As much fun as it is to laugh at Castro’s exploding cigars or whatever, I think the narrative of CIA as a bunch of incompetents is actually pretty harmful to the left. Sure they’ve done a few really dumb things, but they’ve been incredibly fucking effective in staging coups, assassinations, and all sorts of other horrific shit, like look into pretty much every bad thing in the last 70-odd years and it’s bound to have their grubby little pawprints all over it. That’s a pretty fucking good strikerate, and painting them as incompetent can make us lose sight of just how effective they’ve been at fucking up the world
To the agent reading this: when you’re done jerking yourself off, please go throw yourself off a cliff in minecraft
The CIA isn’t incompetent. The CIA has enough funding and political power to throw everything, including Wiley Cayoty contraptions, at the wall to see what sticks. We just only hear about what goes wrong. That way they can get more funding and hide their actual insidious shit.
Yeah and to add to this, imagine that the exploding cigars had worked - we would have been hearing “lol commies so stupid died from an exploding cigar what a chump” for decades now from the most insufferable people on earth, it would have been a huge propaganda win beyond just killing Castro. So yeah if I was in charge of the CIA, fuck it why not give it a shot?
I think MK-Ultra is a good example of this. There are a lot of people who know about it, but only as agents bumbling around putting LSD in each other’s coffee, not developing torture techniques they later exported around the world. I’m sure the CIA prefers the former.
And the only reason we even know THAT is because they archived 20k pages or so in the financial building by accident. The rest of the info was all destroyed for being way too spicy, I imagine.
As much fun as it is to laugh at Castro’s exploding cigars or whatever, I think the narrative of CIA as a bunch of incompetents is actually pretty harmful to the left. Sure they’ve done a few really dumb things, but they’ve been incredibly fucking effective in staging coups, assassinations, and all sorts of other horrific shit, like look into pretty much every bad thing in the last 70-odd years and it’s bound to have their grubby little pawprints all over it. That’s a pretty fucking good strikerate, and painting them as incompetent can make us lose sight of just how effective they’ve been at fucking up the world
To the agent reading this: when you’re done jerking yourself off, please go throw yourself off a cliff in minecraft
when you have unlimited resources and backed by the most powerful state in human history, you can afford to be incompetent once in while.
The CIA isn’t incompetent. The CIA has enough funding and political power to throw everything, including Wiley Cayoty contraptions, at the wall to see what sticks. We just only hear about what goes wrong. That way they can get more funding and hide their actual insidious shit.
Yeah and to add to this, imagine that the exploding cigars had worked - we would have been hearing “lol commies so stupid died from an exploding cigar what a chump” for decades now from the most insufferable people on earth, it would have been a huge propaganda win beyond just killing Castro. So yeah if I was in charge of the CIA, fuck it why not give it a shot?
“Smoke my cigar” would become the new “ride my helicopter” for reactionaries.
I think MK-Ultra is a good example of this. There are a lot of people who know about it, but only as agents bumbling around putting LSD in each other’s coffee, not developing torture techniques they later exported around the world. I’m sure the CIA prefers the former.
I mean, what we know about MKULTRA is what CIA decided to release about it. It’s not a coincidence.
And the only reason we even know THAT is because they archived 20k pages or so in the financial building by accident. The rest of the info was all destroyed for being way too spicy, I imagine.