What will become of the CIA?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
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.
The Campus operates under the cover of Hendley Associates, a financial
trading institution. Hendley Associates is a trader in stocks, bonds, and
international currencies, though, it does little in the way of public
business and is not known to have any clients. . . . By intercepting
communications between the CIA and NSA, the Campus is able to take advantage
of SIGINT they gather and cross-deck to the CIA. This gives The Campus
currency-trading troops the best sort of insider information, which enables
the organization to make a ton of long-term money without anybody really
noticing. . . .
It's called Treadstone, there are a few movies about it.
instead of each branch of the US military having their own codebreaking and SIGINT group the DoD decided to merge them and members of all services work at Ft Meade.
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)
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.
In the same way you might say a lot of the NSA's technical accesses are gated by the CIA (due to being HUMINT derived), the inverse is also true where the SIGINT collected by those accesses is gated by the NSA. This isnt strictly true though, since the NSA also has plenty of other non-CIA derived sources.
I also think in a lot of ways it like saying the Army and Navy control the entire military because all the other branches broke off from them and if you need eg aquatic support then the Navy has to provide it.
If one state’s borders were controlled by another’s, its operations reliant on another’s, and its leadership largely coming from or connected to the other’s, we would not consider that state sovereign. In the same way, my point is that the NSA cannot be considered independent of the CIA.
While other agencies can use SIGINT, all of it goes to the CIA by default and access to the NSA’s network is still gated by the CIA. The converse is not true - the NSA does not oversee most broader intelligence networks (shockingly neither does CYBERCOM), and the CIA also operates siloed networks and operations.
The military example you gave is a great way of thinking about it. The Army and Navy gather resources and maintain readiness, but operations and control of resources is afforded to component commands. All of these are technically separate and roll up directly to JCS/JTFs or DepSecDef. Similarly each intelligence agency is technically separate and oversees gathering/maintaining intelligence under its mission, but is still practically under the CIA’s influence.
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.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gabbard-c...
"Oh no! A missile is hitting Kiev!" (puppeteer makes sound of explosion like BKSHSH!)
Also really happy to see a living legend hanging out here with us.
Today's Congress entirely failing to regulate the executive branch and seemingly... uninterested? in doing so is troubling for the stability of the republic.
You say uninterested, yet it seems more like complicit. Both chambers of Congress are led by the same party as POTUS. They are quite happy with how things are going, and actively work to enable POTUS and his agenda. There are some things where previous Congress has put limits on POTUS that this POTUS is ignoring. If this Congress was really effective, they'd repeal those regulations so POTUS' actions would not run afoul of legislation. Instead, they are just ignoring the flagrant violations, and letting SCOTUS (also led by the same party) get involved with their decisions that POTUS has flagrantly pushed back against as well.
And if you were the NSA, how could you pass up on using some of that ‘accidentally’ collected intel to help avoid distractions while you ‘protect the nation’ eh?
what has saved americans is the CIA has been focused on foreign issues. once that might is turned internally there's hell to pay.
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.
It's been used in Ukraine and other Eastern Europe countries as well.
(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)
But that has been deemed unfit by the CIA and somehow Pinochet coup d'etat succeeded.
Backing from the US helped a lot there.
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.
You mean in Ukraine, right? It's quite normal to not see something that's been carefully designed to be invisible.
> It sounds like a kind of American provincialism to think that everything revolves around them.
Those words are a sure sign of serious brainwashing, similar to the Russian side. In the meantime the dead keep piling up... Quo bono?
No.
> Those words are a sure sign of serious brainwashing,
Hardly. Pinning all recent human history on the CIA seems like a "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail" kind of thing. The world is far more complex than stale Usenet copypastas suggest, and the CIA is entirely outclassed by a number intelligence organizations in Eastern Europe purely it lacks an understanding of local history and culture. For the longest time, Eastern Europe has been academically taught through a Russian-centric lens. It's like learning the history of Africa through the perspective of colonial empires rather than the natives; gives barely any understanding what's going on between the different peoples of Africa. This has led to major intelligence failures, such as the failure to accurately predict the collapse of the USSR, which took CIA analysts by surprise. This, in turn, left everyone in Eastern Europe stunned: how could they be so completely oblivious to the facts on the ground?! That gave a lifelong immunity to the whole category of "almighty CIA" conspiracy theories.
