Author does not fully address that the CIA effectively funds and directs the rest of the IC. They gate all infrastructure - from networks to satellites to drones. When Congress tried to limit their operations with heavy oversight, they spun out a brand new intelligence agency, classified its very existence, and spun out operations on that side for years before CBO caught on.
Spun off to another subsidiary seems like the game here!
Not just CIA. Whenever military industrial complex or bankers want a make over, defers litigation risks or just conceal ownership, they just create a subsidiary, spun it off with another name and/or hide the everything behind client attorney privileges.
It also gives the public a memory wipe. Very clever technique indeed.
yep!! people tend to overlook how powerful the CIA is. it's probably the only gvt agency which can fully fund itself, answers to no one. can probably take down the president, or the whole congress and judges.
what has saved americans is the CIA has been focused on foreign issues. once that might is turned internally there's hell to pay.
That's true to a point, but it has no legal mandate to operate domestically. That doesn't mean it has no domestic operations, it exists domestically after all, but it means it does so at the discretion of the entire rest of the executive and judicial branch. The FBI, police services and Homeland Security have jurisdiction, which the CIA doesn't.
Foreign abuses eventually rebound on the imperial core. The establishment of more and more internment camps and the snatch squads to fill them is extremely alarming, even if it doesn't have a "CIA" label on it but "ICE" instead.
America built a machine for overthrowing democratic governments in South America because they didn't align with corporate interests, and somehow pretends that this can be contained to only operate south of the Rio Grande?
Ironically I think the extremely indiscriminate nature of Trumpism might be its downfall when the security agencies finally turn on him. I wonder to what extent USAID really was a CIA front, and if they're offended that it was burned down without consulting them.
Just because Trump represents a slightly different faction of capital doesn’t mean he seriously threatens the one the CIA is the paramilitary arm of, though.
That would explain a lot about how aggressively it was nuked. Trump's operators hate the CIA with a memetic passion, to the point it's like a joke.
I would be shocked if the CIA hadn't registered what was happening, isolated its would-be minder, and gone totally dark. If they hadn't been running an American imperialist plot to conquer their Cold War enemy, by now they've got no choice but to do that. And we won't be hearing about it unless they had a complete collapse of opsec.
They don't have operational control of the ICE camps, though maybe they'd rather take them over than take them down.
>>America built a machine for overthrowing democratic governments in South America because they didn't align with corporate interests, and somehow pretends that this can be contained to only operate south of the Rio Grande?
It's been used in Ukraine and other Eastern Europe countries as well.
>This is a slur against the genuine demands for freedom from those countries, and not one you'd say if you listen to people from there.
People from there do say those things just as well. Unless one only hears the expats that say what he wants to hear and/or have adopted their host countries politics, or only taks to people who share his own lifestyle, which are usually hardly representative, there's even a name for this phenomenon in journalism, because it's often how things are told in western media.
The "genuine demands for freedom for those countries" range from actual ones, to orange "revolutions", to astroturfed bullshit, to grooming the political establishment and civic society with tons of imperial money.
man youve got to be borderline retarded to believe that shit. what about Jacobo Árbenz? And Americans have the fuckin cheek to cry over Russian election interference - richest country in the world crying about how "unfair" everything is
The CIA used to be in charge of the US intelligence community, at least on paper.
But since 2004, there's the Director of National Intelligence, who heads an organization with about 1700 people. They supervise CIA, NSA, NRO, and the armed services intelligence agencies, and control the flow of information to the President.
They create the President's Daily Brief, which the CIA used to generate. (Not to be confused with someone's podcast of the same name.) Tulsi Gabbard is the current DNI.
On paper sure, but ODNI & CIA are interchangeable highside. The NRO is spun off the CIA, NSA’s network sits in a network gated by the CIA, and everything under DIA is overseen by the NSC which is “advised” by the CIA. They also control all HUMINT which is critical to the mission of nearly every agency.
Would also mention the last two DNI were CIA directors. The two before that were NSA directors during a time where the NSA was largely controlled by the CIA and its leadership largely shared positions on the CIA’s senior leadership team.
It should be heavily emphasized that pre and post 9/11 IC are two completely different entities. One of the biggest changes post 9/11 was a fundamental analysis of how our agencies are split up and how they share information.
They don't. This guy is talking out of his ass. They don't have the same funding streams (NSA falls under DoD for example) or missions. Hell, several IC members are military organizations and definitely do not fall under CIA in any way.
Until 2004 directly via DCI, since then via embedding officers in leadership across the rest of the IC.
Today, NSA SIGINT still flows directly to the CIA. They are also the only agency without an independent mission, and must rely on the CIA or CYBERCOM to actually do anything with SIGINT (they are only allowed to gather)
Also an open secret that the FBI and CIA often collude and any operation that they can’t get a warrant for just gets performed by the CIA. The FBI’s threat matrix is coordinated by the CIA and despite the Church probes their collusion has only incentivized and even been codified (eg NCTC)
NSA SIGINT flows to any agency who has a need to know.
And what do you mean by can only do anything with SIGINT? SIGINT is a broad term that includes COMINT and ELINT, which many other agencies do quite a lot with.
Congress gave the president the power to create national security agencies with the National Security Act of 1947. Eisenhower created the NRO in 1960 (well if was named differently and renamed to NRO in 61) There have been several changes to the relationship of the various national security agencies and Congress over the years.
The entire existence of the NSA was classified for a long time too (including that they had a budget). These agencies seem to go through a cycle where a prior agency gets noticed/public and starts to get blowback, so can’t hide anymore. This makes it more difficult for them to do some or part of their mission, so a new secret agency gets spun up to do the new hotness part - and their existence is classified, wash rinse repeat.
It doesn't work that way, there is a pretty clear separation between civilian and military intelligence. For example, CIA and FBI are civilian, NSA and DIA are military. This separation is both legal and practical.
Some agencies are more influential than others but that waxes and wanes over time. There is always some agency in ascendency and another in decline. I've seen the centers of influence shift between agencies more than once.
The great problem of intelligence is that collection will tell you capability but not intent. During a war, capabilities tend to be used. Finding out that the enemy has massed forces somewhere or has a new weapon indicates something is about to happen.
During peacetime, there's mostly unused capability, and preparations take place that don't result in actual conflict. Military assets are built and trained, but not being used.
Intent may exist only in the mind of the leader and may change rapidly.
This often frustrates decision-makers, who want intelligence to tell them what's going to happen.
> great problem of intelligence is that collection will tell you capability but not intent
We had a pretty clear picture of intent in the build-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Different countries have historically been skillful in different elements of intelligence. American geospatial and signals intelligence is renowned. Our human intellignece, on the other hand, has been crap in the modern era. I would be wary about projecting the strengths and weaknesses of the American IC to intelligence as a whole.
don't know why you were voted down. You are right, the intent was clear, thanks to geospatial and signals intelligence.
Given the amount of amunition, medical teams, blood reserves, etc, it was clear that they were not staging an excercise. Unfortunately the Americans lost all credibility after the Gulf war. History is a bitch.
Regardless of how you feel about the US IC, I think the systematic dismantling of the national infrastructure and capacity to govern is, to put it mildly, a serious problem.
I suppose that position comes down to weather you feel like these folks are representing you or you feel like they govern you.
Having read a couple of popular histories of the CIA and knowing how they thought about how folks like me live in the world, it is easy to understand that they are decidedly not acting in my interests.
If you find the interests of the US power to align with your own, that's probably pretty normal for US citizens. But even just looking at Paperclip and Phoenix, I'd be sad to be aligned with either of those crimes, and that's not even looking at the horrible outcomes of their work in Guatemala, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, etc.
The CIA is a pretty handy thing I suppose, as it's existence has convinced me that the US gov neither has my interests in mind nor represents me in any meaningful fashion.
Given the fact I think that they have done an immense amount of harm in the world, that fact has made my conscience much lighter.
That depends on the degree to which a nation is entangled in foreign trade and security and the threat it faces from foreign aggressors. The US of course being one the the most integrated, most meddling and most targeted nations in the world.
Averting threats from abroad is sort of important. E.g. a more capable foreign intelligence organization could have averted 9/11, and with it, an avalanche of changes in the way US citizens live and are governed.
I agree, but the CIA is quite out of line, quite a lot of times. Specifically in its current iteration, I do not see the agency being high up in the absolute requirement for the capacity to govern.
> but the CIA is quite out of line, quite a lot of times
More than other intelligence agencies? Extant or historical?
Intelligence is messy. Here. And among our enemies. We have to contain that messiness domestically, to keep it from consuming us. In that way, it's analogous to our immune system. And just like our immune system, turning it off means all the other out-of-line elements around the world now have easy pickings over you.
The CIA has been more destructive than other modern agencies because it's far reaching. It's not more evil than other ICs. Just more capable. I'm not thrilled to learn who occupies that vacuum if the CIA goes away; almost by definition, it won't be anyone benevolent.
> Some 9/11 attackers were CIA assets and protected from FBI/police scrutiny as such
Citation seriously needed. This is untrue unless the words you are using are not to be understood in any sense common to English speakers. The most generous fact based interpretation I can give it is that Saudi financiers were underscrutinized for political reasons, resulting in missed opportunities to stop the attacks. The actual attackers were not CIA nor FBI assets.
How big is "big enough"? All aspects of the US Federal Government have grown enormously within my lifetime, and there have been very few cutbacks. Often times, an organization is less effective when it is bigger. You have the "too many cooks" issue, and the "need for consensus" issue, both of which become more of a problem with growth.
"Yankees, Confederacy, California, Texas, and None Of The Above" would probably reflect the political and population-geography splits of the US better than the current situation. Would be very messy getting there though.
That's what US is openly planning against all other countries in the world. Divide every country into dozens tiny "independent" countries with puppet "democratic" governments obliging every decision from USA.
There are maps of this new world regularly published by US think tanks.
I like the idea of explaining Mad Magazine's Spy v Spy as a Nash equilibrium. Nash is about strategies, particularly that neither side could do any better with any other strategy. Spying's justification then comes from fact that withdrawal would be a worse strategy.
The CIA does more than counterespionage. For example, Chile would be a much better place if the CIA didn't overthrow its democracy and install a fascist dictator, Pinochet, in its stead.
