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Here's my meditation for 9/11.
Long-time followers know I blame the CIA for 9/11... not because I think they "did it", but because of what they didn't do, and all the useless, pointless, evil things they did instead.
World War II and the Cold War in its wake saw an explosion of alphabet soup intelligence agencies. Military, government, hybrid. All of them had pieces of the puzzle but no one could put them together.
What was needed, learned men said, was someone to watch the big picture.
What was needed, learned men said, was someone to watch the big picture.
If you were old enough to absorb the boring parts of news (or worse, find it interesting) in the days and months after 9/11, this might sound eerily familiar! Nearly six decades after the end of World War II and two of them since the fall of the USSR, and we were in the same boat
How can it be that the same problem we had back in the 1940s was still afflicting us in the 21st century, and worse, had allowed a devastating series of attacks to be pulled off when we had all the puzzle pieces to stop them?
Did we never actually try to solve it?
Did we never actually try to solve it?
I guess it wouldn't be an easy problem to tackle. You'd need some kind of agency for handling all the intel, some kind of intelligence agency in the middle of it all, some kind of centralized intelligence agency...
We didn't found the CIA to play at being Bond villains all over the globe. A "CIA field operative" ought to be a contradiction in terms. Its original mission was all desk job: to analyze, collate, correlate, collaborate, and corroborate among the agencies that collected intel.
But the National Security Act of 1947, which restructured the intelligence apparatus of the US, included language that said the CIA director shall also perform 'other functions and duties" as deemed necessary by the NatSec council.
Now every single body established or re-organized by the National Security Act had a codicil like that, because laws that establish agencies tend to have some stretch in them so you don't have to constantly pass new laws to accommodate unforeseen eventualities.
But unless they've done a better job of covering it up, none of the other bodies mentioned in the Act decided "other duties as deemed necessary" is wide enough to encompass, "So, if it's deemed a matter of national security that we, just like, murder a dude, we can?"
Other duties and functions the CIA has performed as necessary include: running drugs out of other countries, selling drugs in predominantly Black neighborhoods to destabilize them and provide money to destabilize other countries, assassination (character and just regular type)...
...doing mind control experiments on US citizens, trying to make Fidel Castro's cigar explode, researching chemicals that would turn Communists gay (I have some anecdotal evidence they may have managed a kind of success there), weaponizing bats (we tried that in WWII, too)...
A full accounting of the things the CIA has actually, provably, and in some cases admittedly done in the 72 years of its existence veers between hellacious evil and cartoonishly evil. Murder, coups, terror, drugs... gay bombs and exploding cigars.
And while the CIA was doing all this, guess what they basically completely stopped doing? An agency whose whole bag has become secret, quasi-legal (but actually very illegal) dirty tricks, stuff kept off the books, can't be the clearinghouse for information. Doesn't work.
And they so completely reinvented themselves away from their original purpose that in the days and months after 9/11, all the very learned talking heads on the television and voices on the radio who were saying "We need someone to mind the store."... none brought up the CIA.
And all the talk about "someone has to watch the big picture" post-9/11 got us the DHS, which... you have to take off your shoes to get on an airplane, and also we're terrorizing immigrants and people who racists think look like they might be immigrants. Security!
"We need someone to manage all this intel."
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to install brutal dictators, turn Afghanistan into a vast opium field, and turn enemies gay.
"We need someone to manage all this intel."
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to put people in camps.
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to install brutal dictators, turn Afghanistan into a vast opium field, and turn enemies gay.
"We need someone to manage all this intel."
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to put people in camps.
I don't know. I was going to say that maybe it's Cowboy Culture, that every time we set out to make a boring desk job agency it winds up being run as though the guy from Die Hard and the guy from 24 are in a penis-measuring contest over how to save Murica from the terrorists...
But Die Hard and 24 don't give us MKUltra (yes, that's a real thing) or the TSA.
So I don't know what it is, exactly. But as a country, we can't save our lives to save our lives.
So I don't know what it is, exactly. But as a country, we can't save our lives to save our lives.
And to be clear, when I say "Cowboy Culture" as a pejorative I don't mean Yee Haw and Howdy Partner. You take that horse to the old town road. I mean Yippee Ki Yay, Mr. Falcon.
Anyway, I invariably lose followers when I start ranting about the CIA and especially when I mention their share of responsibility for 9/11. I know! I know exactly what it sounds like. And that's part of how they do it.
If you say that the CIA gave US citizens various doses of LSD and other substances in illegal experiments into the limits of mind control, you sound like a conspiracy theorist. Every movie and show that wants to tell you a character is a paranoid whackjob has them mention it.
Shorthand in our culture for "person who will believe any far-fetched, overly complicated, and ridiculous thing" is to have them mention something the CIA actually in real life actual fact did.
Post 9/11, the consensus was "no one was minding the store".
No one talked about how we had someone whose one job, whose literal one specified job, was doing that, but they were busy performing "other duties and functions".
No one talked about how we had someone whose one job, whose literal one specified job, was doing that, but they were busy performing "other duties and functions".
And now we have the Department of Homeland Security, and that history is in the process of being repeated.
When people say "Never forget.", I never forget that as a nation we decided we'd rather have a roster of semi-tame supervillains than an agency of qualified analysts collating intelligence in a way that makes it useful.