I clearly sense that you cannot relate to issues of life and death, which puts your non-botness into serious question. Besides, I've never argued about who is doing the siccing, you're simply following your old context which happens to be wrong.
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.
The constitutional crisis in Ukraine in 2014 was between President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian Parliament, which is actually the sovereign institution. In a constitutional sense it wasn't even really a revolution because the sovereign institution was never overthrown. It pressured Yanukovych into resigning, backed by massive public support.
Why, are we in 1930s Germany when those things were incompatible? It's 2025, get on with the times:
https://jacobin.com/2025/04/orban-netanyahu-israel-war-crime...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/le-pen-as-frenc...
Supporting Jews and Israel especially is a great way for modern far-right to get allies on its anti-immigrant and anti-muslim campaigns. The same is increasingly true for LGBT+ rights (take Geert Wilders as an example).
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.
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops to the crazed Trumpers who think that USAID is a waste of money.
It's a jobs program for midwestern farmers to grow unprofitable legacy crops and then it morphs into an intelligence operation by giving those crops to the poorest of the poor as food donations in some resource rich but economically poor and geopolitically strategic areas, all while creating tremendous goodwill and ground-level intel.
And somehow, this combo deal that puts money in poor farmers' pockets AND creates tremendous political goodwill AND serves as a fountain of continuous strategic information in vital localities is seen as a bad thing by Trump fans.
I don't get it. It's probably one of the most economically beneficial operations the CIA has ever taken part of outside of trafficking cocaine.
As a matter of principle it just isn't possible to run a democracy where the government, in its official capacity, is working to shape the narrative. I can't deny that is what has been happening for decades, but the result is a toxic soup of lies and would explain a lot about why the journalist community seems to have been slowly unmooring from reality - they're attached to the money printing pipe. People shouldn't be paying for political propaganda with their taxes; particularly not in the US where it is probably leaking into domestic politics. Those NGO networks USAID was pushing money towards appear to be hostile in the main to the Trump voter base and their political objectives.
[0] https://rsf.org/en/usa-trump-s-foreign-aid-freeze-throws-jou... - I note they put in an erratum, although given that the US is almost certainly trying to obscure where its propaganda funding there are still a lot of questions. Their source in imi.org.ua was quoting some eyebrow-raising numbers.
You're not that naive...come on.
Of course it's possible to run a democracy when the government is working to shape the narrative. Every government regardless of their type tries to control narratives. That's sort of their whole thing....
1. USAID – Frequently used by the CIA for covert operations and as cover for agents abroad. (Washington Post [1])
2. Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) – CIA-founded and funded anti-communist intellectual network during the Cold War. [2]
3. Air America – CIA-owned airline used heavily during the Vietnam War and Laos operations. PBS [3]
4. Blockstream - CIA backed "non-profitable" company that controls the Bitcoin GitHub repository and guides development founded by useful idiots like Gregory Maxwell, "Blue Hair Matt," and a handful of other internet trolls with no real software credentials.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/usaid...
2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1263191.The_Cultural_Col...
Citation #2 is a link a good reads page for "The Lincoln Lawyer" - confused on how this is relevant to "air america"
Citation #3 is not a specific link to any particular article, just the miamiherald's home page.
And someone previously mentioned there is no citation for claim 4
Kind of feels like astroturfing or a bot of some sort. Mind clarifying any of this?
If it was a swamp/intel front I don't think it could've gotten burned down. I think the CIA laughed the whole time "this is what those idiots get for not doing their stuff under our umbrella and letting us take our cut".
And yes, they've been operating domestically as well with the same color revolution tactics. Particularly to try to keep Trump out of office.
Trying to project this onto ICE is cute.
As the latest release of docs from the DNI shows, the CIA certainly tried to do this with Obama instigated Russian collusion hoax.
That doesn't really fit with "answers to no one", which can be understood as "it can focus on whatever it pleases".
It is extremely likely but not proven that they have done so at least one time in the past.
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.
How is that even a question?
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.
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.
