• PugJesus@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    My favorite part is when they lie to the president and Congress. Like, it’s not enough that they do dogshit evil for the US government, they have to do dogshit evil against it as well? Is evil just the highest goal of the CIA? Is the agency just staffed with sociopaths?

    … don’t answer that, actually.

    Letting the CIA develop a culture of criminality and invulnerability was a fucking mistake. Tear it down. Start over from the ground up.

    • Dressedlikeapenguin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Behind the Bastards podcast has taught me that we will never fix the culture, will only sometimes remove individuals, and it will always be shitty.

    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Letting the CIA develop a culture of criminality and invulnerability was a fucking mistake. Tear it down. Start over from the ground up.

      Can that be done without negatively affecting their actual job of countering negative powers like Russia?

      • PugJesus@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yes, absolutely. The culture of criminality and invulnerability is not even helpful to their job. Running drugs to fund black sites where they torture people for shits and giggles is not actually in any way vital to the purported functions of the CIA. More oversight would do them good.

        Unless you’re asking if tearing it down and rebuilding it can be done without a period of reduced efficacy, in which case, no, that’s a price that would have to be paid.

      • CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Nope. And their shenanigans killing some people isn’t a problem on a bigger scale. They have done more good than evil and as long as it’s a net positive its ok.

  • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Even Australia is not immune.

    (Not really, this is just a fun conspiracy theory with one of our most impactful PMs)

    • Zagorath
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      1 year ago

      It’s really not that wild of a theory.

      • The Australian government of the time was very left wing, doing things like creating universal healthcare and education.
      • Whitlam was threatening to shut down Pine Gap, the joint Australian-US spy station in the middle of Australia, and a key location for the CIA’s information gathering efforts in Asia.
      • The Governor-General of the time, John Kerr, had known ties to known CIA-backed organisations.
      • The US in the lead-up to the Dismissal appointed as its ambassador to Australia a man who has known connections to a coup in Indonesia, and he was also the ambassador to South Korea during a coup there.
      • Whitlam even threatened to reveal the identities of CIA agents in Australia.
      • A US military contractor has spoken out and said that the CIA internally referred to the Governor General as “our man Kerr”.

      The US had many clear motives for wanting this. They had the means thanks to Kerr. And they were afforded the opportunity by the Senate deadlock. There are certainly a few reasons to say otherwise, but at the very least it’s impossible to dismiss the theory as crackpot.

      • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Agreed, as far as conspiracy theories go this is definitely on the more credible side at least in my view. I just didn’t want to present it as fact.

          • Zagorath
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            1 year ago

            Yup. Here’s a snippet from their Wikipedia page:

            Freedman named the band after the former Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, although Plunder had sought to call themselves, ‘The Three Nice Boys’. According to Freedman “I loved the family names—the Smiths, the Reivers. I thought, the Whitlams, no-one’s done that. I’ll be able to steal all the goodwill that Australia holds in reserve for Gough Whitlam.”

            Also, if you didn’t see it already, there are actually a lot of really good reasons to suspect US involvement in the event that has come to be known as “The Dismissal”. A brief explanation of some of them are in another comment further up the page.

  • mlg@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Looks over at Pakistan army getting bribed for the nth time to remove the government

  • BigNote@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The Cold war called and wants its meme back.

    I’m not saying they wouldn’t happily get back into the business of helping to undermine and overthrow democratically elected regimes if they thought they had a good reason, just that they haven’t really done so since the end of the cold war.

  • armrods@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Fuck socialism, I lived 30 years in Venezuela (and don’t blame the sanctions, they just started in 2019)

    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      That was more an issue with a couple corrupt dictators. Varying degrees of democratic socialism are perfectly fine.

    • FaeDrifter@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Since joining lemmy I’ve learned that apparently gloabal socialism can’t handle a single 3-letter agency.

      • Destraight@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        No it doesn’t. You’re just throwing out random country words with no link to back it up. Your point is moot

          • Lianodel@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            And to tack onto that, it’s part of the broader Operation Condor.

            Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, also known as Plan Cóndor; Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state terrorism involving intelligence operations, CIA-backed coup d’états, as well as assassinations of left-wing socialist leaders in South America from 1968 to 1989.