Today we have three high-profile members of the U.S. intelligence community, including CIA director Leon Panetta, visiting our campus to speak at the university’s Foreign Policy Conference. This visit will hopefully spark some debate over the efficacy and morality of the CIA and similar organizations.

While some people believe this highly secretive government agency is harmful and should either be made more open or eliminated, others, including myself, argue the CIA is much more beneficial than harmful, and secrecy is necessary for it to operate successfully.

One benefit of the CIA’s secret nature is its efficiency and ability to operate without all the drama that is inherent in our modern political process. In a discussion at the Honors College March 1, OU President David Boren shared his experience on an intelligence committee. He said in order to operate effectively, they would lock themselves in a room without TV cameras and talk about what needed to be done. Partisan bickering and constituent pandering aside, these government officials would talk and compromise until they reached a unanimous decision. None of this would have been possible, however, had they been in an open meeting with cameras rolling.

Another benefit of secrecy is obvious: We don’t want to give our enemies any knowledge that would make it easier for them to harm or kill citizens of the United States. Enemy movements, terrorist activities or suspicions, intelligence gathering, along with a slew of other activities the CIA is — at least partly — responsible for, all require confidentiality and secrecy. If the enemy knows what we’re going to do, or even if they just know what we know, we are giving them an advantage that could jeopardize the welfare of our citizens.

If nothing else, the biggest reason to support the CIA is that we can all sleep soundly at night. It is naive to think we could go about our lives safely without the CIA around. This is not apocalyptic paranoia or a hyperbolic scare-tactic, rather it is a simple assessment of reality. We know there are people both internally and externally who want to harm our nation and its citizens, yet we go about our daily lives without worry. Why? Because we know there are government officials working around the clock to quell these attempts.

Without agencies like the CIA and FBI, the recent high-profile terrorist arrests like Najibullah Zazi and Hosam Smadi probably wouldn’t have happened, meaning their attempts to kill Americans on our own soil probably would have succeeded. Along with these high-profile busts, who knows how many secret arrests have been made to keep who knows how many Americans alive.

In contrast with all of these invaluable benefits, opponents list several alleged abuses of the CIA: making deals with drug lords, equipping and funding death squads, overthrowing democratically elected leaders in foreign countries, the list goes on and on. And I’m sure some, maybe even many, of these alleged abuses did indeed occur. However, the overall utility of the agency certainly outweighs these abuses.

While it is inexcusable for any segment of our government to partake in some of the actions the CIA is accused of, this certainly does not warrant its abolition.

Whatever abuses that the CIA is guilty of are not OK or excusable; it should indeed be reprimanded for its faults. However, to say these faults warrant abolishing it or making it more open is silly. Our national government has made countless mistakes, but the solution is clearly not to abolish Congress or to eliminate the office of president or the Supreme Court. The purposes they serve are too important. And so it is with the CIA.

Making the agency more open and accountable is not a solution, as we know secrecy and confidentiality are vital to the agency’s ability to protect our nation. Rather, these abuses must be taken with a grain of salt, as an unfortunate byproduct of the nature of the agency.

Click here to read why Matt Bruenig thinks secrecy erodes understanding