>Chile would be a much better place if the CIA didn't overthrow its democracy and install a fascist dictator
Empirically that's not a very well-supported statement, if you compare the economy and living conditions of Chile to its neighbours. Empirically speaking, electing communist governments almost always leads to reduced living standards. It's like if the US hadn't intervened in to help a fascist dictator in South Korea, the whole of South Korea would be as poor as North Korea is now.
> Empirically speaking, electing communist governments almost always leads to reduced living standards.
Almost always leads to a CIA-backed coup or civil war which indirectly indeed reduces living standards. In the other scenarios it often resulted in generally improved living standards via industrialization, increase of literacy and social programs. In yet others gross mismanagement and large scale famines, or fluctuating results depending on the time scale. There is no commonly accepted uniform outcome, and "almost always worse living standards" is clearly not one.
Saying the "CIA overthrew its democracy and installed a fascist dictator" is a vast oversimplification of what actually happened and ignores the role of other international actors, not to mention the domestic actors themselves.
Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup" and if you dig into the details, it raises the question if the CIA had done nothing whether the outcome would have changed at all.
>Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup"
Absolutely wrong, to the point of negationism. Amongst many things, the CIA trained South American militaries and police in torture through the School of the Americas.
If "this guy" wasn't already planning a coup, the CIA would have done it themselves anyway. Overthrowing Allende by any means was a core mission for them. The CIA was directly responsible for killing a general, René Schneider, who stood against any attempt at a coup.
And then they collaborated with Argentina's (and other South Amrican dictatorships') Operation Condor:
-mass abduction
-death squads
-torture of anyone suspected of being even vaguely leftist (electric shocks, prolonged immersion in water, cigarette burns, sexual abuse, rape, removal of teeth and fingernails, castration, and burning with boiling water, oil and acid)
-throwing them alive fron planes into the sea, hands and feet bound
-kidnapping newborns from their "leftist" mothers (subsequenly killed) to give them to conservative families
“ In the best traditions of the CIA, catastrophe ensued. Viaux ignored the explicit U.S. instructions to cease-and-desist; two abduction efforts against Schneider, on 19 and 20 October, failed; the third attempt, on 22 October, ended with Schneider being mortally wounded (he died on 25 October);”
> Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup" and if you dig into the details, it raises the question if the CIA had done nothing whether the outcome would have changed at all.
Helping a fascist coup is bad, even if the fascist coup didn't need your help.
Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?
It's not a choice between democracy and a fascist (Allende was going regardless), it was a choice between a US friendly authoritarian or a USSR friendly authoritarian.
This is a nice summary of the situation in Chile at the time, the actors involved (domestic and international) and the role of the CIA.
To get a sense of the CIA’s role, they didn’t even think Pinochet had it in him - they had others pegged as the coup leader. They were surprised to find out it was Pinochet.
> Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?
Yes, the USA shouldn't be meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries to action its proxy cold war against a rival super power.
I acknowledge that the USA determined this was a correct course of action in order to strengthen its hegemony, and the hegemony of global capitalism, however it was still unethical and in opposition to the needs of people in the USA.
It is insane that this is downvoted. You have to be wrong in the head to think that a country helping a coup that clearly damaged another country is a good thing.
But if the USDR is already meddling it’s not longer purely “domestic affairs” is it?
If your take is that it’s unethical, that’s fine, but you need to consider the alternative - giving the USSR free rein to meddle in the domestic politics of the Southern hemisphere. The citizens of those countries end up living under an authoritarian anyways.
I’m not saying it isn’t an ugly business, but I’m not sure the alternative is much better.
I also believe it's unethical for the USSR to meddle. I don't think two wrongs make a right. Also, let's not be naive and pretend like the USA supported Pinochet out of the goodness of the CIA's heart - it was absolutely to use the country as a pawn in the country's cold war against the USSR.
Yeah, with help of KGB. What could possibly go wrong? It could become as democratic as Cuba. In best case. Or take path of other countries with exported communist revolutions, like North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. You just don't know about pervasive and perverted level of informants and delation that was installed by these "democratic" countries
Well you went off the rails. The comment is talking about Chile, which was a democracy before the CIA overthrew the government and installed a dictator. What does that have to do with other countries or the KGB?
In the short-term, the wheat and chaff are very mixed for sure.
But I don't think nation-states are likely to survive for more than 500 or so more years. And the capacity for collaboration, innovation, and even perhaps transcendence into something like a distinct and more peaceful species seems to only grow.
> if they were abolished the world would be a better place
I'm not so sure about that; some actions of the CIA are questionable at best, but the Soviet Union or KGB were not the good guys by any means, nor is Al Qaeda or Putin's Russia.
The failures are far more publicised than the successes. How many $bad_things has the CIA prevented? I don't have a clear answer for that but it's obviously non-zero. How does that balance against the mistakes and crimes? Unclear.
And look, obviously the world would be far better off without the CIA, or KGB/FSB, or Al Qaeda, or any of these assholes. But I can't control what Russia or Al Qaeda does and neither can anyone else, and obviously we need to do something to counter these people. It seems to me what we need is a way to have a secret service that doesn't go to the dark side.
>How many $bad_things has the CIA prevented? I don't have a clear answer for that
Well that's the problem for your steelman on a position being an unfalsifiable hypothesis, isn't it? We DON'T know - and neither you or I know if it's actually non-zero either. We can probably list 20 main atrocities committed by the CIA together, and with a few hours of research we can probably get it up to a few hundred. But we can't find the inverse, so why introduce is as support in your argument?
The last major intelligence coup CIA had (that we know of) was when the agency called the Russia's invasion of Ukraine months in advance.
Going public with that was a bold call - CIA put its reputation on the line. But Ukraine was more prepared because of it - and so were its allies.
A lot of Ukrainian officials didn't believe that the war was about to start up until the moment it did. Imagine how much worse the situation could have been without US beating the drum.
That's intelligence gathering. I don't personally have any problems with the CIA's literal spying and intelligence operations. That's what the voters were sold on when it was set up. Gathering accurate information for our democratically elected officials to use to make their decisions can only be a good thing, assuming they follow the rules and leave Americans and America alone (which they of course don't).
The entire issue I and most people have with the CIA is that it isn't just a bunch of guys having coded conversations on park benches in foreign capitals and writing thick reports. Yes, those guys are there, but mainly its an unaccountable army that ignores the rules of war and does tons of illegal assassinations, blackmail, etc. These are the lowest of the low. These are people that, in any just society, should be tried and publicly executed while the citizenry packs a picnic lunch and lights off fireworks to celebrate.
We can have the fake-mustache guys without the extralegal murder-for-hire and using-computers-to-industrialize-domestic-political-blackmail guys.
>I don't personally have any problems with the CIA's literal spying and intelligence operations.
That's magnanimous of you.
>We can have the fake-mustache guys without the extralegal murder-for-hire and using-computers-to-industrialize-domestic-political-blackmail guys.
People say that, but is it true? Any examples? I feel like these "fake-mustache guys" are always getting themselves into something. That's why they have the fake-mustaches, after all.
MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, doesn't have a covert action arm. Which is not to say that our government hasn't done any fuckery with other countries' politics (we're also a former imperial power) but it does lessen the temptation and the capability.
“ SIS activities included a range of covert political actions, including the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état (in collaboration with the US Central Intelligence Agency).[85]”
“ During the Soviet–Afghan War, SIS supported the Islamic resistance group commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud and he became a key ally in the fight against the Soviets. An annual mission of two SIS officers, as well as military instructors, were sent to Massoud and his fighters. Through them, weapons and supplies, radios and vital intelligence on Soviet battle plans were all sent to the Afghan resistance. SIS also helped to retrieve crashed Soviet helicopters from Afghanistan.[90]/
“Some of SIS's actions since the 2000s have attracted significant controversy, such as its alleged complicity in acts of torture and extraordinary rendition.[10][11]”
“ The stated priority roles of SIS are counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, providing intelligence in support of cyber security, and supporting stability overseas to disrupt terrorism and other criminal activities.[8]”
“ In March 2016, it was reported that MI6 had been involved in the Libyan Civil War since January of that year, having been escorted by the SAS to meet with Libyan officials to discuss the supplying of weapons and training for the Syrian Army and the militias fighting against ISIS.[113] In April 2016, it was revealed that MI6 teams with members of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment seconded to them had been deployed to Yemen to train Yemeni forces fighting AQAP, as well as identifying targets for drone strikes.[114] In November 2016, The Independent reported that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ supplied the SAS and other British special forces a list of 200 British jihadists to kill or capture before they attempt to return to the UK. The jihadists are senior members of ISIS who pose a direct threat to the UK. Sources said SAS soldiers have been told that the mission could be the most important in the regiment's 75-year history.[115]”
“ E Squadron is the sole paramilitary group within SIS.[132] There is limited information about the squadron in the public domain, and it was not until the 1990s that it was officially recognised by the British government. Although the Government has declassified some information about the squadron, details about its operations generally remain secret. Before the 1990s, the group was known mainly by pseudonym The Increment.[133]
Out of all the British special forces units, E Squadron is a branch of the wider UKSF and many of its combatants are hand-picked to work with the SIS. The group is available for undertaking any task at the requirement of the both UKSF Directorate and SIS. It is manned by operators from the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR).[133]”
They definitely have guns, and aren’t afraid to use them. And they’re fundamentally covert.
However, the big issue is that you can't argue the values of liberal democracy, the rule of law, elections, freedom of speech, but at the same time overthrow democratically elected leaders, torture innocents, run vile ph
psychological experiments and keep people believing you.
I believe that the CIA has done more to destroy the trust in democracy and promote the rise of totalitarian regimes that we are seeing now, than any other single entity. Even if they prevented some terror attacks (and as we know they failed spectacularly to prevente several), that's not a price worth paying IMO.
>"Even if they prevented some terror attacks (and as we know they failed spectacularly to prevente several), that's not a price worth paying IMO."
What's always been funny to me about the CIA is if they didn't even do these things:
>"overthrow democratically elected leaders, torture innocents, run vile ph psychological experiments"
There probably would have been less - if any - of those terror attacks to worry about in the first place.
