With Leon Panetta, CIA Director, and former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft coming to campus today, I thought it might be a relevant time to explain what the CIA really does.

In 1953, the CIA orchestrated a coup d’état against Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and installed a brutal dictatorship in his place.

Just 26 years later, 53 Americans were taken hostage and held for more than a year as the people in the country undertook a revolution to overthrow the government the CIA had installed. Americans at home, lacking the context of the 1953 coup, were unable to understand why.

In 1966 the CIA orchestrated a military coup against Kwame Knrumah, the first democratically elected president of independent Ghana. Ghana would undergo 15 years of coups followed by 11 years of dictatorships before regaining any semblance of democracy.

Sept. 11, 1973, the CIA orchestrated a coup d’état against Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile and installed a military dictatorship in his place.

In the 1980s, the CIA funded and equipped contra death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua whose penchant for rape, torture and indiscriminate killings left a region destabilized and 200,000 politically motivated killings.

In the 2000’s, the CIA operated secret illegal prisons where agents transported people to be tortured.

The list of CIA imposed dictatorships and atrocities could go on.

Just a few decades after these actions, we have seen American popularity abroad plummet and a large number of heads of state who have a noticeable dislike for the United States (e.g. Hugo Chavez). The American public, lacking the context of the half-century of CIA terror throughout much of the third-world, opts to understand these democratically elected leaders as crazy dictators who just happen to hate the U.S. for some unknowable reason.

While someone might argue in theory that an unaccountable CIA would be more efficient, the real question is: efficient at what? The CIA’s history tells us its efficiency is aimed at overthrowing popular democratically elected leaders, arming death squads and torturing people.

But it is really much more than just the horrific nature of its actions that should make us cautious to grant this agency completely clandestine authority. Blowback, or the unintended consequences of covert action abroad, not only causes American deaths, but also leads to American confusion.

For instance, on Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden attacked the United States in response to the U.S. propping up the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine, propping up corrupt and tyrannical governments in such places as Saudi Arabia, using these corrupt puppets to gain unfair access to oil resources; and a few other reasons. Americans, most of whom completely lacked this context, couldn’t understand why we were attacked.

This lack of understanding by Americans led to the fear and hysteria that motivated the eventual blank check provided by the people and U.S. media for the U.S. government to invade whatever unrelated countries it wished to.

Now, in the case of 9/11, much of the information surrounding the motives for the attack was available, but just not accessed by most people. Nevertheless, it still proves the point I am trying to make about the problems caused when a population does not have background information with which to put actions into context. Lacking all the relevant information, people act irrationally and we wind up in unnecessary wars of aggression.

So in short, the CIA has a track record of brutal suppression. Even if it did not, secrecy and unaccountability is inherently problematic because it can lead to unexplainable blowback, which only causes more problems in the future.

Click here to read why Jerod Coker thinks secrecy is necessary for security