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The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

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Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#111

Post by Spooky23 »

Zakharov wrote: post #40
knowtheory wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an Epic Level difference between a government agency who is ultimately responsible for their conduct to their citizens, one way or another having a secret assassination program, and a government paying a 3rd party to carry out assassinations. One particular way in which this is different, is that the CIA can't go out and decide that it (as an organization) wants to freelance for other nations or organization…

They're not moonlighting for the Zetas or the Russian mob because if they were, they'd lose billions of dollars of CIA money.

Really? Sounds like a great opportunity to blackmail the CIA to me.

One of the disadvantages of committing illegal and morally questionable acts is that you become vulnerable to the consequences of the disclosure of those acts.

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#112

Post by lusr »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #109
lusr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What puzzles me is why the person delegating authority is not considered responsible for the actions of those whom authority has been delegated to. Authority was delegated, not responsibility.

Plausible deniability is a velvety layer of insulation between the people who carry out the acts and the person elected or appointed to take responsibility. By the time the denials, obfuscations, delays, hand-wiping, shoulder-shrugging and tied-hands miming is done, the guilty parties are gone and the trail is so convoluted that it becomes very difficult to prove that the leader was anything more than ignorant of wha…

Right but if you create a layer of plausible deniability you are still responsible for the consequences. If the head honcho says "Yeah you can kill the people on the list I haven't seen" I don't understand why seeing the list is a requirement for them to be responsible. Otherwise, what is the point of them authorising the act? May as well not bother.

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#113

Post by RyanMcGreal »

lusr wrote: post #112
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plausible deniability is a velvety layer of insulation between the people who carry out the acts and the person elected or appointed to take responsibility. By the time the denials, obfuscations, delays, hand-wiping, shoulder-shrugging and tied-hands miming is done, the guilty parties are gone and the trail is so convoluted that it becomes very difficult to prove that the leader was anything more than ignorant of wha…

Right but if you create a layer of plausible deniability you are still responsible for the consequences. If the head honcho says "Yeah you can kill the people on the list I haven't seen" I don't understand why seeing the list is a requirement for them to be responsible. Otherwise, what is the point of them authorising the act? May as well not bother.

It's the difference between being held responsible (politically, maybe, eventually) for a botched policy execution and being held responsible legally for a criminal act. Plausible deniability shields you from the former for long enough that the political news cycle has stopped caring and shields you almost absolutely from the latter.

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#114

Post by Spooky23 »

refurb wrote: post #70
heretohelp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Reagan forcing the issue by spending the Soviets into insolvency because of the arms race I agreed with most of what you said but you're wrong here, the Saudis forced the Soviets into insolvency because they didn't like the Soviet actions in Iran and Afghanistan. The Saudis were able to sell oil at a lower price than the USSR, took advantage of that and broke them. Any extra spending incurred by Reagan is a drop in…

"A central instrument for putting pressure on the Soviet Union was Reagan’s massive defense build-up, which raised defense spending from $134 billion in 1980 to $253 billion in 1989. This raised American defense spending to 7 percent of GDP, dramatically increasing the federal deficit. Yet in its efforts to keep up with the American defense build-up, the Soviet Union was compelled in the first half of the 1980s to ra…

Consider the other event that was contributing to that 20% increase in defense spending. (ie. the Afghanistan war)

Afghanistan was part of the Russian sphere of influence since the days of the imperial "Great Game" era. The Russians didn't invade Afghanistan because they got a kick out of tribal politics -- their sphere of influence was being threatened.

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#115

Post by chubbard »

autodidakto wrote: post #94
knowtheory wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that's probably why they changed it again. Blackwater was a comically villainous name to begin with.

Not only is it comically villainous, it's the technical term for waste water from toilets. That is, sewage. Whoever is picking their names needs to be, uhm, shot.

It has nothing to do with sewage.

Blackwater got it names from the swamps surrounding the area: "the Great Dismal Swamp, a vast swamp on the North Carolina/Virginia border, now mostly a National Wildlife Refuge...There, he created his state-of-the-art private training facility and his contracting company, Blackwater, which he named for the peat-colored water of the swamp.[10]"

But apparently if Blackwater wanted to shot the person that named it they can do that.

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#116

Post by runjake »

Zakharov wrote: post #40
knowtheory wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an Epic Level difference between a government agency who is ultimately responsible for their conduct to their citizens, one way or another having a secret assassination program, and a government paying a 3rd party to carry out assassinations. One particular way in which this is different, is that the CIA can't go out and decide that it (as an organization) wants to freelance for other nations or organization…

They're not moonlighting for the Zetas or the Russian mob because if they were, they'd lose billions of dollars of CIA money.

Count the number of shell corporations Academi (formerly Blackwater) has. I lost count at about 100 of them, and I'm sure there's many, many more.

Now, track what each shell corp does and who their customers are. I hope you have a vast team dedicated to sorting that out.

Academi is staffed by experienced, former CIA personnel who know the ins and outs of the trade.

And if you further need convincing, look at Air America and South American CIA operations where the CIA didn't even know what was going on under their OWN chain of command.

The CIA is (mostly) not some mystical, all-seeing spy organization. They suffer the same problems as any company/agency of their size. Bureaucracy, and especially PHBs.

