ass the CIA is involved in North Africa and the Middle East right now.
After reading this book by a Pulitzer winning author, about how at least on two occasions in the '60s cabinet-level officials submitted plans to stage fake terror attacks on US soil to justify entering a war, and how they wanted to roll into the Russian blockade of Berlin starting WWIII, and how generals wanted to nuke the Chinese during the Korean War, and how they staged terror campaigns complete with killing civilians all over Central America and the Caribbean, I'd say perhaps more things are worthy of legitimate questions than a bunch of neckbeards would first assume.
http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/038551445X
You are massively overestimating the CIA's competence.
Well here's the thing Olpainless, they don't teach this in American schools. Modern US history in K-12 doesn't cover much about the middle east, and what it does cover certainly doesn't go in depth about CIA coups. If anything it focuses on the Cold War and the Soviet Union and even though events in Iran were possible because of Communist paranoia, it just isn't covered. They don't teach how the United States butchered tens of thousands of civilians in the Philippines around the turn of the century either, or anything that puts the lie to the propaganda of us being the light of freedom and justice in the world.
I urge everyone interested in the sad, sordid history of the CIA to read Legacy of Ashes. Really gives you perspective on how much of a failure our "intelligence" agency has been over the years.
I'm currently reading (well listening, it's an audiobook) "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA".
I'm no expert, but if even half of this is true, world history is greatly influenced by idiots and the criminally stupid.
Missing the failures.
http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/038551445X
You should probably read Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA if you truly believe that the US is the most benign empire in human history.
For at least the last 100 years, the US military has been used more to secure economic advantage for the well-connected than for any "humanitarian" or "global security" purposes.
There may have been a time when the US did not concern itself with expanding the empire or rigging global markets for the benefit of US financial and industrial conglomerates, but we're probably talking about the mid-late 1800's here.
Read "Legacy of Ashes". It's pretty realistic.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner also deals with the CIAs interventions and covert ops. It's one of my favourite books.
http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/038551445X
You're moving the goalposts again. You've gone from "justified" to "has some justification" and now to "don't deserve to be safe". But whatever.
>We don't intentionally kill large numbers of civilians because that has no benefit to US interests - if it did, America would and has done it.
That is a prejudiced conjecture and you ought to know it. I can think of a few times we've done something close to what you're describing (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden) and the factor I see as most prevalent is that we were responding to aggression and attempting to do something bad to avoid something much worse.
BTW, how should a nation act if not in its own interests?
>But Americans don't deserve to be safe while the people in less powerful countries have to fear having a bomb or drone strike intended for someone else landing on them, or fear having being falsely IDed as terrorist to the military and being shot or tortured or detained indefinitely, or having to fear their own government because the US has set up a pro-US dictator. Americans feel none of the pain of their wars, and so they do nothing to stop their government from doing whatever it wants.
So...because one group has it bad, both should? That's pretty bad logic. I would agree that we should try and create the best possible good in those countries, but legitimizing attacks on US civilians is a recipe for even more war and death; mostly on the Muslim side. So maybe the answer is "lets stop encouraging that by making more Americans aware of what is going on", not "lets kill Americans". One has a chance of working, the other ends in war.
Minor points:
>You mean the war that never should have happened in the first place, the one we lied to get into?
More banal, monolithic oversimplification. A small number of people in positions of great powere lied, not "we". Obviously Vietnam was a mistake. When Americans found that out they were...a bit miffed, you could say. Thus a President resigned and operations were scaled back. The only reason we didn't pull out immediately is the same reason we didn't pull out of Iraq immediately: logistics.
>And Iran Contra stopped us from selling weapons to our enemies to fund terrorists? What a huge leap forward! Those two leaks changed nothing about the way the US acts, it only meant they couldn't keep getting away with those specific criminal acts.
I would say that if something like that is happening and is stopped, that would constitute a huge leap forward.
That's demonstrably untrue. CIA covert operations were (as far as we know) scaled back drastically when the administration was caught doing that. (You might want to read Legacy of Ashes) In any case, you're not disproving the point: when the American people are apprised of government misbehavior, they generally demand an end to it. There is no reason to think that if the Arab world had made an effort to inform the American people (and hadn't been busy blowing up cafes and buses full of civilians in Israel or attempting full-on invasions with a stated goal of genocide a la '67) using civil methods of discourse (not airplane hijackings/bombings and car bombs) there's a reasonable chance we would have demanded an end to those policies. That was never even attempted.
