After a trial run of 67 years, the agency has proven a sorcerer's apprentice. The director and his subordinates have became insufferably arrogant Platonic Guardians hiding behind secrecy in the belief that the rest of us are too stupid or naive to judge what risks to accept to preserve liberty and the rule of law. The CIA has made Americans less safe.

Its incorrigible anti-democratic ethos was epitomized by legendary chief of counterintelligence James J. Angleton. He voiced contempt for the Church Committee's investigation of chronic agency abuses, i.e., the "Family Jewels." As reported in The New York Times, Angleton likened the CIA to a medieval city occupied by an invading army, i.e., the Congress of the United States. To the same effect, Director William J. Casey told Church Committee investigator Loch K. Johnson that the congressional role was to "stay the [expletive] out of my business."

The CIA will never accept that it works for we the people and our representatives in Congress; and, that the United States Constitution and laws govern everything the CIA does. It will never accept accountability for its actions — including torture, kidnappings, and extrajudicial killings—because it salutes the motto that the ends justify the means, that savagery is justified to defeat perceived savages.

The CIA is unAmerican. It sneers at our nation's signature creed that it is better to risk being the victim of injustice than to be complicit in it.