It always existed to provoke and to force varying degrees of military response from nations we antagonized. It was ALWAYS to justify a status quo propped by a military industrial complex - and to overstay the luxuries given to us by Pax Americana. We could have pulled off a peaceful era without bullying, I'm sure of it.
I don't know that much about Putin, but "some hands in Putins rise to power" is not really substantiated by your article. It just claims that the US knew some things and didn't act on them, and provides some weak evidence for it. In general I think the hope was always that Russia would see the benefits of liberal democracy and would slowly shift in that direction. Jumping on every incident wasn't really worth it, so they were willing to forgive them. That shift to liberal democracy obviously didn't happen.
"Created Al-Qaeda" is certainly far too simplistic. There are unforeseen consequences to everything you do (or don't do). The alternative of leaving Afghanistan to their fate after the Soviet invasion also wasn't appealing. If you want to blame someone for Al Qaeda, then start with the Soviet Union and Pakistan.
These two examples also conflict by the way: in one instance they had to do more, and in the other less. It's easy to sit here in judgement decades after the fact, but at the time a lot of this was less clear.
Is this a defense of the CIA? The first half of the article catalogs decades of failures ranging from comical to catastrophic.
"There was a time when the C.I.A.’s existential fear was of losing its adversary. In Al Qaeda, it found a new one; in Iraq, it created others. In Trump, it faces an adversary of a different kind."
Further, calling the Commander in Chief its "adversary" is terrible framing.. if they're working against the elected leadership of the US, who are they working FOR?
> if they're working against the elected leadership of the US, who are they working FOR?
The various executive branch departments were created by Congress and are supposed to follow the instructions given by Congress. Various theorists disagree as to the extent to which the President is permitted to override the instructions from Congress.
> The various executive branch departments were created by Congress
Yes
> and are supposed to follow the instructions given by Congress.
Well, yes, but also no. Executive agencies must adhere to the law, but Congress cannot fully set the Executive's policy. Congress has very limited powers to force policy on the Executive, mainly advice and consent (for appointments and treaty ratification) and impeachment.
Past Presidents have wielded vastly more power relative to Congress than the current one. You should see the things that Lincoln did! Lincoln: suspended Habeas Corpus even though the Constitution says only Congress can, he abrogated treaties against the will of the Senate even though the Senate believed that since ratification requires their advice and consent then so much abrogation (but the Constitution is silent on the matter of abrogation) and as a result modern treaties have abrogation clauses to try to hem in heads of state but obviously those clauses can only go so far, and many other things. President Jefferson denied Adams' 18 lame duck federal judge appointees their commissions (and Marbury had something to say about that, namely that it was unconstitutional but also that he couldn't do anything about it). And that's just some of the notable things that Presidents have done that Congress (or in Jefferson's case, the preceding Congress) didn't like.
It hardly matters what various theorists think while 6 justices on the Supreme Court are dedicated to giving the President as much power to override Congress as he pleases.
I think immibis's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44639370) has a couple great examples of what I'm talking about. To add on, the Court has also allowed the executive branch to essentially shutter federal departments that were created by Congress, such as the Department of Education. They also ruled that lower federal courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions to stop executive action, thereby ending a check on presidential power that has vexed both parties when in office.
> To add on, the Court has also allowed the executive branch to essentially shutter federal departments that were created by Congress, such as the Department of Education.
The Dept of Ed had ~4200 employees and they laid of ~1400. It is not "essentially shuttered" currently regardless of the goal.
The important question is: "Can they fulfill their legally mandated obligations with the smaller staff?"
If the answer is "yes" then we saved money and still did the job. If the answer is "no" then we have a problem.
So far I haven't seen anyone identify "here are the legally mandated obligations that won't be fulfilled any longer" which would be useful and could be compelling.
Can you elaborate on this? This past term, in the Loper Bright case[1] the Supreme Court took away a massive amount of power from the executive in interpreting statutes beyond what Congress specified.
Uh, that was the past term. Have you also paid attention to the current term?
The current supreme court (which was also the supreme court past term) has a very consistent pattern of taking away power from Democrats and granting power to Republicans. Since the president is a Republican, they've been consistently granting power to the president; since the last president was a Democrat, they were consistently taking away his power. You can watch the pattern continue in 2029.
They ruled the president has unlimited power to do anything at all, without punishment, if it can be justified as a presidential duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States - during the last term, but in relation to Trump.
Notice all of these sorts of decisions are always 6-3: the 6 conservative justices forming a voting bloc in support of expanding Trump's power (specifically Trump, not just any president), and all 3 non-conservative ones voting against.
Which, is a mixed bag. Judge shopping was a huge problem from universal injunctions. But at the same time, what branch of government is the loss of the steadfast check-and-balance known as "universal injunctions" in favor of – and will now require for ANY AND ALL parties to ONLY be recognized for their loss and damages from actions of the Executive ONLY IF they have the means to sue for it and prevail – in a 1:1 cardinality? Could it be the Executive, who OP said this supported Kingsmanship for?
If a executive action is so unjust, so grotesque, and you need to round up parties damaged by it – outside of the absurdly long time most courts take to make things whole – can't that also be a way to round up people being directly targeted by 1 of 3 branches?
Example: EO-1 quietly builds a “voluntary” federal digital ID, so no one is harmed and nobody has standing for their own injunctions. Then, EO-2 later makes that ID mandatory to file taxes, get Social Security, renew a passport, etc. Real injury finally appears, but each citizen must sue alone and any victory helps only that plaintiff while everyone else stays locked out. The first order sinks the foundations; the second flips the switch.
Sometimes, there should be things that should have avenues to be quickly stricken down before more parties fall victim to them
You say "Stalin took over as dictator of USSR" and I say "This seems like a very ominous-sounding way of saying that Trotsky lost an election." That response would make sense if you'd said it about Arsenal vs Manchester, but when it's Stalin vs Trotsky it has real consequences, like the Holodomor, and shouldn't be trivialized.
Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests the entire executive power to the President, so technically it is the President who is responsible for following and implementing the laws that Congress has passed. Since recent Congresses (going back to at least the 70s and somewhat even to the 1930s) have written laws somewhat vaguely to give the executive branch a lot of discretion, there is a lot of legal uncertainty as to what actions are allowed in this discretion. This is why so many of Trump's executive actions are working their way through the courts as it isn't immediately clear what he's allowed to do with his executive authority vs where he is stepping on Congress's toes. For example, it is an open legal question whether the President and executive agencies are required to spend every dollar allocated by Congress or if they can decide they've already spent enough to meet the Congressional intent of the spending and can decide to not spend anymore.
The President is chosen during an election for this very job. We can't discard democracy in order to save it if sovereignty is meant to be popular. We're not lucky like theocracies or kingdoms, where everything boils down to expert sages or raw power; the vote is the only thing that justifies our country. The only thing that makes people from the US a nation is their commitment to popular rule, one which inspired the world.
The Executive was made to serve the country and the law, not Congress. Congress is meant to serve the country and make the law. The Judiciary is meant to serve the country and rule on the Executive's service to Congress's written law, when asked. At any time and for any reason, Congress can impeach the President, and refer his case to the courts if they think it appropriate.
If law (as regulation) is made from arbitrary agencies, denying people access to the courts when disputing that law is not helpful for democracy, it is anti-democratic, because it denies access to the judicial interpretation of Congress's intent. Congress, however, is free to make itself clear at any time, if it has the votes.
This all comes down to complaining about not having the votes. And in democracies, we shouldn't be sympathetic to people who don't have the votes.
>"The only thing that makes people from the US a nation is their commitment to popular rule, one which inspired the world."
What's this even mean?
Sherman compromise (2 states per state in one chamber of the bicameral legislature) isn't popular rule,
the electoral college doesn't have to operate by popular role,
voter suppression in modern times isn't popular rule,
gerrymandering isn't popular rule.
These existing systems of structure in American political institutions ARE sympathetic to those without votes. We are not a pure democracy. This is civics 101 and amateur hour.
> The Judiciary is meant to serve the country and rule on the Executive's service to Congress's written law, when asked.
The Judiciary is meant to resolve justiciable [civil] controversies, and in its more boring role to try criminal cases. In particular the judiciary cannot exceed its jurisdiction which is set by law and the Constitution. The judiciary cannot say that something the Executive is doing is unconstitutional and force a remedy if the law does not allow it. That's what Marbury v. Madison was all about! In that decision the SCOTUS says that yes, the Executive's action against Marbury was illegal, but no the Court cannot remedy the situation because the law that would have allowed it was unconstitutional! (Holy pretzel batman!) In Marbury two wrongs made a right, or perhaps two wrongs made a third -- depends on how you look at it.
IMO CIA is probably a state within a state with its own agenda and does not get enough oversight.
Oversight is a two edged sword. In one side of the argument, too much oversight effectively slows everything down and makes keeping secrets much hardet. On the other side, without enough oversight the intelligence agency simply has its own agenda, depending on who really control its financing.
Judging from the history of the Cold War era, it is impossible to give enough oversight when you want to fight a cunning enemy. I bet it is the same on the Russian side.
Ostensibly the CIA continues to exist through your elected congressional leadership as an agency created by the National Security Act of 1947. Voters don't have to vote consistently and can choose to have one branch of government ideologically at odds with the others. This would be the CIA working for the people but without it being aligned with the President.
If Congress decided to end the CIA then they could pass a law abolishing the agency or pass laws that refine the things they can or cannot do, but they're not inherently beholden to the President. The legislative branch being at odds with an executive branch representative isn't inherently problematic unless you think the President should be king.
>"The legislative branch being at odds with an executive branch representative isn't inherently problematic unless you think the President should be king."
There's another lens: You could think this, and have it rooted in the belief that separation of powers and the "checks and balances" against political institutions should have expanded beyond 'Executive' <-> 'Legislative' <-> 'Judiciary'.
I didn't find it to be defending the CIA's failures in any way.
The CIA didn't call Trump its adversary, the reviewer of the book did. They also said that Trump was the Agency's adversary, not the other way around. It is also possible to be adversarial against an individual while doing a good job working for them (see for example everyone with a boss they don't like).
I wouldn't read too much about the intentions of the intelligence community into that provocative sentence by an unaffiliated book reviewer.