There are maps of this new world regularly published by US think tanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More than ten percent of the population is on SNAP and everything is corn, but there is no food rationing? Usians toil under an absurd lack of welfare, but that's not a sacrifice? Starving public services through "tax breaks" is not sacrificial?
But I lack the basic sympathy for these organizations, if they were abolished the world would be a better place.
It's like wishing militaries didn't exist.
I'm convinced that the evolution of the internet will bring this as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you just shrug your ahoulders and do nothing?
First, I'll answer the post ipso facto aspect: The USA did meddle, and was that good? In the case of Pinochet, no, because he was a brutal authoritarian and was obviously the worse alternative to the leftist, not even communist, government he overthrew. Also, if the people voted for communism, then, that's self determination, let them have it. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't, that's no business of America's. A military coup is "might makes right," an unethical ideology. So if we compare the two forms of meddling, actually, the USSR's was more ethical, since it was aligned with the will of the people. Overall though I still think neither country should have meddled.
What should have been done instead? If the USSR is meddling, the USA as a nation state should do nothing more than leverage its platform to expose any instances of meddling, especially if they were against the will of the people (e.g. fraudulent votes). The people in the USA is a different thing entirely, if I knew what direct action people could take to resist nation state meddling entirely I'd write it here, since I don't, I'll just say the usual: form subversive relationships with neighbors in opposition to authority, mutual aid in opposition to capital-derived infrastructure, mutual education, mutual bonds.
As for Hitler, who also rose to power undemocratically I might add (Reichstag fire and the like), he was committing a genocide, any and all means to stop that is ethical, including full invasion by other nation states. On the other hand, I can't think of an ethical way for a nation state to prevent him coming to power. After all, at the time, I'm not sure it was possible to predict what he was about to do - an anti-semitic politician wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and nobody had ever seen a Holocaust before. If Germany can't prevent itself from becoming a fascist hellhole I don't really see America's responsibility there other than to offer safe haven to any fleeing Jewish people, gays, trans people, communists, etc. Since time machines don't exist, I can't think of an ethical justification for USA meddling in Germany pre-Holocaust or pre-invasion of Poland.
What do you think? I think an interesting question is, "what is ethical and allowed if Hitler 2 arrived today and began seeking power?" Such questions could have interesting answers depending on what you think America should be allowed to do to the current person and nation conducting a genocide, Netanyahu in Israel.
No, they just never said that in the first place. What they said was, "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." Emphasis mine.
Comparing the two is so fatuous I can't believe it.
It would be like someone saying "Kim Jong Un is a horrific leader" and then another person responding with "yeah well my home owner's association president is terrible too." Just a complete non sequitur.
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.
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...
As if the money was for the strikers and not just their leaders...
(But even so, 28 USD in 1974 would be 180 USD today and was still a pretty sum in Argentina at the time, especially for a trucker)
Bad faith arguments doesn't help believing you have an honest argument to begin with.
So you're claiming the leaders were able to convince 250,000 union members to strike because... the leaders wanted it? That makes no sense.
As laid out in the article, the truckers were already upset at the government undermining their entire industry. They didn't need $28 USD to convince them to strike.
It wild how people think the CIA with a few million dollars can convince an otherwise stable democratic nation to overthrow it's leader in a coup.
As the article lays out, the CIA were mostly observers who tossed a bit of money to opposition parties. It's questionable if the CIA had any impact at all considering they weren't backing Pinochet himself, and the timing of the coup caught them by surprise. It's pretty clear they weren't very plugged in to what was happening.
"The other guy was worse," is factually pretty off base. You can pick and choose sources all you want, but the fact is that Allende was elected as democratically as any US president in the last few decades: the idea that foreign interference invalidates an election is pretty specious. And even if you want to call Allende a dictator, he's definitely a better dictator than Pinochet: he killed far, far fewer innocent people. I give zero fucks about US-friendly vs. USSR-friendly in this case: if the US friendly dictator kills hundreds of thousands of people and the USSR friendly one doesn't, the USSR friendly one is better.
Let me make this clear: if you choose capitalism over preventing mass-murder, your morality is screwed up.
And even if somehow Allende was worse (which again, is not true), that doesn't make supporting Pinochet morally right. Most 5 year olds know two wrongs don't make a right.
> 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.
