While at school I had endless debates with more pro-US-government students, and it was mind-boggling to see how they refused to acknowledge even CIA-operations that the CIA itself has declassified, or tried to dismiss interviews with past CIA directors.

The ability to just flat out deny these things when they don't fit the narrative of the the government (any government) that people want to believe in.

If people think a given government is good, a large portion of them will not take evidence of said government doing something bad and revise their opinion of the government - they'll write off the evidence instead.

Even when said evidence comes from the very same government.

That's a very fair point.

I attribute this to just a lack of education. I never learned in my public education the darker side of American history, and I think to a lot of people some of the crazy things acronym agencies have done sounds like conspiracy theory (bay of pigs, operation sea-spray, mlk suicide letter, MK ultra). And frankly, I get it, some of these things are fucked up enough that they should be fiction.

Except I think with a free encyclopedia being readily available (i.e. wikipedia) finally the average American is slowly having to reconcile their nationalism with their history. Hopefully change will come with that.

You may classify this under idealism, but I bet a lot of them would claim to just have realistic understandings of the brutalities that are a requirement to keep an empire running. They would say that those who would hold back from exploring any means neccissary to defeat their geopolitical adversaries are the idealists.

ah yes, the pragmatist's prayer-- "it was necessary even if it was immoral, therefore it was right, even if it was wrong, therefore i am noble, even if i have lost my humanity"

everyone jumps to the question of "does the end justify the means?"

a better question: why jump to the most brutal means before questioning whether the end is worthwhile regardless of the means?

is government mind control something we really want them to be able to do in the context of an intelligence agency? no, it is not; it is the apex of the opposite of human rights.

You are asking the wrong questions.

Is morality powerful enough to stop actions?

Government thugs can survive with a guilty conscience.

I think you might want to consider context-free vs bound actions and their respective moralities. If an action is wrong, when context-free, can it be right when context-bound?

"A kills B" wrong

"A kills B".bind("B tries to kill A") righteous?

> They must be either ... or ... or...

Or, like many things, they're made up of a mixture of good and bad people. Also, the CIA has either changed a great deal since the Black ops days of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, or they've gotten much better at cover ups.

In any case, they've indisputably saved Western lives in the past ~20 years. Even this week, Putin (!!) thanked the CIA for their help stopping a terror attack in Russia.

It takes a while to understand what's going on in the world. 20-somethings have a simple model with hardly any details filled in. Ambitious people are also purposely ignorant.

A third option: some people may understand and accept the history, but try to change the org and culture from the inside out. Maybe that’s a different kind of naivety.

some people believe that "anything is justifiable" in the name of american security

some people will believe MKULTRA is just a conspiracy people

and some people will view such actions as necessary but messy aspects of the brutally realist struggle between countries (critically forgetting that humanity comes before any individual nation or individual)

>What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.

I saw some CIA recruits, they were not bright boys.

Three letter agencies were and are looking for a specific type of personality in recruits, types that are convinced that whatever they do is right, invariably of what they were told to do.

Three letter services are afraid of hiring people with brains, and even if they do hire ones, they favour people who can be said to be "intelligent, but witless"

Google Ryan Fogle.

The very worst thing you can do with any adversary is to underestimate them.

> What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.

The KGB never had a shortage of willing applicants. Money, power, being part of a secret society, and SERVING THEIR COUNTRY are things that a lot of men and women find incredibly appealing.

Or maybe they just pay enough for people to forget about the ethics of what they’re doing.

Payment in blood for some, no doubt. I'm sure they have no problem finding people for whom torture or murder is its own reward.

I think a lot of "normal" people can rationalize away these things to get into positions of status and authority. The shame is that they still somehow have that status is western culture.