Isn't the point of the previous examples that every organisation ultimately works for its own survival/growth?
The cia was basically pointless when the ussr fell (I'm not sure I agree but that's the logic). It needed a reason to exist and Al Qaeda provided that. When that wore thin, it manufactured its own reason in Iraq, a country that had no wdm and was no threat. And so on.
I'm not saying I agree but that is the logic I believe
Sending in troops to LA over the objections of the mayor and governor, masked ICE agents kidnapping people off the street without identifying themselves, people sent to El Salvador prison without due process in violation of a Federal judge's orders, Congress does his every bidding, conservative majority on SCOTUS continues to cede him executive power, sues newspapers and universities he doesn't like, threatens to arrest political opponents, lies about the Epstein files being a hoax. What more evidence do you need? He's consolidating power like Putin and Orban did.
All institutions are supposed to work for the people no? And kind of supposed to have some amount of independence for check and balances? To make sure none of them stop working for the people?
These jobs are pretty big ones like CISA chief but it doesn't matter much how well you serve the people or whatever. It just matters how well you serve the president
The president is not the state. That's been established multiple times in cases like Nixon, and unfortunately recently regressed with the Trump SCOTUS decision.
But in theory all these organizations swear an oath to the constitution, not to any branch of government, and especially not their leadership.
If any of the leadership issues illegal orders or does work to undermine the constitution or the country, according to the oath sworn by CIA agents, they should be doing everything they can to work against this leadership.
Even the military expects soldiers to reject illegal orders to commit gencode.
The peak of the "the president is not the state" was when the SCOTUS approved of the special counsel law in the 80s. After the Clinton fiasco the SCOTUS has pretty much adopted Scalia's dissent in that case.
> Further, calling the Commander in Chief its "adversary" is terrible framing
Terrible, but not an unusual one. There has been a lot of talk about CIA feuding with various presidents, starting from JFK at least. And it's not exactly a secret they do this:
> New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.
> “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
And man was Schumer right about that.
> who are they working FOR?
The same all large bureaucracies work for - itself. Self-preservation and self-expansion.
Yeah, this article hasn't aged well. It looks like a CIA briefing of a friendly journalist in advance of the Tulsi Gabbard releasing the evidence that the CIA colluded with Obama to lie about Trump/Russia collusion:
This is an extremely credulous take. Even reading the press release it's obvious Gabbard (a massive defender of Putin's Russia) is conflating two entirely different things, namely hacking election infrastructure vs the massive political influence/misinformation campaigns.
You might also recall a Senate Republican-led effort that determined that Russia did attempt to influence us elections in favor of Trump, unless you are avoiding facts that don't confirm your priors.
The press release seems to conflat cyber attacks (of which there were none) with election influence (I think interference would be another phrase for the same thing?). But those are different no?
"Russia tried to get people to vote for candidate X" can be true even when "Russia tried to stop people voting by breaking machines" isn't.
So you believe a known liar but it's impossible for you to believe that trump has ties to russia? the guy who has invested in russian real estate? the guy who went to russia many many times before he even became president?
it's hard for you to believe that the guy who did all those things and asked Russia on live TV for dig up dirt on Hillary is colluding with russia?
It's weird how accounts like this one forgets to mention how the CIA rebooted global heroin trade (as well as addiction at home) and gave it to italian mafia networks, and of course subsequent deep interfacing with such actors.
Especially since it mentions election interference in Italy through those same mob networks.
Perhaps it's easy to forget they early brought the fruits of their activities home and never stopped, or easy to believe that they only have effects abroad.
The military industrial complex lies in ruins, the west is in full retreat while other empires expand in another great game and the CIA conspiracy theories where revealed as just left racism dogwhistles. Because of course , non-white people can not be bad acteurs , creating their own destiny and pursuit the original sin that is imperialism, racism and genocide. They are noble savages.
Meanwhile , the agents of centralized incompetence aggregated, rainmade the public behind this conspiracy facade, by hijacking the stories of local developments.
So tirrd of all this hyperbiased nonsense, that then turns out to be the narratives pushed by the working secret service of hostile nations.
If you willingly turn yourself into a propaganda asset of a hostile foreign power, you should leave the democracy you reside in .
Always interesting to read these highly-selective histories of the CIA, where the most powerful clandestine organization in the world is presented as largely above-board and under-resourced.
Apparently the CIA was struggling to find a place in the early 90s while its former director was the sitting POTUS and the USA was renewing its grand campaign to covertly and overtly reshape the Middle East. Sure buddy, totally believable.
And no mention of the CIA's protection of 9/11 attackers from FBI persecution prior to the attacks.
"If a genuine emergency were to take place, and Trump tried to use the occasion to cancel elections or declare martial law, who would be able to stop him?"
This comment was killed, and I vouched for it because the comment's quote from TFA is accurate, and its implication in TFA is that the CIA should be able to do something like, idk, kill or remove the POTUS, something that is quite nefarious. Pointing out that TFA does that is very much worth having here. Feel free to discuss.
Agreed, but it's a good question. Will the will of the people do it - should we expect the will of the people, as a conglomerate, to make such a concentrated and calculated decision?
A good article that is critical of the previous book by Weiner ("Legacy of Ashes") is this article[0].
Here is a quote from it:
"A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has distorted what was said, why it was said, when it was said, and the circumstances under which it was said—all to support his thesis that CIA has been a continuous failure from 1947 up to the present. Weiner’s use of the plural 'final gatherings' in the excerpt from his account suggests he knows what he is doing."
https://archive.is/6k1FH
(Archive: https://archive.is/6k1FH)
Author does not fully address that the CIA effectively funds and directs the rest of the IC. They gate all infrastructure - from networks to satellites to drones. When Congress tried to limit their operations with heavy oversight, they spun out a brand new intelligence agency, classified its very existence, and spun out operations on that side for years before CBO caught on.
Could you elaborate / point me in the right direction on this? Would love to read up on this spun out operation
Many would argue there are 2-3 agencies that fit this description but the most famous and clear cut is the NRO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Offi...
I thought NRO was funded separate from CIA not spawned off from
Spun off to another subsidiary seems like the game here!
Not just CIA. Whenever military industrial complex or bankers want a make over, defers litigation risks or just conceal ownership, they just create a subsidiary, spun it off with another name and/or hide the everything behind client attorney privileges.
It also gives the public a memory wipe. Very clever technique indeed.
yep!! people tend to overlook how powerful the CIA is. it's probably the only gvt agency which can fully fund itself, answers to no one. can probably take down the president, or the whole congress and judges.
what has saved americans is the CIA has been focused on foreign issues. once that might is turned internally there's hell to pay.
>what has saved americans is the CIA has been focused on foreign issues
That doesn't really fit with "answers to no one", which can be understood as "it can focus on whatever it pleases".
That's true to a point, but it has no legal mandate to operate domestically. That doesn't mean it has no domestic operations, it exists domestically after all, but it means it does so at the discretion of the entire rest of the executive and judicial branch. The FBI, police services and Homeland Security have jurisdiction, which the CIA doesn't.
Foreign abuses eventually rebound on the imperial core. The establishment of more and more internment camps and the snatch squads to fill them is extremely alarming, even if it doesn't have a "CIA" label on it but "ICE" instead.
America built a machine for overthrowing democratic governments in South America because they didn't align with corporate interests, and somehow pretends that this can be contained to only operate south of the Rio Grande?
Ironically I think the extremely indiscriminate nature of Trumpism might be its downfall when the security agencies finally turn on him. I wonder to what extent USAID really was a CIA front, and if they're offended that it was burned down without consulting them.
Just because Trump represents a slightly different faction of capital doesn’t mean he seriously threatens the one the CIA is the paramilitary arm of, though.
That would explain a lot about how aggressively it was nuked. Trump's operators hate the CIA with a memetic passion, to the point it's like a joke.
I would be shocked if the CIA hadn't registered what was happening, isolated its would-be minder, and gone totally dark. If they hadn't been running an American imperialist plot to conquer their Cold War enemy, by now they've got no choice but to do that. And we won't be hearing about it unless they had a complete collapse of opsec.
They don't have operational control of the ICE camps, though maybe they'd rather take them over than take them down.
>>America built a machine for overthrowing democratic governments in South America because they didn't align with corporate interests, and somehow pretends that this can be contained to only operate south of the Rio Grande?
It's been used in Ukraine and other Eastern Europe countries as well.
This is a slur against the genuine demands for freedom from those countries, and not one you'd say if you listen to people from there.
(while I'm happy to condemn the CIA, the existence of one bad actor does not disprove the existence of other bad actors out there)
>This is a slur against the genuine demands for freedom from those countries, and not one you'd say if you listen to people from there.
People from there do say those things just as well. Unless one only hears the expats that say what he wants to hear and/or have adopted their host countries politics, or only taks to people who share his own lifestyle, which are usually hardly representative, there's even a name for this phenomenon in journalism, because it's often how things are told in western media.
The "genuine demands for freedom for those countries" range from actual ones, to orange "revolutions", to astroturfed bullshit, to grooming the political establishment and civic society with tons of imperial money.
So countries in Latin America didn't want to be "free" as well?
I don't think people wanted Pinochet and his torture and murder spree, no. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14584095
You are correct, originally people of Chile voted for Salvador Allende, A leftist politician.
But that has been deemed unfit by the CIA and somehow Pinochet coup d'etat succeeded.
Backing from the US helped a lot there.
Well that's one country in South America. What about the rest?
heard of Venezula? [https://time.com/5512005/venezuela-us-intervention-history-l...]
US support for the ‘64 Military coup in Brazil? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d%27%C3%...]
and Bolivia.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...]
Not to mention all the drug war meddling in Columbia, etc.
Or the really crazy Operation Condor [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor]. Which included Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Peru.
You’d have to be willfully ignorant to not know this history.
Screwing with South America has to be one of the CIA’s favorite hobbies.
man youve got to be borderline retarded to believe that shit. what about Jacobo Árbenz? And Americans have the fuckin cheek to cry over Russian election interference - richest country in the world crying about how "unfair" everything is
They did take down JFK, famously.
Good thing the current CIA director helped the current president avoid accountability for his first putch attempt.
