The US rulers have always been a delusional lot. This is not new, it’s just becoming more obvious as the Empire reaches its end.
Anyway here’s James Randi easily proving Uri Geller to be a fraud
The ruling class and their cronies are not rational, they’re irrational capitalists that see the world in a similar way to how British monarchs in the dark ages did. That makes them even more dangerous to me, because they are in charge of power that they don’t understand.
While the espionage apparatus in the US is woefully incompetent in a lot of areas, it wouldn’t surprise me if they used whacky shit to cover up how they actually obtained intel, especially if it was in an unethical or illegal way. Some examples:
The US used vaccination programs in Pakistan to find Osama bin Laden by collecting needles and doing DNA analysis to uncover his associates and relatives believed to be in the area. The CIA later tried to do something similar in Venezuela as part of their coup attempt a few years back, but the Osama bin Laden stuff had come to light so Venezuela told the US to fuck off.
Soviet mole Robert Hanssen was given a bullshit appointment when the FBI began to suspect he was the source of a leak. The FBI managed to isolate him from important data while collecting evidence against him without him knowing until it was too late. So if the CIA were creating similar bullshit jobs for other nitwits, they would also need to create more bullshit jobs to maintain the ruse. After assigning some incompetent buffoon or a potential mole to a position in the “psychic division” to get them out of the way, you’d want legitimate people in place to avoid suspicion.
This could also be used for ideological reasons, like removing anyone with the potential to “go native” by setting them up to fail. Take potential communist sympathizers who realized “Hey wait maybe the Soviets have a point…” and make them want to quit before they flip sides.
Of course, maybe the CIA really is this unserious and the only thing they were good at during the Cold War was creating America’s future enemies.
The CIA’s only real strength in practice was having a functionally unlimited budget to spend on engineering, bribes, and gunrunning. They could spend piles of money on fancy listening equipment or projects to physically breach and wiretap secure comm lines, they could practically just stand waving a stack of cash and promising defectors a comfy life as special good boys in the imperial core and some disaffected official from the Soviet bloc was bound to take them up on it and grift all they could off it (although this was of limited value: defectors could only leak information they already knew, which the CIA likely also already knew from shit like listening in on people talking about it, and then stopped being an asset; that’s before you get to the grifters who just kept making up bullshit and trying to get more money and attention for it, the kind of people who’d now just be given a cushy job by fascist oligarchs to do talk show rounds), and on their real specialty: just grabbing the worst person they could see at any given moment and handing him a bunch of guns and money and telling him the US has his back as long as he does reactionary terror against people the US doesn’t like.