This essay is a review of the book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

By Chalmers Johnson

The American people may not know it, but they have some severe problems with one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible for citizens to know what the CIA’s approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their share of the yearly US$44 billion to $48 billion or more spent on “intelligence”. This inability to account for anything at the CIA is, however, only one problem with the agency, and hardly the most serious one, either.

There are currently at least two criminal trials under way, in Italy and Germany, against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in those countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in Germany and Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt and Jordan for torture, and causing them to “disappear” into secret foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the United States without any form of due process of law.

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