You should read "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA"
> sen·sa·tion·al·ize: "(esp. of a newspaper) Present information about (something) in a way that provokes public interest and excitement, at the expense of accuracy"
Oh, look. Amoricon knows how to look up words in a dictionary. WOO!
> Yes the map is shit. It's almost a perfect example of something that has been sensationalized. Why would Australia and Vietnam be colored the same?
Because they're both countries that have at one time or another suffered the brunt of Americam imperialist interference. Like most of the fucking planet that happen to be colored the same. The map is trying to get across the truth, that far from standing for freedom and democracy, the USA is devoted to terrorizing and enslaving humanity. The USA is just another evil empire cut out of the same cloth as the Soviets, Nazi and Britshits. If you weren't an Americon dipshit apologist jingoist cretin you would have grasped that.
> What exactly was the "intervention" in Australia, or all of Europe for that matter?
You want me to give you a fucking history course on a huge subject as modern American imperialism on Reddit? Am I your own fucking personal internet tutor here? Is my name cojackass22s_tutor? No? Then stop being foolish, you Americon morans. Here are two excellent books dedicated to the subject of American tyrrany and hegemony:
Learn to fucking read and educate yourself. Stop demanding to be spoonfed like an Americon oaf.
> Uhh, I'm not saying the BBC is completely impartial and free of bias, but there is really no comparison here. At least the BBC acknowledges the fact that opposition to the government even exists...
No, you like the BBC because it's an organization run by an allied state. You dislike PressTV they're run by a society that resists American imperialism and hegemony. You dislike PressTV because they stand up for freedom and democracy against Americun tyrranny.
> You mean the news source that has to photo shop extra missiles onto images to make Iran look more threatening? The news source that not once has given any air time to any Iranian opposition leaders or speakers? "Opposition political figures such as Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi have not appeared on Press TV since the June 2009 presidential election."
So what? They lost the election. I don't see Mccain and Sarah Palin prancing about on Smericon TV much either.
> The news source that is state owned?
Just like the BBC except more reliable and trustworthy on world events.
I don't see how you can't admit that the US was no better than any faction in vietnam. They killed civilians to demoralize the populace. Operation Phoenix, if I remember correctly.
On the flip side, I read a book called Legacy of Ashes, A History of the CIA and that author apologizes for every horrible thing the US has ever done. He repeatedly blamed everything on good ideas gone wrong, incompetence, and a bit of zeal in attacking communism that might have gotten out of control.
For example, he admits that Guatemala was attacked by the CIA and a democratic leader, Arbenz, was removed, but then claims that 'although people accuse United Fruit of being involved, they were not. Unfortunately the fear of Communism got the better of too many people' blah blah blah.
I think Chomsky has a pretty solid view, because in Manufacturing Consent, he admits there is no conspiracy and in general people think they are doing good. There are people out there though (Dick Cheney comes to mine) who, I would think, really know exactly what is going on and how cut throat the US can be.
It's easy to say 'oh well the US just backed a dictator because it was the best choice of two evils at the time' but it is often bullshit, and Chomsky usually gives pretty solid evidence to show that it was not true.
Anyway, while Chomsky might sway a few degrees too far past what really happened, the rest of the media and most authors are waaaaaaay too far on the hopelessly deluded side. In my opinion.
God forbid you actually read primary sources.
From the article:
>Each revelation exposes more about the illegal, immoral, and counter-productive actions of the Bush administration and the CIA over the past eight years.
Umm. To anyone who's read Legacy of Ashes, you'll find the reference to "the past eight years" a bit laughable.
The CIA's problems go far deeper and have been around much longer than "eight years".
But I guess that's how one would politicize the issue.
I'm not going to keep arguing this, but if you think the administration that screwed up or flat out failed at everything it attempted somehow pulled this off without a hitch, you're fucking dim.
Might I suggest some reading material so you can educate yourself a bit on how things work in intelligence.