>>can probably take down the president, or the whole congress and judges.
As the latest release of docs from the DNI shows, the CIA certainly tried to do this with Obama instigated Russian collusion hoax.
The CIA used to be in charge of the US intelligence community, at least on paper. But since 2004, there's the Director of National Intelligence, who heads an organization with about 1700 people. They supervise CIA, NSA, NRO, and the armed services intelligence agencies, and control the flow of information to the President. They create the President's Daily Brief, which the CIA used to generate. (Not to be confused with someone's podcast of the same name.) Tulsi Gabbard is the current DNI.
On paper sure, but ODNI & CIA are interchangeable highside. The NRO is spun off the CIA, NSA’s network sits in a network gated by the CIA, and everything under DIA is overseen by the NSC which is “advised” by the CIA. They also control all HUMINT which is critical to the mission of nearly every agency.
Would also mention the last two DNI were CIA directors. The two before that were NSA directors during a time where the NSA was largely controlled by the CIA and its leadership largely shared positions on the CIA’s senior leadership team.
It should be heavily emphasized that pre and post 9/11 IC are two completely different entities. One of the biggest changes post 9/11 was a fundamental analysis of how our agencies are split up and how they share information.
Thank you so much for sharing this enlightening fact.
Also really happy to see a living legend hanging out here with us.
The existance of the President's brief makes me smirk these days. It's probably a 10 second cartoon now, if it's used at all.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gabbard-c...
Uhh, no? In what way does the CIA fund and direct the FBI and/or NSA?
They don't. This guy is talking out of his ass. They don't have the same funding streams (NSA falls under DoD for example) or missions. Hell, several IC members are military organizations and definitely do not fall under CIA in any way.
Until 2004 directly via DCI, since then via embedding officers in leadership across the rest of the IC.
Today, NSA SIGINT still flows directly to the CIA. They are also the only agency without an independent mission, and must rely on the CIA or CYBERCOM to actually do anything with SIGINT (they are only allowed to gather)
Also an open secret that the FBI and CIA often collude and any operation that they can’t get a warrant for just gets performed by the CIA. The FBI’s threat matrix is coordinated by the CIA and despite the Church probes their collusion has only incentivized and even been codified (eg NCTC)
NSA SIGINT flows to any agency who has a need to know.
And what do you mean by can only do anything with SIGINT? SIGINT is a broad term that includes COMINT and ELINT, which many other agencies do quite a lot with.
When you say spun out, you mean that congress created another agency, right?
Congress gave the president the power to create national security agencies with the National Security Act of 1947. Eisenhower created the NRO in 1960 (well if was named differently and renamed to NRO in 61) There have been several changes to the relationship of the various national security agencies and Congress over the years.
Thank you for explaining.
The entire existence of the NSA was classified for a long time too (including that they had a budget). These agencies seem to go through a cycle where a prior agency gets noticed/public and starts to get blowback, so can’t hide anymore. This makes it more difficult for them to do some or part of their mission, so a new secret agency gets spun up to do the new hotness part - and their existence is classified, wash rinse repeat.
It doesn't work that way, there is a pretty clear separation between civilian and military intelligence. For example, CIA and FBI are civilian, NSA and DIA are military. This separation is both legal and practical.
Some agencies are more influential than others but that waxes and wanes over time. There is always some agency in ascendency and another in decline. I've seen the centers of influence shift between agencies more than once.
Your conspiracy theory is a bit overwrought.
It's true that if a leader betrays his own country, is that really a treason if that leader was elected?
Democracy and politics are outside of the realm of the CIA and intelligence, because the CIA is under the command of the white house.
It's true that Putin found a big vulnerability in the US by abusing its democracy, it's difficult to deny it.
The great problem of intelligence is that collection will tell you capability but not intent. During a war, capabilities tend to be used. Finding out that the enemy has massed forces somewhere or has a new weapon indicates something is about to happen.
During peacetime, there's mostly unused capability, and preparations take place that don't result in actual conflict. Military assets are built and trained, but not being used. Intent may exist only in the mind of the leader and may change rapidly.
This often frustrates decision-makers, who want intelligence to tell them what's going to happen.
> great problem of intelligence is that collection will tell you capability but not intent
We had a pretty clear picture of intent in the build-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Different countries have historically been skillful in different elements of intelligence. American geospatial and signals intelligence is renowned. Our human intellignece, on the other hand, has been crap in the modern era. I would be wary about projecting the strengths and weaknesses of the American IC to intelligence as a whole.
don't know why you were voted down. You are right, the intent was clear, thanks to geospatial and signals intelligence.
Given the amount of amunition, medical teams, blood reserves, etc, it was clear that they were not staging an excercise. Unfortunately the Americans lost all credibility after the Gulf war. History is a bitch.
The US hasn't seen peacetime in a very long time.
Regardless of how you feel about the US IC, I think the systematic dismantling of the national infrastructure and capacity to govern is, to put it mildly, a serious problem.
I suppose that position comes down to weather you feel like these folks are representing you or you feel like they govern you.
Having read a couple of popular histories of the CIA and knowing how they thought about how folks like me live in the world, it is easy to understand that they are decidedly not acting in my interests.
If you find the interests of the US power to align with your own, that's probably pretty normal for US citizens. But even just looking at Paperclip and Phoenix, I'd be sad to be aligned with either of those crimes, and that's not even looking at the horrible outcomes of their work in Guatemala, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, etc.
The CIA is a pretty handy thing I suppose, as it's existence has convinced me that the US gov neither has my interests in mind nor represents me in any meaningful fashion.
Given the fact I think that they have done an immense amount of harm in the world, that fact has made my conscience much lighter.
How much is a foreign intelligence service tied to nation's capacity to govern?
That depends on the degree to which a nation is entangled in foreign trade and security and the threat it faces from foreign aggressors. The US of course being one the the most integrated, most meddling and most targeted nations in the world.
Averting threats from abroad is sort of important. E.g. a more capable foreign intelligence organization could have averted 9/11, and with it, an avalanche of changes in the way US citizens live and are governed.
I agree, but the CIA is quite out of line, quite a lot of times. Specifically in its current iteration, I do not see the agency being high up in the absolute requirement for the capacity to govern.
> but the CIA is quite out of line, quite a lot of times
More than other intelligence agencies? Extant or historical?
Intelligence is messy. Here. And among our enemies. We have to contain that messiness domestically, to keep it from consuming us. In that way, it's analogous to our immune system. And just like our immune system, turning it off means all the other out-of-line elements around the world now have easy pickings over you.
The CIA has been more destructive than other modern agencies because it's far reaching. It's not more evil than other ICs. Just more capable. I'm not thrilled to learn who occupies that vacuum if the CIA goes away; almost by definition, it won't be anyone benevolent.
What things has the CIA done in the last quarter century that you object to as being out of line?
Torture, black prison sites, lied to Congress?
How is that even a question?
We will probably have to wait another quarter century for them to be public.
Okay, so then when you were talking about your problems with the CIA "Specifically in its current iteration", you were talking about what exactly?
The behemoth it has become after years of toppling govts, slinging drugs, the MKs, etc., without any real repercussions.
Some 9/11 attackers were CIA assets and protected from FBI/police scrutiny as such. These were not random unknown guys, they were on the radar.
To some extent, the CIA (unintentionally?) aided and abetted the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That's pretty egregious, in my opinion.
> Some 9/11 attackers were CIA assets and protected from FBI/police scrutiny as such
Citation seriously needed. This is untrue unless the words you are using are not to be understood in any sense common to English speakers. The most generous fact based interpretation I can give it is that Saudi financiers were underscrutinized for political reasons, resulting in missed opportunities to stop the attacks. The actual attackers were not CIA nor FBI assets.
> To some extent, the CIA (unintentionally?) aided and abetted the 9/11 terrorist attacks
This is unsubstantiated. If you dissolved the CIA at the end of the Cold War, chances are 9/11 still happens.
How big is "big enough"? All aspects of the US Federal Government have grown enormously within my lifetime, and there have been very few cutbacks. Often times, an organization is less effective when it is bigger. You have the "too many cooks" issue, and the "need for consensus" issue, both of which become more of a problem with growth.
Don't worry.
If CIA ends up hurting for money they can go back to using Israel to sell weapons to Iran and selling cocaine to intercity youth.
Like the good old days.
Well, maybe US will decompose into a bunch of indent states with actually functioning politcs, maybe thats the plan
"Yankees, Confederacy, California, Texas, and None Of The Above" would probably reflect the political and population-geography splits of the US better than the current situation. Would be very messy getting there though.
What an excellent outcome for China et al.
Yup, as they say, get divided and prosper. Hmm...
That's what US is openly planning against all other countries in the world. Divide every country into dozens tiny "independent" countries with puppet "democratic" governments obliging every decision from USA.
There are maps of this new world regularly published by US think tanks.
Can't be that bad of an idea, right?
I read Tim Weiner's first CIA book and expect something similar. You learn a lot about the obvious and well-known mistakes and crimes.
But I lack the basic sympathy for these organizations, if they were abolished the world would be a better place.
It's a nash equilibrium, the primary value of spycraft is opposition to hostile spycraft.
It's like wishing militaries didn't exist.
I like the idea of explaining Mad Magazine's Spy v Spy as a Nash equilibrium. Nash is about strategies, particularly that neither side could do any better with any other strategy. Spying's justification then comes from fact that withdrawal would be a worse strategy.
Well, and being worse than your opponents likely has material negative effects.
The CIA does more than counterespionage. For example, Chile would be a much better place if the CIA didn't overthrow its democracy and install a fascist dictator, Pinochet, in its stead.
>Chile would be a much better place if the CIA didn't overthrow its democracy and install a fascist dictator
Empirically that's not a very well-supported statement, if you compare the economy and living conditions of Chile to its neighbours. Empirically speaking, electing communist governments almost always leads to reduced living standards. It's like if the US hadn't intervened in to help a fascist dictator in South Korea, the whole of South Korea would be as poor as North Korea is now.
> Empirically speaking, electing communist governments almost always leads to reduced living standards.
