> The internal disorder was a matter of dealing with a bad situation more than antyhing else.
This is questionable, but it’s clear at least that China’s eventual response was more successful than the US’s, so there is that. Whether we’ll ever know the true origins of the virus is a different question of course.
> You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on.
I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.
> The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes.
There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.
> And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.
[citation needed]
I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians. However, I think one is hard pressed to prove that the situation with the CIA is substantially different from that of other intelligence agencies around the world, outside of the issues I mentioned. For one thing a lot of European intelligence agencies operate with even less transparency than the US IC (among them GCHQ, famously), so raising them up as a model gives me pause.
>I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.
Putin is KGB, yes, but he was only able to get power after the KGB dissolved, did he not? The KGB attempted to influence Soviet policy, but they were largely unsuccessful, which is why both times they had to use force and failed. From all the declassified documents since the fall of the USSR I can't see any evidence of control of the rest of the CPSU from the KGB.
>There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.
Banning political assassinations is a good look, but we both know that's not going to do much at all.
>[citation needed]
>I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians.
Well, we know that the IC still got involved into domestic politics. The FBI for example surveilled leadership of BLM in 2014 and later, and leaked documents from 2017 showed that the FBI targeted organizations based on ideology even if they were not engaging or planning to engage in anything remotely criminal, nowadays using the excuse of left-wing domestic terrorists to do so [https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-...] [https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...]
Many European intelligence agencies are as bad or even worse than the CIA, agreed. I was talking about the specific example of France, which still is not perfect, but is much better.
This is questionable, but it’s clear at least that China’s eventual response was more successful than the US’s, so there is that. Whether we’ll ever know the true origins of the virus is a different question of course.
> You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on.
I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.
> The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes.
There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.
> And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.
[citation needed]
I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians. However, I think one is hard pressed to prove that the situation with the CIA is substantially different from that of other intelligence agencies around the world, outside of the issues I mentioned. For one thing a lot of European intelligence agencies operate with even less transparency than the US IC (among them GCHQ, famously), so raising them up as a model gives me pause.