Abolish the CIA? Yes or No

You call for abolition, but your argument is built on cherry-picked history and a dangerous fantasy. Yes, the CIA has made mistakes—every intelligence agency in history has. But to equate those mistakes with a 'murderous cartel' is to ignore the existential threats that the Agency neutralizes daily. You cite Iran and Chile, but you ignore that the Agency also helped dismantle the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, prevented multiple terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and broke up networks that would have killed tens of thousands. The 'dark shield' you mock is the only reason you can sleep at night without fearing a nuclear detonation in your city. Abolish the CIA, and you hand a victory to every adversary who wants to see the United States weakened. You claim the Agency is a 'self-licking ice cream cone' of violence, but that is a grotesque oversimplification. The CIA operates under presidential directives and congressional oversight—imperfect, yes, but real. The torture program was an aberration, not the norm, and it was exposed and curtailed by the very system you claim is broken. Compare that to the alternative: a world without a CIA would be a world where the President flies blind, relying on diplomatic chatter and open-source news. Is that what you want when a rogue state is developing chemical weapons or a terrorist cell is plotting a biological attack? Intelligence is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Abolishing the Agency would not end covert actions—it would just move them to the military, which is even less accountable. Your call for 'moral hygiene' is naive. In an anarchic world, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. The CIA is our sword and our shield, and while it is not always clean, it is ours. You point to drone strikes that kill innocents—I point to the strikes that saved thousands of American lives. You see a rogue cartel; I see a necessary evil that operates in the gray zone where other nations play without any pretense of law. The CIA is not perfect, but it is the least bad option we have. Abolishing it would not bring peace; it would bring chaos, and the first victims would be the very democracies you claim to defend. So, spare me the moral outrage. The world is a brutal place, and the CIA is our response to that brutality. You want to dismantle it? Then offer a concrete alternative that can stop the next 9/11, the next nuclear proliferator, the next cyberattack. Until you can, your argument is just a slogan—a dangerous one that would leave us naked in the dark. The Agency is not the problem; it is the solution, flawed as it may be. Keep it. Reform it. But never, ever abolish it.