The CIA has supposedly done some great things for the USA, and I'd applaud them for that, except I don't know those things are because it's classified. The only time we hear about it is when they screw up, and we only hear that 10 years after the fact. The agency is built on an unstable, inherently defective design of secrecy that cannot function effectively in a democratic society.

Furthermore, the nature of their operation is questionable at best. They are in the business of clandestine operations, the sort of things we don’t want to admit to. The CIA has a very ugly track record that left a path of destruction through central America. It’s their job to do thing that we ourselves, other countries, and international agreements all label as illegal. Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys?

And there’s the argument that all of these dirty actions have come back to bite us. It’s a term called “blowback”. If you give people a reason to hate you, they will go to great length to harm you. Al-Qaeda needs to be hunted down and destroyed. But it needs to be done in a way that the rest of the world, our children, and the majority of the USA will be proud of. Otherwise they will be martyrs, and their children, countrymen, and brothers of the faith will find us to be “the bad guy” and they will hate us. And they will seek revenge. And our children will witness our past and will have to go through all of this again. So America must be loved. America must give the world reason to love us.

But that isn’t the CIA’s job. The war that the CIA was made for has already been won, no thanks to them. Soviet Russia collapsed under it’s own oppressive weight and when the Berlin wall fell, the CIA had no operative in the country. They had to watch CNN like the rest of the world.

I’d like to tell you how much we could save by removing them, but those funds are black listed. It’s probably a lot.