Almost always leads to a CIA-backed coup or civil war which indirectly indeed reduces living standards. In the other scenarios it often resulted in generally improved living standards via industrialization, increase of literacy and social programs. In yet others gross mismanagement and large scale famines, or fluctuating results depending on the time scale. There is no commonly accepted uniform outcome, and "almost always worse living standards" is clearly not one.
Saying the "CIA overthrew its democracy and installed a fascist dictator" is a vast oversimplification of what actually happened and ignores the role of other international actors, not to mention the domestic actors themselves.
Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup" and if you dig into the details, it raises the question if the CIA had done nothing whether the outcome would have changed at all.
>Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup"
Absolutely wrong, to the point of negationism. Amongst many things, the CIA trained South American militaries and police in torture through the School of the Americas.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2246205
If "this guy" wasn't already planning a coup, the CIA would have done it themselves anyway. Overthrowing Allende by any means was a core mission for them. The CIA was directly responsible for killing a general, René Schneider, who stood against any attempt at a coup.
And then they collaborated with Argentina's (and other South Amrican dictatorships') Operation Condor:
-mass abduction
-death squads
-torture of anyone suspected of being even vaguely leftist (electric shocks, prolonged immersion in water, cigarette burns, sexual abuse, rape, removal of teeth and fingernails, castration, and burning with boiling water, oil and acid)
-throwing them alive fron planes into the sea, hands and feet bound
-kidnapping newborns from their "leftist" mothers (subsequenly killed) to give them to conservative families
Sources rather than “trust me bro” would be nice.
“ In the best traditions of the CIA, catastrophe ensued. Viaux ignored the explicit U.S. instructions to cease-and-desist; two abduction efforts against Schneider, on 19 and 20 October, failed; the third attempt, on 22 October, ended with Schneider being mortally wounded (he died on 25 October);”
> Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup" and if you dig into the details, it raises the question if the CIA had done nothing whether the outcome would have changed at all.
Helping a fascist coup is bad, even if the fascist coup didn't need your help.
Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?
It's not a choice between democracy and a fascist (Allende was going regardless), it was a choice between a US friendly authoritarian or a USSR friendly authoritarian.
This is a nice summary of the situation in Chile at the time, the actors involved (domestic and international) and the role of the CIA.
https://www.kyleorton.com/p/myth-1973-american-coup-in-chile
To get a sense of the CIA’s role, they didn’t even think Pinochet had it in him - they had others pegged as the coup leader. They were surprised to find out it was Pinochet.
>Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?
Comparing the two is so fatuous I can't believe it.
You know reality is independent from your morals right ?
You can't be the bad guy saying the alternative is worse and expect to be respected tho
> Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?
Yes, the USA shouldn't be meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries to action its proxy cold war against a rival super power.
I acknowledge that the USA determined this was a correct course of action in order to strengthen its hegemony, and the hegemony of global capitalism, however it was still unethical and in opposition to the needs of people in the USA.
It is insane that this is downvoted. You have to be wrong in the head to think that a country helping a coup that clearly damaged another country is a good thing.
White savior complex: "We know better what's best for you."
But if the USDR is already meddling it’s not longer purely “domestic affairs” is it?
If your take is that it’s unethical, that’s fine, but you need to consider the alternative - giving the USSR free rein to meddle in the domestic politics of the Southern hemisphere. The citizens of those countries end up living under an authoritarian anyways.
I’m not saying it isn’t an ugly business, but I’m not sure the alternative is much better.
I also believe it's unethical for the USSR to meddle. I don't think two wrongs make a right. Also, let's not be naive and pretend like the USA supported Pinochet out of the goodness of the CIA's heart - it was absolutely to use the country as a pawn in the country's cold war against the USSR.
Whether you think the USSR meddling is unethical does change that it happened.
Do you just shrug your ahoulders and do nothing?
>https://www.kyleorton.com/p/myth-1973-american-coup-in-chile
This article is on the level of "the holocaust never happened" cherry-picked argumentations.
Just an example: it doesn't even mention the trucker's strike was directed by the CIA.
Love your attempt at bringing in Holocaust denial to evoke emotions.
The total funding was $7M over 2 years. The strike involved 250,000 trucker drivers, or $28 per striker.
As the source said in a NY Times article..
““The whole point of this is that covert action provides a 1 per cent impetus for something that the people want anyway,” he said.” - CIA source
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/20/archives/cia-is-linked-to...
The head side of the coin comes with the tail side of the coin.
Yeah, with help of KGB. What could possibly go wrong? It could become as democratic as Cuba. In best case. Or take path of other countries with exported communist revolutions, like North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. You just don't know about pervasive and perverted level of informants and delation that was installed by these "democratic" countries
Well you went off the rails. The comment is talking about Chile, which was a democracy before the CIA overthrew the government and installed a dictator. What does that have to do with other countries or the KGB?
> It's like wishing militaries didn't exist.
I'm convinced that the evolution of the internet will bring this as well.
I think the internet is making this problem worse, actually.
In the short-term, the wheat and chaff are very mixed for sure.
But I don't think nation-states are likely to survive for more than 500 or so more years. And the capacity for collaboration, innovation, and even perhaps transcendence into something like a distinct and more peaceful species seems to only grow.
> if they were abolished the world would be a better place
I'm not so sure about that; some actions of the CIA are questionable at best, but the Soviet Union or KGB were not the good guys by any means, nor is Al Qaeda or Putin's Russia.
The failures are far more publicised than the successes. How many $bad_things has the CIA prevented? I don't have a clear answer for that but it's obviously non-zero. How does that balance against the mistakes and crimes? Unclear.
And look, obviously the world would be far better off without the CIA, or KGB/FSB, or Al Qaeda, or any of these assholes. But I can't control what Russia or Al Qaeda does and neither can anyone else, and obviously we need to do something to counter these people. It seems to me what we need is a way to have a secret service that doesn't go to the dark side.
>How many $bad_things has the CIA prevented? I don't have a clear answer for that
Well that's the problem for your steelman on a position being an unfalsifiable hypothesis, isn't it? We DON'T know - and neither you or I know if it's actually non-zero either. We can probably list 20 main atrocities committed by the CIA together, and with a few hours of research we can probably get it up to a few hundred. But we can't find the inverse, so why introduce is as support in your argument?
> I don't have a clear answer for that but it's obviously non-zero.
This isn't obvious to me. Can you help me understand?
The last major intelligence coup CIA had (that we know of) was when the agency called the Russia's invasion of Ukraine months in advance.
Going public with that was a bold call - CIA put its reputation on the line. But Ukraine was more prepared because of it - and so were its allies.
A lot of Ukrainian officials didn't believe that the war was about to start up until the moment it did. Imagine how much worse the situation could have been without US beating the drum.
That's intelligence gathering. I don't personally have any problems with the CIA's literal spying and intelligence operations. That's what the voters were sold on when it was set up. Gathering accurate information for our democratically elected officials to use to make their decisions can only be a good thing, assuming they follow the rules and leave Americans and America alone (which they of course don't).
The entire issue I and most people have with the CIA is that it isn't just a bunch of guys having coded conversations on park benches in foreign capitals and writing thick reports. Yes, those guys are there, but mainly its an unaccountable army that ignores the rules of war and does tons of illegal assassinations, blackmail, etc. These are the lowest of the low. These are people that, in any just society, should be tried and publicly executed while the citizenry packs a picnic lunch and lights off fireworks to celebrate.
We can have the fake-mustache guys without the extralegal murder-for-hire and using-computers-to-industrialize-domestic-political-blackmail guys.
>I don't personally have any problems with the CIA's literal spying and intelligence operations.
That's magnanimous of you.
>We can have the fake-mustache guys without the extralegal murder-for-hire and using-computers-to-industrialize-domestic-political-blackmail guys.
People say that, but is it true? Any examples? I feel like these "fake-mustache guys" are always getting themselves into something. That's why they have the fake-mustaches, after all.
> People say that, but is it true? Any examples?
MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, doesn't have a covert action arm. Which is not to say that our government hasn't done any fuckery with other countries' politics (we're also a former imperial power) but it does lessen the temptation and the capability.
MI6 doesn’t have a covert action arm? Are you kidding me? lulz [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MI6]
“ SIS activities included a range of covert political actions, including the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état (in collaboration with the US Central Intelligence Agency).[85]”
“ During the Soviet–Afghan War, SIS supported the Islamic resistance group commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud and he became a key ally in the fight against the Soviets. An annual mission of two SIS officers, as well as military instructors, were sent to Massoud and his fighters. Through them, weapons and supplies, radios and vital intelligence on Soviet battle plans were all sent to the Afghan resistance. SIS also helped to retrieve crashed Soviet helicopters from Afghanistan.[90]/
“Some of SIS's actions since the 2000s have attracted significant controversy, such as its alleged complicity in acts of torture and extraordinary rendition.[10][11]”
“ The stated priority roles of SIS are counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, providing intelligence in support of cyber security, and supporting stability overseas to disrupt terrorism and other criminal activities.[8]”
“ In March 2016, it was reported that MI6 had been involved in the Libyan Civil War since January of that year, having been escorted by the SAS to meet with Libyan officials to discuss the supplying of weapons and training for the Syrian Army and the militias fighting against ISIS.[113] In April 2016, it was revealed that MI6 teams with members of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment seconded to them had been deployed to Yemen to train Yemeni forces fighting AQAP, as well as identifying targets for drone strikes.[114] In November 2016, The Independent reported that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ supplied the SAS and other British special forces a list of 200 British jihadists to kill or capture before they attempt to return to the UK. The jihadists are senior members of ISIS who pose a direct threat to the UK. Sources said SAS soldiers have been told that the mission could be the most important in the regiment's 75-year history.[115]”
“ E Squadron is the sole paramilitary group within SIS.[132] There is limited information about the squadron in the public domain, and it was not until the 1990s that it was officially recognised by the British government. Although the Government has declassified some information about the squadron, details about its operations generally remain secret. Before the 1990s, the group was known mainly by pseudonym The Increment.[133] Out of all the British special forces units, E Squadron is a branch of the wider UKSF and many of its combatants are hand-picked to work with the SIS. The group is available for undertaking any task at the requirement of the both UKSF Directorate and SIS. It is manned by operators from the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR).[133]”
They definitely have guns, and aren’t afraid to use them. And they’re fundamentally covert.