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#117

Post by yourapostasy »

heretohelp wrote: post #54
briandear wrote: post #38

It's almost ridiculous how some people get so indignant about CIA; I can almost feel their spittle as they shout at their computer screens. At the same time, people get equally outraged when terrorists kill people and then want to blame CIA for their failings. It's a bad world. I am not sympathetic to the plight of those who associate with terrorists (even if they themselves haven't committed a terrorist act) and fin…

>Reagan forcing the issue by spending the Soviets into insolvency because of the arms race I agreed with most of what you said but you're wrong here, the Saudis forced the Soviets into insolvency because they didn't like the Soviet actions in Iran and Afghanistan. The Saudis were able to sell oil at a lower price than the USSR, took advantage of that and broke them. Any extra spending incurred by Reagan is a drop in…

You, briandear, and refurb are painting with broad strokes where a more nuanced view might provide more insight. See the Reynolds, Kolodziej paper [1]. It was a complex situation with many factors.

I was curious about your claim, so I did some cursory digging to compare defense spend against potential oil export revenue. "Potential" because I can't find evidence the USSR exported before 1990.

According to some inflation-adjusted data I found [2], from 1980-1990 (approximately the period everyone is likely discussing here), in real terms the $/bbl dropped from $104.49 to $40.67. At this point the analysis of your claim becomes rather challenging. According to the US EIA [3], the USSR had no import/export figures to report prior to 1992. What we have left is to posit their total imputed revenue loss upon all production, and guess at their losses from various barter-like trades they performed for the oil. I'd appreciate it if anyone had more accurate data (unfortunately, Wolfram Alpha doesn't have this kind of data).

Assume for the sake of discussion you were right, and the Saudis pushed down the price of oil from 1980-1990. How much did this cost the USSR in lost oil production revenue? I pulled total production numbers from an US EIA spreadsheet [4]. By my calculations (I'll post the spreadsheet to a Google Docs if anyone is really interested in pursuing this), it is $2.2375E+12 USD in real terms, or $2.2T in round numbers. Even if the USSR consumed 50% and exported the rest in swap trades, that is still $1.1T over 10 years.

Taking refurb's numbers on defense spend and assuming an equal distribution across 10 years of $13.2B extra per year, or $132B over 10 years for the US. Even if we assume the USSR kept pace with that spending, or even doubled, you are right, the potential export losses on USSR oil dwarf the defense spending. If I were Russian, I'd want a Putin at the head of the table in a geopolitical climate that engineers that kind of machination, too. If this was engineered as some claim, it is one of the greatest untold stories of market manipulation and geopolitical chutzpah of astonishing scale.

Here is where it gets interesting and I can't connect the dots to tie up your theory. If you look at the US EIA figures [5], Saudi Arabian production dropped from 1980-1985. That is not consistent with the theory that Saudi Arabia pushed down prices during that period, as one would expect them to flood the market to accomplish a price decline.

I'm intrigued to hear other explanations of what caused that precipitous price decline in the 1980-1990 period that would be consistent with the available data.

[1] http://people.bu.edu/marek/FSU_Oil_Decline.pdf

[2] http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical...

[3] http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=RS&tr...

[4] http://www.eia.gov/ipm/supply.html

[5] http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=SA#pet

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#118

Post by woobar »

yourapostasy wrote: post #117
heretohelp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Reagan forcing the issue by spending the Soviets into insolvency because of the arms race I agreed with most of what you said but you're wrong here, the Saudis forced the Soviets into insolvency because they didn't like the Soviet actions in Iran and Afghanistan. The Saudis were able to sell oil at a lower price than the USSR, took advantage of that and broke them. Any extra spending incurred by Reagan is a drop in…

You, briandear, and refurb are painting with broad strokes where a more nuanced view might provide more insight. See the Reynolds, Kolodziej paper [1]. It was a complex situation with many factors. I was curious about your claim, so I did some cursory digging to compare defense spend against potential oil export revenue. "Potential" because I can't find evidence the USSR exported before 1990. According to some inflat…

the USSR had no import/export figures to report prior to 1992

You are looking at the data for Russia. Which was a part of the USSR until 1992m hence there is no stats prior to 1992. This link will help [1]

[1] http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Oil-Prices-And-The-Fal...

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#119

Post by bdunbar »

Volpe wrote: post #76
bdunbar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the CIA get upset when France developed and tested nuclear weapons? France at the time was a member of NATO. So, no, probably not. Do some countries deserve trust while others don't? I would rephrase it 'do some governments deserve trust ... Yes. Intent matters. The UK is not possibly going to blow up New York City. For a while there in the 50s and 60s the same could not be said for the USSR. What has North Korea…

As I've said in other threads. How about Israel, they do all of those things[1], have Nukes, and are massive aggressors in their part of the world. [1](Except the Stalinism)

1. Israel is an ally of the US. 2. Intention matter. 3. So does governance. 4. Did you really compare North Korea to Israel, say they are comparable?

If Y there is no talking to you. Have a nice day.

Re: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

#120

Post by Volpe »

bdunbar wrote: post #119
Volpe wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've said in other threads. How about Israel, they do all of those things[1], have Nukes, and are massive aggressors in their part of the world. [1](Except the Stalinism)

1. Israel is an ally of the US. 2. Intention matter. 3. So does governance. 4. Did you really compare North Korea to Israel, say they are comparable? If Y there is no talking to you. Have a nice day.

What's North Korea's intent? (I thought unification)

What's Israels intent? (I thought unification)

Are they comparable? Seems, at face value, they are.

I'm not sure what you are getting at with the governance point.

> If Y there is no talking to you. Have a nice day.

Really? That's the position you want to take?

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