The most important single fact about the CIA and the only fact that anybody knows for sure is that the CIA is stupid, and way back when I was occasionally invited to parties on Embassy Row in Washington (because of the Harvard Cyclotron) I proved this over and over with a little game.
“The stupidest person at every party in Washington always works for the CIA,” I would say, and inevitably some guy in white socks would get red in the face and blurt out…
“That’s not true!”
But it was all too true, and the CIA has demonstrated this self-evident proposition once again by jumping the shark with their already ridiculous story about the death of Osama bin Laden.
It wasn’t enough just to kill one sick old Arab chained to a dialysis machine in a house with no telephones. It wasn’t enough to kill one sick old Arab that it cost us more than $1 trillion to kill.
They had to jump the fucking shark!
They also had to prove that all that torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was a very good thing!
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who was repeatedly subjected to methods including “waterboarding” and stress positions, provided the CIA with the name of bin Laden’s personal courier, according to US officials. The killing of the world’s most wanted man as a direct result of information obtained from Guantanamo detainees such as KSM will reignite the debate over whether torture is a legitimate interrogation technique in the “war on terror”.
Torture paid off!
HURRAH!!!
Now we can forget all those pesky accusations about crimes against humanity and the Geneva Conventions! Torture saved us from UBL! Case closed!
And this is exactly the same kind of overkill that couldn’t stop piling new and ever more incredible weapons into the arsenal of Saddam Hussein until the CIA had inflated him from a tin-pot dictator with a rusted-out army all the way to the status of SUPERHUMAN MONSTER, who supposedly possessed not only the kind of armament that he might have actually possessed, like chemical and biological weapons, but also a whole fleet of totally imaginary drone-bombers which could fly all the way from Baghdad to Manhattan, along with 500 tons of yellow-cake for non-existent nuclear weapons.
This was exactly the same kind of overkill that couldn’t stop piling new and ever more HORRIBLE CONSEQUENCES upon the very idea of losing the War in Vietnam! It wasn’t enough that Vietnam would be re-united under a communist ally of the Russians! The CIA also had to “prove” that dominoes would fall all the way from Saigon to London unless we sent yet another hundred thousand soldiers to fight and die in those god-forsaken rice-paddies! Western Civilization will die! Defeat is not an option! Be very afraid! And don’t just feel fear…
Piss your pants and give us all your money!
So of course anybody with minimal intelligence immediately sees right through these ridiculously exaggerated stories…
But that still leaves 85% of the American electorate to piss their pants and give away all their money.