My thoughts are that it's a good thing to have agents in the world that can operate in the dark, keeping their actions, and sometimes the consequences, hidden and secret. It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on. That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.
Take the oversight and principled direction away, and you're left with state funded villains whose activity will almost always run counter to societal well-being.
Our institutions are failing because we eroded and ultimately lost our social cohesion and embraced the cultural balkanization instead of seeking new shared values.
It's bad enough that we don't trust the media, but the CIA being off the leash is horrifying. The war on drugs is a crystallized example of this social failure mode.
Take the oversight and principled direction away, and you're left with state funded villains whose activity will almost always run counter to societal well-being.
Our institutions are failing because we eroded and ultimately lost our social cohesion and embraced the cultural balkanization instead of seeking new shared values.
It's bad enough that we don't trust the media, but the CIA being off the leash is horrifying. The war on drugs is a crystallized example of this social failure mode.