If your argument is that the CIA was incompetent, that doesn't look much better for them.
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
“ 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);”
Your rebuttal consists of one source completely unrelated to what happened in Chile. Well done.
And what the CIA was doing in other countries is irrelevant to whether what was article describes as happening in Chile is accurate.
If you're going to claim the article isn't true, then an actual rebuttal of the article arguments would be a helpful place to start.
Meanwhile you pretend we should ignore the CIA trained every torturer and executioner of the juntas of South America.
Pure negationism.
I take that as you can’t actually prove the article is wrong?
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.
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.
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.
This isn't obvious to me. Can you help me understand?
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.
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.
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.
If you have invented the disease, then surely you can warn in advance that a cure will be needed.
It feels ridiculous even writing that out. Can you help me understand your perspective?
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.
"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.
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.
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?
If it could be transparent and ‘clean’ it would be able to operate in the open.
"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?
Unironically: Either themselves, or the American people.
That's what I always thought.
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
The current POTUS is doing neither of those things.
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 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.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of what one thinks of trump, this should be enough to have serious consequences for the CIA and other three letter agencies
I would think this is true of any intelligence agency.
There is just too much power involved to not form an internal cabal. Financing is a trivial hurdle for the cabal to overcome once formed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the POTUS feels the CIA is not obeying legal orders then he can roll heads till they do.
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'.
Jury is a positive right within the right of due process - AND the right of citizens to participate in - and is therefore treated as a compelled responsibility on members of the populace, that exists to quell concentrated power from legal proceedings. In my opinion, we should have had more of those - and “The People” should have been an enumerated institution within the political structure that offers more comprehensive positive rights, negative rights, and compelled (and tensioned) checks and balances against the other institutions (executive, legislative, judiciary, “state”)
Legality doesn't matter as long as the money keeps flowing.
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
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...
And you, underestimate people that are not of your own.
He wanted to get the US in another Vietnam. He understood the effect it would have on the American people.
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.
Probably the same can be said of MI5.
Author makes it sound like democratically legitimate oversight is bad
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-...
"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.
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.
At Trump's request though? That was the lie from Obama.
Obama didn't actually talk about Russian election interference until after the 2016 election due to a fear it would appear partisan. In interviews afterward, he avoided suggesting Trump or his campaign coordinated with Russia at all.
I can't find anything about Obama accusing Trump of asking Russia to interfere. It would be so out of character that it is hard to believe.
The problem was that Obama didn’t do anything about it, include calling it out at the time.
The rest of the evidence makes it even more damning.
Trump worked on a massive plan with Putin to influence the US election. However, rather than bothering with encrypted messages, dead drops etc, they both decided that the best way to manage this TOP SECRET PLOT was for Trump to ask for help from Russia in a TV interview.
Who is dumber - the one who does the dumb thing, or the one who refuses to believe that the person did the dumb thing literally right in front of them, and then refuses to act.
No one has to be sophisticated when the world is willfully this stupid. The US is like the wife that insists their husband is faithful (and punishes the kids who try to say something) while the husband is literally cheating right in front of them.
PBS:
"“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump said in a July 27, 2016 news conference."
Wikipedia:
These emails were subsequently leaked by DCLeaks in June and July 2016[2] and by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, just before the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...
The RNC systems were also hacked, and their emails never released. [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...]
It’s this shit that makes everyone laugh at people doing what you’re doing. Because you’re incredibly dumb.
But as I'm learning, you can't argue people out of a conspiracy theory.
But I guess it’s true that he could literally shoot someone on 5th Ave and get away with it, eh? [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/23/donald-trump...]
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.
Everything in the NYer these days is NYer Lite. And the timing could not be worse.
"Not today, CIA" "Nice try, FBI" "Nice attempt at obscurity, Department of Homeland Security"
“$&773AjjaWj7-_£7f, NSA”
LOL
There’s usually 2 implied answers to this - at least in American discourse (the people - with an extralegal right to revolution, and foreign states - as an act of war).
However, the author actually introduces a party that usually isn’t discussed in the conversation - the IC.
I was just bringing up the party of “The People” that is USUALLY assumed the responsibility in hypotheticals like these, and actually challenging the grounds of doing so
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 .
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.
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."