Scott Ritter Rants On The CIA

This is an excerpt from How Close Is US to War?

I just think your audience needs to be reminded of the 1948 legislation that created the CIA and created the National Security Council. There is important language in there about the the role of the National Security Council which is, of course, a body that has no congressional oversight. The fact is that they [the CIA] can run a secret foreign policy, they can do things that are covert in nature--non reportable to the American people, non-reportable to Congress. They can lie, they can cheat, they can steal. Americans can have diplomats saying one thing while the CIA is doing another thing altogether. And that's just the way it is.

So when the president of the United States--and this is the disturbing thing about when the president of the United States is speaking to the American people in the State of the Union Address. Understand that it's likely that he's lying to the American people because we have secret foreign policy, and in Ukraine we've never told told the American public the truth. I mean, imagine what the discussion would have been in 2020, 2021, when we're talking about Russian troop movements. If the American people knew that the CIA since 2014 had 12 bases along the Ukrainian border collecting intelligence for potential offensive strikes inside Russia, imagine what the debate would be if we'd been informed of that. Instead, we're told, No, we're doing nothing! Those Russians are being aggressive! We haven't provoked the Russians! The truth is we do nothing but provoke them.

And here's the other thing. The president may be able to lie to the American people. The Russians know darn well what's going on. They knew those 12 bases are there. They know what the American policy is, and that's why they act the way they do. It would be nice if we would just, as a nation, decide that we don't want a CIA that carries out covert foreign policies, that for once ... we actually are in charge. But what it is, we're dupes. We are literally dupes whose elected government is allowed by law to lie, to carry out covert policy, to deny it to Congress. It's all deniable, and they're doing it over and over again. American ambassadors who work in the embassies are not the number one voice of the American people, it's the CIA Station Chief. The last president that tried to stop the CIA operations from overthrowing other countries had his brains blown out on November 22nd 1963.

If I were the president of the United States I could handle this very easily. It'd be called the Night of the Long Knives. All the CIA people wake up one morning with US Marshals at their door, their badges, their credentials, will be taken away, any weapons they had to be taken away. They'd be placed under some sort of home arrest until we investigate their role in this. The CIA would be shut down, US Marshals would flood in there and shut the whole thing down seize the documents, remove the people, and the CIA would cease to exist overnight. That's the way you do it.

It needs to happen because I'm here to tell you, right now the CIA is running a parallel government, they are running a parallel foreign policy, a parallel defense policy. We're being told one thing by the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, who have to go before the US Senate to be confirmed. The CIA ... reports to the National Security adviser and the National Security Council and there is no Senate confirmation process there. The American people need to take control of their government, take control of their foreign policy, take control of their defense policy.

Don’t hold your breath.