Intel competence

The CIA is not to be trusted

The CIA's brutal incompetence goes back virtually to the very moment of its founding. They spent most of the Cold War doing stuff like air-dropping thousands of people into China and Russia to get murdered, overthrowing foreign governments, spying on domestic dissidents, feeding random people LSD, screwing around with "psychic" charlatans, and so on.

Recent history is no exception. Most notoriously, on orders from the very top levels of the Bush administration, the CIA started and operated an illegal torture program which killed at least one person, and probably many more, in its custody. It provided no good intelligence and seriously damaged the agency's operational effectiveness. Then when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence attempted to conduct a mere investigation of that program, the CIA spied on the staffers conducting the investigation and reported them to the Department of Justice, in what Sen. Dianne Feinstein called "a potential effort to intimidate this staff."