At the center of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lies 3 major problems that disregard foreign policy and international law, an opinion piece in Common Dreams by Jeffrey Sachs revealed. 

According to Sachs, the CIA's aims and tactics, along with its covert methods and deceptive strategies, ensure a lack of accountability.

He calls Congress a "doormat" and notes that the agency's objectives are whatever the CIA and president determine at the time, irrespective of international and domestic law.

Sachs recalls Mike Pompeo's comments when he admitted, as CIA director, that the agency "lied, cheated, and stole."

The CIA, founded in 1947, has two main missions. One is to provide intelligence to the US government, while the other is to undermine whoever is considered an "enemy" by the current president, by a variety of techniques, including assassinations, coups, manufactured disturbances, arming of rebels, and other methods.

CIA creates mayhem, no accountability

Sachs notes that the second objective has had a destructive impact on global stability and the rule of law in the US. He calls the CIA a covert army of the US "capable of creating mayhem across the world with no accountability whatsoever."

He recalls how former President Dwight Eisenhower orchestrated the 1961 assassination of African president Patrice Lumumba of Zaire.

Sachs also details how in its 77-year history, the CIA has only been called to meaningful public account only once: in 1975. That year, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a Senate investigation into the CIA's stunning campaign of killings, coups, instability, monitoring, and Mengele-style torture and medical "experiments".

In December 1974, investigative writer Seymour Hersh revealed an exposé of unlawful CIA spy activities against the US antiwar movement, prompting Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader at the time, to select Church to examine the CIA.

Sachs details the many operations of the CIA in Afghanistan, Serbia, Russia, China, and Syria and how for the last 20 years, it has been "deeply involved in fomenting the growing catastrophe in Ukraine," which is not limited to the overthrowing of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 that triggered a "decade of bloodshed" leading up to the war with Russia.

The author notes that the little or no accountability and no restraint imposed by Congress has not slowed down the agency, rather it has become "ever-more obsessively secretive, pursuing aggressive legal actions against disclosures of classified information, even when, or especially when, that information describes the illegal actions by the government itself."

In Syria, Sachs discusses New York Times stories that revealed the CIA's operations to destabilize the country and overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, which were ordered by then-President Barack Obama.

This blatant violation of international laws, he argues, led to the escalation that resulted in a "regional war, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of displaced people, and yet there has not been a single honest acknowledgment of this CIA-led disaster by the White House or Congress."

In February 2023, Seymour Hersh wrote that there was good reason to believe US Navy divers planted explosives to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022.

"Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning," Hersh wrote in his Substack newsletter.

Naturally, the White House responded and dismissed the claims as "false and complete fiction."

No attempts to hold CIA accountable

Sachs expresses that the "continuing mayhem" from CIA operations has resulted in "needless deaths, instability, and destruction" that continue to this day.

He criticizes mainstream media for not questioning or investigating such operations and demanding the release of data that allows the CIA to be held accountable.

The author calls for the urgent need to expose the truth about the "US-led mayhem" and attempt to start a new epoch in which US foreign policy is more "transparent, accountable, subject to the rule of law both domestic and international, and directed towards global peace rather than subversion of supposed enemies."