> The last major intelligence coup CIA had (that we know of) was when the agency called the Russia's invasion of Ukraine months in advance.
If you have invented the disease, then surely you can warn in advance that a cure will be needed.
What kind of tin foil hat conspiracy land did I stumble into?
How would you estimate the probabilities of the organization having never prevented a single bad thing from happening vs having prevented one or more?
It feels ridiculous even writing that out. Can you help me understand your perspective?
It's worth noting that the CIA effectively created Al-Qaeda, and also likely had some hands in Putins rise to power (https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/how-america-helped-mak...).
However, the big issue is that you can't argue the values of liberal democracy, the rule of law, elections, freedom of speech, but at the same time overthrow democratically elected leaders, torture innocents, run vile ph psychological experiments and keep people believing you.
I believe that the CIA has done more to destroy the trust in democracy and promote the rise of totalitarian regimes that we are seeing now, than any other single entity. Even if they prevented some terror attacks (and as we know they failed spectacularly to prevente several), that's not a price worth paying IMO.
>"Even if they prevented some terror attacks (and as we know they failed spectacularly to prevente several), that's not a price worth paying IMO."
What's always been funny to me about the CIA is if they didn't even do these things:
>"overthrow democratically elected leaders, torture innocents, run vile ph psychological experiments"
There probably would have been less - if any - of those terror attacks to worry about in the first place.
It always existed to provoke and to force varying degrees of military response from nations we antagonized. It was ALWAYS to justify a status quo propped by a military industrial complex - and to overstay the luxuries given to us by Pax Americana. We could have pulled off a peaceful era without bullying, I'm sure of it.
I don't know that much about Putin, but "some hands in Putins rise to power" is not really substantiated by your article. It just claims that the US knew some things and didn't act on them, and provides some weak evidence for it. In general I think the hope was always that Russia would see the benefits of liberal democracy and would slowly shift in that direction. Jumping on every incident wasn't really worth it, so they were willing to forgive them. That shift to liberal democracy obviously didn't happen.
"Created Al-Qaeda" is certainly far too simplistic. There are unforeseen consequences to everything you do (or don't do). The alternative of leaving Afghanistan to their fate after the Soviet invasion also wasn't appealing. If you want to blame someone for Al Qaeda, then start with the Soviet Union and Pakistan.
These two examples also conflict by the way: in one instance they had to do more, and in the other less. It's easy to sit here in judgement decades after the fact, but at the time a lot of this was less clear.
If it wasn't for "Felix Leiter" in James Bond, I think pretty much all non US views of the (fictional) CIA would be net negative.
Probably the same can be said of MI5.
They will continue commiting crimes around the world. Do not worry.
Aww, thanks for the reassurance! (Equally useful comment)
Can't they just go back to selling crack cocaine to fund themselves again?
In accordance with the Executive Order, sounds like great “budget neutral” candidates to fund the bitcoin reserve
Is this a defense of the CIA? The first half of the article catalogs decades of failures ranging from comical to catastrophic.
"There was a time when the C.I.A.’s existential fear was of losing its adversary. In Al Qaeda, it found a new one; in Iraq, it created others. In Trump, it faces an adversary of a different kind."
Further, calling the Commander in Chief its "adversary" is terrible framing.. if they're working against the elected leadership of the US, who are they working FOR?
> if they're working against the elected leadership of the US, who are they working FOR?
The various executive branch departments were created by Congress and are supposed to follow the instructions given by Congress. Various theorists disagree as to the extent to which the President is permitted to override the instructions from Congress.
> The various executive branch departments were created by Congress
Yes
> and are supposed to follow the instructions given by Congress.
Well, yes, but also no. Executive agencies must adhere to the law, but Congress cannot fully set the Executive's policy. Congress has very limited powers to force policy on the Executive, mainly advice and consent (for appointments and treaty ratification) and impeachment.
Past Presidents have wielded vastly more power relative to Congress than the current one. You should see the things that Lincoln did! Lincoln: suspended Habeas Corpus even though the Constitution says only Congress can, he abrogated treaties against the will of the Senate even though the Senate believed that since ratification requires their advice and consent then so much abrogation (but the Constitution is silent on the matter of abrogation) and as a result modern treaties have abrogation clauses to try to hem in heads of state but obviously those clauses can only go so far, and many other things. President Jefferson denied Adams' 18 lame duck federal judge appointees their commissions (and Marbury had something to say about that, namely that it was unconstitutional but also that he couldn't do anything about it). And that's just some of the notable things that Presidents have done that Congress (or in Jefferson's case, the preceding Congress) didn't like.
It hardly matters what various theorists think while 6 justices on the Supreme Court are dedicated to giving the President as much power to override Congress as he pleases.
Which cases do you mean specifically?
I think immibis's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44639370) has a couple great examples of what I'm talking about. To add on, the Court has also allowed the executive branch to essentially shutter federal departments that were created by Congress, such as the Department of Education. They also ruled that lower federal courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions to stop executive action, thereby ending a check on presidential power that has vexed both parties when in office.
> To add on, the Court has also allowed the executive branch to essentially shutter federal departments that were created by Congress, such as the Department of Education.
The Dept of Ed had ~4200 employees and they laid of ~1400. It is not "essentially shuttered" currently regardless of the goal.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ed...
The important question is: "Can they fulfill their legally mandated obligations with the smaller staff?"
If the answer is "yes" then we saved money and still did the job. If the answer is "no" then we have a problem.
So far I haven't seen anyone identify "here are the legally mandated obligations that won't be fulfilled any longer" which would be useful and could be compelling.
When do you think he will shut the entire DOE down?
Can you elaborate on this? This past term, in the Loper Bright case[1] the Supreme Court took away a massive amount of power from the executive in interpreting statutes beyond what Congress specified.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
Uh, that was the past term. Have you also paid attention to the current term?
The current supreme court (which was also the supreme court past term) has a very consistent pattern of taking away power from Democrats and granting power to Republicans. Since the president is a Republican, they've been consistently granting power to the president; since the last president was a Democrat, they were consistently taking away his power. You can watch the pattern continue in 2029.
They ruled the president has unlimited power to do anything at all, without punishment, if it can be justified as a presidential duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States - during the last term, but in relation to Trump.
Very soon after Trump took power, they ruled that courts cannot challenge the constitutionality of Trump's orders: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf?...
Notice all of these sorts of decisions are always 6-3: the 6 conservative justices forming a voting bloc in support of expanding Trump's power (specifically Trump, not just any president), and all 3 non-conservative ones voting against.
> "Very soon after Trump took power, they ruled that courts cannot challenge the constitutionality of Trump's orders"
No, specifically they said district judges couldn't write rulings that applied to other districts.
Your local city council would hit the same limitation if they attempted to write laws for other cities.
Which, is a mixed bag. Judge shopping was a huge problem from universal injunctions. But at the same time, what branch of government is the loss of the steadfast check-and-balance known as "universal injunctions" in favor of – and will now require for ANY AND ALL parties to ONLY be recognized for their loss and damages from actions of the Executive ONLY IF they have the means to sue for it and prevail – in a 1:1 cardinality? Could it be the Executive, who OP said this supported Kingsmanship for?
If a executive action is so unjust, so grotesque, and you need to round up parties damaged by it – outside of the absurdly long time most courts take to make things whole – can't that also be a way to round up people being directly targeted by 1 of 3 branches?
Example: EO-1 quietly builds a “voluntary” federal digital ID, so no one is harmed and nobody has standing for their own injunctions. Then, EO-2 later makes that ID mandatory to file taxes, get Social Security, renew a passport, etc. Real injury finally appears, but each citizen must sue alone and any victory helps only that plaintiff while everyone else stays locked out. The first order sinks the foundations; the second flips the switch.
Sometimes, there should be things that should have avenues to be quickly stricken down before more parties fall victim to them
This seems like a very ominous-sounding way of saying that Democrats have been losing in the Supreme Court lately and Republicans have been winning.
You say "Stalin took over as dictator of USSR" and I say "This seems like a very ominous-sounding way of saying that Trotsky lost an election." That response would make sense if you'd said it about Arsenal vs Manchester, but when it's Stalin vs Trotsky it has real consequences, like the Holodomor, and shouldn't be trivialized.
By Republicans you mean the party hijacked by an authoritarian cult of personality.
Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests the entire executive power to the President, so technically it is the President who is responsible for following and implementing the laws that Congress has passed. Since recent Congresses (going back to at least the 70s and somewhat even to the 1930s) have written laws somewhat vaguely to give the executive branch a lot of discretion, there is a lot of legal uncertainty as to what actions are allowed in this discretion. This is why so many of Trump's executive actions are working their way through the courts as it isn't immediately clear what he's allowed to do with his executive authority vs where he is stepping on Congress's toes. For example, it is an open legal question whether the President and executive agencies are required to spend every dollar allocated by Congress or if they can decide they've already spent enough to meet the Congressional intent of the spending and can decide to not spend anymore.
The President is chosen during an election for this very job. We can't discard democracy in order to save it if sovereignty is meant to be popular. We're not lucky like theocracies or kingdoms, where everything boils down to expert sages or raw power; the vote is the only thing that justifies our country. The only thing that makes people from the US a nation is their commitment to popular rule, one which inspired the world.
The Executive was made to serve the country and the law, not Congress. Congress is meant to serve the country and make the law. The Judiciary is meant to serve the country and rule on the Executive's service to Congress's written law, when asked. At any time and for any reason, Congress can impeach the President, and refer his case to the courts if they think it appropriate.
If law (as regulation) is made from arbitrary agencies, denying people access to the courts when disputing that law is not helpful for democracy, it is anti-democratic, because it denies access to the judicial interpretation of Congress's intent. Congress, however, is free to make itself clear at any time, if it has the votes.
This all comes down to complaining about not having the votes. And in democracies, we shouldn't be sympathetic to people who don't have the votes.
>"The only thing that makes people from the US a nation is their commitment to popular rule, one which inspired the world."
What's this even mean?
Sherman compromise (2 states per state in one chamber of the bicameral legislature) isn't popular rule,
the electoral college doesn't have to operate by popular role,
voter suppression in modern times isn't popular rule,
gerrymandering isn't popular rule.
