Has the CIA ever done anything right?

[Shroom Man 777]

The Glomar Explorer. They got Howard Huge and went on a grand expedition to recover the wreckage of a Soviet submarine, and they even gave the dead an honorable burial at sea. That was pretty classy, and involved James Bondish technologies too.

[The Spartan]

Thing is, in this case absence of evidence leaves us with no idea what their success rate is. It might honestly be in our best interests to fire the lot of them for all I know, and I'm never going to find out. And they like it that way.

Which bothers me, for some reason.

Well, in theory, there is Congressional Oversight so it's not like they're totally unleashed for want of a better term. So it's usually only the general public who doesn't hear about their success, for the most part, mainly just the public failures.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that congressional oversight can easily get folded into the same "them:" the community running our foreign affairs.

In domestic issues we don't have this problem: there may be widespread disagreement about (for example) how to view the national health care system, but at least the facts are available to anyone who seeks them in good faith. They're not being kept secret from the voters, though it's still possible for a big enough propaganda engine to lie to the voters.

In foreign affairs, the propagandists can lie and the truth of the matter is kept secret. This makes it far easier to (for example) sweep us into an optional war. We're so used to intelligence documents covering whether there's a reason to fight a war being secret that no one outside the policymaker community actually expects to ever get to read them. That conceals our strategic thinking from our enemies, but it also conceals it from the voters- which means that the politicians responsible are a lot less likely to get punished by the public for doing things wrong. And even if they do get punished, the punishment may still land on the wrong person, because no one is in a good position to identify the people responsible for the bad decision.

Ideally, an active, investigative Congress could fix this, if it were responsive enough to the public interest. But we don't have such a Congress. We have a trough-fed, lazy Congress that only stands to benefit from continued 'business as usual'.