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Comment by smallblacksun | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not that the intelligence agencies can't stay above politics, but that the politicians meddle with the intelligence agencies for political reasons. Despite what some conspiracy theorists believe, the US intelligence agencies are run by the elected officials, not the other way around. This is good for a lot of reasons, but does leave them subject to the whims of politicians.

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Yes to what both of you are saying. But it's not quite just "politics", I would say. Perhaps look at this as an evolution of the post-WWI principle that "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail"? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services#Or...)

(Me, after the WSJ recommended it I just got a copy of The Deceivers by Thaddeus Holt, 1148 pages (!!!) on "Allied Military Deception in the Second World War". Very interesting.)

Thanks for the recommendation, that book sounds great. I've ordered it, at a price of less than one pence per page!

An intelligence agency not run by politicians, on the other hand, would be an enemy to be feared.

I think there's another problem. Arab intelligence services tend to be brutal, so I'm not surprised that _they_ thought that their course of action was a good idea, but was "let's torture this Islamic-fundamentalist blogger into infiltrating al-Qaida for us" really a course of action that raised _no_ moral or common-sense alarm bells at the CIA?

And where do I go to get my money back? I would rather be killed by a suicide bomber than defended by torturers. (I say this as a conservative -- and as someone who believes in objective right and wrong.)

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