With shocking revelations that made headlines in papers across the country, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Tim Weiner gets at the truth behind the CIA and uncovers here why nearly every CIA Director has left the agency in worse shape than when he found it; and how these profound failures jeopardize our national security.
The decline was part of a slow rot undermining the pillars of American national security. After four years of war in Iraq, the military was exhausted, bled by leaders who had invested far more in futuristic weapons than in uniformed soldiers. After five years of defending a foreign policy based on born-again faith, the State Department was adrift, unable to give voice to the values of democracy. And after six years of willful ignorance imposed by know-nothing politicians, congressional oversight of the agency had collapsed. The 9/11 Commission had said that of all the tasks facing American intelligence, strengthening congressional oversight might be the most difficult, and the most important. In 2005 and 2006, Congress responded by failing to pass the annual authorization bill for the CIA,... (查看原文)
At the end of Dwight Eisenhower’s years as president, a few days after he lamented the legacy of intelligence failures he would pass on to his successors, he gave his farewell address to the nation and famously warned: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Little more than half a century later, the surge of secret spending on national security after 9/11 had created a booming intelligence-industrial complex.
Corporate clones of the CIA started sprouting all over the suburbs of Washington and beyond. Patriotism for profit became a $50-billion-a-year business, by some estimates—a sum about the size of the American intell... (查看原文)
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还没人写过短评呢