Will CIA End Dirty Work?
Opinion CIA Director Burns: What U.S. intelligence needs to do today — and tomorrow
July 7, 2023
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/07/cia-director-william-burns-ditchley-speech-adaptation/
Apt for Mr. Burns to describe his early work as a diplomat for that is how spies are listed in US embassies' public rosters. The column is quite impressive for being written by a CIA head when most foreign policy statements are attributed to others. And it is unexpectedly moderate in tone rather than aggressive such as that of CIA officers, ex and current.
Perhaps the national security suspicious, paranoid, accusatory, high alert era is winding down after the decades since 1947 when the sqwalling brat was born in the aftermath of WW2, sustained by the Cold War, goosed by the Korean Police Action, enthusiastically pursued with Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, whereever, deleriously welcomed by Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, and nutured with ops in Africa, Latin America, Pakistan, Mongolia, Taiwan, yadda yadda, not to dare mention 9/11 windfall.
Will global and domestic spying diminish in this promised new era or just dress in different couture, shade different scholarly studies, colorize horrors with astronomically-beguiling subterfuges?
Mr. Burns suggests a kindly retirement of the old way of fighting dirty and rise of a youthful optimism to combat the climate damage threat, worldwide of course, by all means fair and foul, diplomatically under cover.
If you would, please pardon my coat-tail riding and colorful fabric weaving in advance. I appeal for greater perspicuity and reflective doubt in good faith. As architects, I pray you will appreciate the value of a hearty critique.
"Will global and domestic spying diminish in this promised new era or just dress in different couture, shade different scholarly studies, colorize horrors with astronomically-beguiling subterfuges?"
This sentence gets better as it comes to its conclusion, enabling as it does an appropriately open ended, vivid and dark imagination. But, for as far as it goes, I think the image still confines or limits the potential of the Intelligence Apparatus's immanent evolution too innocently into a quaint third-generation-warfare style of framing that doesn't explicitly do justice to our mutually-held legitimate concerns about the future. 'Astronomic beguilement' begins to touch upon it, yet such does not take infinity and oblivion sufficiently into account.
My critique is that the image's lack of specificity, and, to my awareness, that of your other writing, maintains an almost mainstream-level of rosy depiction of the professional intelligence class, even if that depiction includes 'all means fair and foul, diplomatically,' as the vision is one that does not satisfactorily integrate awareness of Whitney Webb's history concerning "The Enterprise" in the CIA's shadow.
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Your short blog post comment on Burns - fine complaint thought it is - is as if sanitary enough for the New York Times, itself, which has had at least 12 Langley reps in situ since 1959, according to the authority of Bill Pepper. [Start ~minute 34:30] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0k19cpPIlWQ
The picture of what is to come is much more dire - or at least, I assert that a healthy paranoia within us should be able to consider the costs and benefits, which we may collectively and individually face, lest we be caught with our pants down in pursuit of a bait and switch. In the worst case scenario, if we entertain the notion that current powers-that-be - both those proud of the proscenium and those behind the curtain - will achieve some combination of their officially stated goals about a unified global civilization AND a regression of the actual track-record of past events, recent and distant, intentional or not (the ever-convenient "9/11 windfall" comes to mind) into the future, then it will look more specifically something like this: