In atrocious past, does US intelligence see regret or blueprint of opportunity?

Iran is now a focal point of a United States foreign policy agenda geared assertively, we are told, toward resolving disorder in the Middle East with the goal of propping democracy to sustain the vices of a geopolitical hellhole. Lesser known is the fact that Iran once had a government that was not only democratically elected but friendly to the West and proactive about sharing oil revenue. Enter the US Central Intelligence Agency. In 1953, the CIA helped its British cousin, MI6 overthrow Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq, the democratic leader of Iran. Mosaddeq supported the nationalization of Iran's oil fields–a move which denied a monopoly to British Petroleum, Iran's only oil company at the time. Despite offering job security and generous oil profit shares to the British as well as having driven forces understood to be US enemies out of Iran, Mosaddeq saw his country blindsided by economic warfare and terrorism designed by the CIA. The operation included mosque bombings and the gunning down of civilian crowds for the purpose of blaming the attacks on Mosaddeq's government. US and British intelligence determined Mosaddeq's replacement to be Fazlollah Zahedi, a Nazi collaborator. The CIA then formed SAVAC, the security police which ruled over Iran for the next 25 years. Amnesty International reported that SAVAC's human rights record was so abysmal that it was "beyond belief." But for the CIA, this brand of beyond-belief tyranny was a success of archetypal proportions. The agency went on to exercise the same techniques for overthrowing other leaders, many of whom were democratically elected and sought to uplift their people's economic and social conditions. Such was the case in 1954 when the CIA overthrew Jacob Arbenz, Guatemala's first president elected through a universal suffrage vote. Arbenz's crime was his plan to buy uncultivated land for redistribution to peasant farmers. American business interests in Guatemala saw the intention as a threat to their assets. Among those interests was the United Fruit Company, whose investors included then-CIA Director Allen Dulles. The CIA had Arbenz replaced with a succession of dictatorships whose policies over the next 40 years led to the killing of over 100,000 Guatemalans. In 1961, the CIA coordinated to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo. Newly elected Lumumba's misdeed was challenging European and American business dominance over his impoverished country's vast natural resources. Lumumba's CIA-backed replacement proceeded to take the country for billions of dollars. But the CIA's overthrow strategy hasn't always worked, in which cases other US resources have been played. From 1957 through 1973, for example, the CIA averaged one coup per year attempting to quell democratic elections in Laos. When these efforts ultimately failed, the US barraged Laos with more bombs that all the US bombs dropped during World War II. On October 6, 1976 bombs exploded on a Cuban jet airliner carrying Olympic athletes returning form the Pan America Games in Venezuela, killing all 73 aboard in the most deadly act of airline terrorism prior to the attacks of Sept. 11th. US government documents reveal that the attack's mastermind was CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles. Last year while Carriles sat in a Texas jail on illegal immigration charges, the Bush administration declined to declare him a terrorist under federal law. Why Carriles doesn't meet the White House's definition of a terrorist is an interesting question. Beneath the CIA and its US foreign policy umbrella is a catalog of activities and events defined by means and motives that most Americans would find deplorable. In addition to plots to depose more than 40 governments, the CIA has between 1945 and today sought to quash over 30 popular people's movements facing despotic oppression. Certainly, nations need strong and effective intelligence services. But the idea that the CIA has operated principally to gather intelligence for just purposes–the likes of promoting democracy, security, and liberating the oppressed–is disingenuous. So is the idea that the agency's calculated abuses are a mostly irrelevant thing of the past. In 2004 reports came out that the "Salvador Option" was discussed at the Pentagon amid plans for the securing of Iraq. The term refers to the widespread use of CIA-endowed death squadrons that abducted, tortured, and murdered thousands in Central America in the 1980s as part of what become known as the Iran-Contra scandal. This and other allusions to dreadful CIA tactical relics beg the question of whether the CIA sees its atrocious history with regret or as a model for present-day opportunity. This year, criminal trials began in Europe for dozens of CIA officials charged with felonies for torture and kidnapping innocent "war on terror" suspects without any form of the law's due process. One rationalization for horrific CIA activities claims: CIA means have not always been right, but its goals have been for the good. But killing innocent people and taking advantage of other cultures and indigent populations for the sake of corporate gluttony, resource monopolization, and undue power and greed is neither right nor just. Another justification says that there are evildoers in the world who must be dealt with if America is to safeguard its way of life and defend freedom. But this assertion disregards the fact that the CIA has routinely rejected alliances with supporters of human rights and democracy while harboring the company of evildoing tyrants and dictatorial regimes. Millions of people around the world have suffered misery, poverty and murder as a result of covert CIA activities and political installations. Even with intelligence agency shuffles over the last few years, it's doubtful that the CIA could ever be truly rehabilitated because it is overreaching by trade and design.