These existing systems of structure in American political institutions ARE sympathetic to those without votes. We are not a pure democracy. This is civics 101 and amateur hour.
> The Judiciary is meant to serve the country and rule on the Executive's service to Congress's written law, when asked.
The Judiciary is meant to resolve justiciable [civil] controversies, and in its more boring role to try criminal cases. In particular the judiciary cannot exceed its jurisdiction which is set by law and the Constitution. The judiciary cannot say that something the Executive is doing is unconstitutional and force a remedy if the law does not allow it. That's what Marbury v. Madison was all about! In that decision the SCOTUS says that yes, the Executive's action against Marbury was illegal, but no the Court cannot remedy the situation because the law that would have allowed it was unconstitutional! (Holy pretzel batman!) In Marbury two wrongs made a right, or perhaps two wrongs made a third -- depends on how you look at it.
IMO CIA is probably a state within a state with its own agenda and does not get enough oversight.
Oversight is a two edged sword. In one side of the argument, too much oversight effectively slows everything down and makes keeping secrets much hardet. On the other side, without enough oversight the intelligence agency simply has its own agenda, depending on who really control its financing.
Judging from the history of the Cold War era, it is impossible to give enough oversight when you want to fight a cunning enemy. I bet it is the same on the Russian side.
yes, such as when schumer warned trump that "the intelligence community has six ways from sunday to get back at you" on television.
Regardless of what one thinks of trump, this should be enough to have serious consequences for the CIA and other three letter agencies
Ostensibly the CIA continues to exist through your elected congressional leadership as an agency created by the National Security Act of 1947. Voters don't have to vote consistently and can choose to have one branch of government ideologically at odds with the others. This would be the CIA working for the people but without it being aligned with the President.
If Congress decided to end the CIA then they could pass a law abolishing the agency or pass laws that refine the things they can or cannot do, but they're not inherently beholden to the President. The legislative branch being at odds with an executive branch representative isn't inherently problematic unless you think the President should be king.
>"The legislative branch being at odds with an executive branch representative isn't inherently problematic unless you think the President should be king."
There's another lens: You could think this, and have it rooted in the belief that separation of powers and the "checks and balances" against political institutions should have expanded beyond 'Executive' <-> 'Legislative' <-> 'Judiciary'.
> This would be the CIA working for the people but without it being aligned with the President.
If the POTUS feels the CIA is not obeying legal orders then he can roll heads till they do.
I didn't find it to be defending the CIA's failures in any way.
The CIA didn't call Trump its adversary, the reviewer of the book did. They also said that Trump was the Agency's adversary, not the other way around. It is also possible to be adversarial against an individual while doing a good job working for them (see for example everyone with a boss they don't like).
I wouldn't read too much about the intentions of the intelligence community into that provocative sentence by an unaffiliated book reviewer.
Isn't the point of the previous examples that every organisation ultimately works for its own survival/growth?
The cia was basically pointless when the ussr fell (I'm not sure I agree but that's the logic). It needed a reason to exist and Al Qaeda provided that. When that wore thin, it manufactured its own reason in Iraq, a country that had no wdm and was no threat. And so on.
I'm not saying I agree but that is the logic I believe
The country and the people it exists to serve.
Hopefully the rule of law and democracy since the current POTUS is undermining those. Which is kind of ironic, given it's the CIA.
> Hopefully the rule of law and democracy since the current POTUS is undermining those
The current POTUS is doing neither of those things.
Is due process not the rule of law? Well TIL, thanks Nutter!
Sending in troops to LA over the objections of the mayor and governor, masked ICE agents kidnapping people off the street without identifying themselves, people sent to El Salvador prison without due process in violation of a Federal judge's orders, Congress does his every bidding, conservative majority on SCOTUS continues to cede him executive power, sues newspapers and universities he doesn't like, threatens to arrest political opponents, lies about the Epstein files being a hoax. What more evidence do you need? He's consolidating power like Putin and Orban did.
> if they're working against the elected leadership of the US, who are they working FOR?
Unironically: Either themselves, or the American people.
All institutions are supposed to work for the people no? And kind of supposed to have some amount of independence for check and balances? To make sure none of them stop working for the people?
That's what I always thought.
It depends on the definition of "people" I guess.
I find it incredibly weird that people stroll into a conversation like this, basically flexing the complete lack of civic knowledge they have.
I think it was sarcasm:)
There's the "at the pleasure of the president" kind of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_pleasure_of_the_preside...
These jobs are pretty big ones like CISA chief but it doesn't matter much how well you serve the people or whatever. It just matters how well you serve the president
They are working for their own black budget above all else.
Legality doesn't matter as long as the money keeps flowing.
The president is not the state. That's been established multiple times in cases like Nixon, and unfortunately recently regressed with the Trump SCOTUS decision.
But in theory all these organizations swear an oath to the constitution, not to any branch of government, and especially not their leadership.
If any of the leadership issues illegal orders or does work to undermine the constitution or the country, according to the oath sworn by CIA agents, they should be doing everything they can to work against this leadership.
Even the military expects soldiers to reject illegal orders to commit gencode.
The peak of the "the president is not the state" was when the SCOTUS approved of the special counsel law in the 80s. After the Clinton fiasco the SCOTUS has pretty much adopted Scalia's dissent in that case.
> Further, calling the Commander in Chief its "adversary" is terrible framing
Terrible, but not an unusual one. There has been a lot of talk about CIA feuding with various presidents, starting from JFK at least. And it's not exactly a secret they do this:
> New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.
> “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
And man was Schumer right about that.
> who are they working FOR?
The same all large bureaucracies work for - itself. Self-preservation and self-expansion.
Yeah, this article hasn't aged well. It looks like a CIA briefing of a friendly journalist in advance of the Tulsi Gabbard releasing the evidence that the CIA colluded with Obama to lie about Trump/Russia collusion:
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-...
This is an extremely credulous take. Even reading the press release it's obvious Gabbard (a massive defender of Putin's Russia) is conflating two entirely different things, namely hacking election infrastructure vs the massive political influence/misinformation campaigns.
You might also recall a Senate Republican-led effort that determined that Russia did attempt to influence us elections in favor of Trump, unless you are avoiding facts that don't confirm your priors.
The press release seems to conflat cyber attacks (of which there were none) with election influence (I think interference would be another phrase for the same thing?). But those are different no?
"Russia tried to get people to vote for candidate X" can be true even when "Russia tried to stop people voting by breaking machines" isn't.
Yes, but "Trump co-ordinated with Putin to get Russia to help him" is not true and is the line that was pushed.
So you believe a known liar but it's impossible for you to believe that trump has ties to russia? the guy who has invested in russian real estate? the guy who went to russia many many times before he even became president?
it's hard for you to believe that the guy who did all those things and asked Russia on live TV for dig up dirt on Hillary is colluding with russia?
The cult is strong it seems.
Nonsense, he literally did that on TV and his current scrambling is to obscure that he is, not an Epstein client, but a collaborator.
It's weird how accounts like this one forgets to mention how the CIA rebooted global heroin trade (as well as addiction at home) and gave it to italian mafia networks, and of course subsequent deep interfacing with such actors.
Especially since it mentions election interference in Italy through those same mob networks.
Perhaps it's easy to forget they early brought the fruits of their activities home and never stopped, or easy to believe that they only have effects abroad.
https://history.wisc.edu/publications/the-politics-of-heroin...
"rebooted global heroin trade" lol you been keepin an eye on it yea?
> But these days the threats are coming from above.
Author makes it sound like democratically legitimate oversight is bad
Nice try, CIA
You're supposed to say,
"Not today, CIA" "Nice try, FBI" "Nice attempt at obscurity, Department of Homeland Security"
The military industrial complex lies in ruins, the west is in full retreat while other empires expand in another great game and the CIA conspiracy theories where revealed as just left racism dogwhistles. Because of course , non-white people can not be bad acteurs , creating their own destiny and pursuit the original sin that is imperialism, racism and genocide. They are noble savages.
Meanwhile , the agents of centralized incompetence aggregated, rainmade the public behind this conspiracy facade, by hijacking the stories of local developments.
So tirrd of all this hyperbiased nonsense, that then turns out to be the narratives pushed by the working secret service of hostile nations.
If you willingly turn yourself into a propaganda asset of a hostile foreign power, you should leave the democracy you reside in .
The CIA spectacularly failed to prevent the US from being compromised by a foreign power. That was sort of its only reason for existing.
Always interesting to read these highly-selective histories of the CIA, where the most powerful clandestine organization in the world is presented as largely above-board and under-resourced.
Apparently the CIA was struggling to find a place in the early 90s while its former director was the sitting POTUS and the USA was renewing its grand campaign to covertly and overtly reshape the Middle East. Sure buddy, totally believable.
And no mention of the CIA's protection of 9/11 attackers from FBI persecution prior to the attacks.
"If a genuine emergency were to take place, and Trump tried to use the occasion to cancel elections or declare martial law, who would be able to stop him?"
LOL
This comment was killed, and I vouched for it because the comment's quote from TFA is accurate, and its implication in TFA is that the CIA should be able to do something like, idk, kill or remove the POTUS, something that is quite nefarious. Pointing out that TFA does that is very much worth having here. Feel free to discuss.
Agreed, but it's a good question. Will the will of the people do it - should we expect the will of the people, as a conglomerate, to make such a concentrated and calculated decision?
It's important to note that CIA is a very large, bureaucratic government. Perhaps the best example of the downsides of "big government".
There are a lot of great people who work there. And people who innovate, but that's in spite of.
It is the opposite of nimble, innovative, and adaptable.
A good article that is critical of the previous book by Weiner ("Legacy of Ashes") is this article[0].
Here is a quote from it: "A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has distorted what was said, why it was said, when it was said, and the circumstances under which it was said—all to support his thesis that CIA has been a continuous failure from 1947 up to the present. Weiner’s use of the plural 'final gatherings' in the excerpt from his account suggests he knows what he is doing."
[0]: https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/legacy-of-ashes.pdf
The author was not only a longtime CIA employee, but staff historian. Not the most trustworthy source here.
https://nationalsecurity.gmu.edu/nicholas-dujmovic/