Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And it would effectively function under cover of humanitarian work as being a CIA, but without having the limitations that the CIA has on needing White House approval through what's called a presidential finding. So... All these CIA scandals popped off in the 1960s and 70s. The CIA went through a bunch of reforms. This was the famous Church Committee and Pike Committee hearings of 1975 and 1976.
First time the U.S. ever created a Senate Intelligence Committee, a House Intelligence Committee, to permanently oversee the CIA, to stop what it had been doing, domestic political targeting at that time of left-wing Democrats, from ever happening again. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election because of these scandals. And immediately, his first year in office,
carried out the famous Halloween massacre that laid off 30% of the CIA operations division in a single night and crippled their budget. By the way, tell me if that sounds familiar to what's happening right now, you know, the first month of the Trump admin. won the office because of political scandals from intelligence agency oversight. It hits them right away.
But then Carter ran into the Iran hostage situation. The national security state, the media, Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter neutering the CIA for having caused that. If we had had the CIA that we had before, the Iran hostage situation would have never happened. And so...
There was still a black eye at CIA to get those old powers back, but the Reagan administration wanted those powers, so they couldn't get it through Congress.
So what they did is they basically created new structures to do what used to be done by the CIA, to be done by places like USAID and their newly created in 1983 National Endowment for Democracy, who is effectively the operations arm of much of USAID work.
I say all this to say that USAID, the reason so much of the worst scandals that you find are USAID, and why I always say when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID, is because the CIA needs to get presidential approval for every covert action they do. There needs to be a presidential finding that they need to do it.
USAID does not, which means if a rogue cell at CIA or special forces or some wing of the State Department wants to do a dirty deed and they know the president won't approve or, in fact, targets directly or indirectly the president or his international allies, they know they can't get the presidential finding, but it has to be a covert action to run.
The world can't find out they're doing it or what these – grantees are actually doing, all they need to do is walk next door or place a phone call or, you know, meet in a secure location and tell their friends at USAID and USAID can make the whole thing happen totally, you know, basically behind the president's back.
And I can go through a bunch of examples of that, but that's what, that's how Trump got hoodwinked in term 1.0 by his own USAID.
It's the great flexible swing man for any of their needs.
Well, this is the magic of being an independent agency. Is it an NGO? No. No, it's a formal U.S. government agency, but they make grants and subgrants and contracting work after the NGO class. But it's an independent agency. There's a great... There's a great U.S. Army War College book slash extended white paper that I've been publishing receipts from for the past six months.
It's from 2014, and it's called the DOD and USAID Analysis and Recommendations for Development Defense Cooperation, going forward. It looks at this relationship between DOD, state, and USAID And it compiles DoD senior leadership thoughts on how best to synchronize what they call defense diplomacy development, the three Ds all working together, the military, the State Department, and USAID.
Because DoD has national security interests in the region, state has national interest or economic interest in the region. They need assets to play with, assets to liaise with, assets to build up, and development creates those assets. Paying to create these institutions, paying to co-op these institutions. So these things all go together, these three Ds, defense, diplomacy, development.
This is 2014. This is over a decade ago. And in that U.S. Army War College memo, there's quotes from U.S. generals that say that they prefer working with USAID over state, even though USAID is... Independent, but it's always supposed to be guided by state. Because even our humanitarian assistance has to serve U.S. interests. And state represents those stated interests.
But you have DOD people, over a decade ago, saying they prefer to work with USAID over state for several reasons. That USAID is not bogged down by bureaucratic red tape of the, quote, interagency knife fight that happens at the National Security Council. But that USAID, quote, actually does stuff, whereas, you know, state is hamstrung by what they can actually do.
It's a diplomatic incident if the formal diplomatic arm of the U.S. State Department does something versus an independent aid agency that is there on a humanitarian purpose and, oh, they were using it for this wrong purpose. Because there's much more oversight on state. State runs the interagency gauntlet every day of its existence.
It has to persuade the White House National Security Council and all the interagency partners to do something. But really the only oversight there is at USAID is what's happened is at the Office of Inspector General level. You have their own in-house accountability mechanism. And there's some great examples of how this has gone so haywire. I don't mean to... Keep going. Okay.
There was a massive scandal for USAID, and everyone can look this up. It was the Zunzaneo scandal. And let me make clear out the gate that I do not like and I'm not a fan of the Cuban government. I don't believe in socialism. I don't believe in communism. I'm not saying what I'm about to say because I believe that the Cuban government should remain or whatnot.
I leave aside the moral question about whether or not this was the right or wrong thing to do. But here is what was done. In 2014, a very massive scandal popped off that I think few people today remember. This was during the Biden White House where USAID took humanitarian funds that were earmarked for Pakistan.
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