The folks at the CIA are chanting this: “Budget cuts will break our bones, but Feinstein cannot hurt us.”
The CIA and NSA have been hammered all year. But the public does not know what the government spends on them. Congress does not know. Their budget are never publicly cut. Never.
The Washington Post Reports:
The release of a searing report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA’s interrogation program Tuesday was the latest morale-sinking moment for an agency that has been buffeted repeatedly throughout its history, from the Bay of Pigs fiasco to the Nixon-era domestic abuses to the 1980s scandals tied to Iran and Latin America.
If anything, the cycle has only been compressed in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with at least four major investigations, not to mention criminal probes, during a frenetic 13-year span. That collection now includes a 528-page account of alleged CIA abuses and dishonesty in its brutal treatment of terrorism suspects.
The Senate report is a substantial blow to the CIA’s reputation, one that raises fundamental questions about the extent to which the agency can be trusted. And yet, as in those previous instances of political and public outrage, the agency is expected to emerge from the investigatory rubble with its role and power in Washington largely intact.
Indeed, the CIA is in many ways at a position of unmatched power. Its budgets have been swollen by billions of dollars in counterterrorism expenditures. Its workforce has surged. Its overseas presence has expanded. And its arsenal now includes systems, including a fleet of armed drones, that would have made prior generations of CIA leaders gasp.
Nothing will change.
The CIA never finds anything of significance. It doesn’t have to. As long as its black ops budget grows, it doesn’t matter.
There is no surveillance of the CIA’s budget. Nothing else matters.
There is no report to the nation on the CIA’s budgets, 1946-2014. Nothing else matters.
We get what we pay for. In the case of the CIA, we pay for what we get.
What we got was 9-11. Having failed to warn Bush, the CIA and FBI were rewarded by budget increases.
In government, nothing succeeds like failure.
