That’s insincere. Even if you truly believe a catastrophe may happen you may not be willing to risk life in prison because the President doesn’t like your bosses boss.
1. If the President hates the CIA/NSA/FBI director that much they tend to get quickly replaced.
2. Punishing a lower-level agent with prison doesn't seem like an effective way to get revenge on whatever agency leadership the President might hate.
You're making an appeal to a compound scenario: It isn't just (A) "Hollywood ticking bomb" unlikely, but also (B) "TV political backstabbing drama" unlikely, multiplied again by (C) "stupidly baroque form of revenge" unlikely... to get a final probability somewhere near zero-point-zero-zero-not-gonna-happen-LOL.
So no, I don't think that fantastical hypothetical justifies day-to-day erosion of rule-of-law and civil rights.
> Even if you truly believe a catastrophe may happen
If someone truly believes it and they have a reasonable basis behind that belief [0], then surely the morality of saving millions from an atomic fireball or whatever goes pretty dang far in outweighing 1-20 years in federal prison, and they will have ample evidence to make a strong case for getting a pardon.
[0] If spy/agent/analyst dude "truly believes" but for no real reason other than voices in their head, a prophetic dream, hidden scriptures, or alphabet-soup... they are already incompetent and need to be fired immediately to remove them from that position of authority.
Now you are in trial for torturing this guy. You state that you stopped a major attack. Israel isn’t even fully convinced an attack was eminent, despite you being confident. Even other members of Hamas provide evidence on your behalf, but it looks bad for everyone involved that torture was needed. It’s much better looking to the general intelligence establishment that you acted ina rogue manner doing something that may have at best helped a little and at worst had ignited a whole international crisis of torture of a Palestinian.
I think for a lot of people they would be fine to just see how things play out and later say “if we tortured this guy who later admitted to know we could’ve stopped the attack”.
... but of course it depends on the standard for what 'prevented' means. De-radicalized a potential terrorist, does that mean a terror attack was stopped/prevented.
It's quite complicated in practice, alas.
The reason we can't see the justification is because it doesn't exist.
Here is a small list of the ones that were publicized. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrori...
It doesn't really speak to or against your point. You're not going to justify an entire national security system on a subset of one of its many functions.
Yes, that is the primary problem with spy agencies - that they don't feel accountable. They SHOULD be.
The current paradigm is that agencies generally are accountable to congressional committees and the courts. I'm not sure how we would make them accountable to the public when there's very little accountability for elected representatives even.
The truth is that even a minor succesfully stopped attack they'd advertise till the end of time, to score political and press points.
I didn't say they're perfect methods or systems. Intelligence operations have mixed outcones partially dependent on adversarial actions such as ops sec or counterintel. This isn't a new or unique phenomenon.