Political Memes

I suggest we also collectively recall CIA can be both, given it's a pretty big institution. It's also been an evil fucker, presuming commercial interests based in the US count as US interests, even when those companies have become large multi-national corporations who actively avoid paying taxes.

I agree that it's gauche that surveillance companies will pass sufficiently saucy private pictures to their colleagues for a gander (a tradition since WWII that is still carried on in NSA deep-packet scans of internet communications. (That includes sext exchanges between teenage lovers.) Playing around with LSD (on each other, as a practical joke) sounds like it falls more into this category, which, I'll concede, is unprofessional especially for a department that has to sometimes engage in unethical action for sake of US national security, but that's different than incompetent

If I was going to be critical of them, it would be their propensity for assassinations (botched ones on occasion) when there were alternatives, abandoning liberation forces they had sworn to support and supply and putting down developing democratic regimes in favor of US-allied dictators. Or even that they fueled their budget by supporting and participating in major drug trafficking syndicates, but these things are not incompetent, they're immoral.

CIA's strength (in the 20th century, at least, was SIGINT, including codebreaking, and analysis (that is, developing accurate dossiers based on limited or scattered data), and CIA did a whole lot more of that than they did killing VIPs and supporting revolutionary force.

As a young adult, I realized being a field operative was dangerous, and besides I was better at research and analysis, which I wasn't imagining at all as a kid. Then by the time I understood the more gruesome parts of CIA history, George W. Bush was in office and they were torturing folks.