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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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" 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.
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?
The US needed access to Chilean copper mines. The Allende government wanted to nationalize the profits of Chile’s natural resources.
Allende was democratically elected. Costa-Gavras made an excellent film about the coup & aftermath.
How do you know, having some superpowers? Since when has US mandate to overthrow democratically elected government because its not leaning towards direction CIA wants? Saddam was also heavily supported by CIA and whole US government for example. And few other merry folks.
At least admit a fuckup and don't try to macho-out of this sin of your fathers. Decent folks would be at least ashamed of their mistakes and apologize (I know that's for decent nations to pick up, but its nice to lay clean moral actions and then watch reality divert because of blahs).
Good one. I guess Allende being a socialist justifies killing him, disregarding the popular vote, dismantling a democracy, stripping Chileans of their rights and putting up a fascist dictator. Jesus Christ.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
Which sounds like a very trivializing way of saying that stuff's going to shit. And then we've gone full circle, haven't we?
Political happenings do have consequences. Severe ones. It's not like soccer where no matter who wins, the game is basically the same and the only difference is whose name goes on the leaderboard. No, politics is not like that at all.
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 the election." That response would make sense if you'd said it about Arsenal vs Manchester. When it's Stalin vs Trotsky it has real consequences, like the Holodomor.
Democracies are fragile, and the USA's lasted longer than most.
But you're just saying shit because you never experienced actual consequences of politics and get to laugh it all off as a case of stupid people taking everything too seriously.
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'.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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?
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.
"Dismantling" is very far from what is happening. "Slightly reducing" would be more accurate - even if we concentrate on the discretionary budget, i.e. start with ignoring 3/4 of the whole federal spending - the projected 2025 spending is around $1.6 trln, where 2024 was at $1.8 trln. It is a cut of about 12%, which is substantial, as federal budgets go, but nowhere near "dismantling". If we dig further down and ignore defense and security spending (which is the whole point of this post, but let's go wild!) then it's projected that 2025 figure would be about $710 bln, down from $910 bln in 2024. Thats about 22% reduction (Trump's cuts, unsurprisingly, mostly go to nondefense budget parts) - again, a substantial reduction, but nowhere near "dismantling".
In fact, the government, spending 7 trillion dollars per year, does not look "dismantled" to me, dwarfing the GDP of every country on Earth excluding USA and China. And this is not likely to change much in the rest of Trump's term, more likely these are the biggest cuts we will see and some of them may even be quietly rolled back later in the term.
People pay attention to both SPOKEN/PUBLISHED intentions along with how cuts were implemented/planning for dealing with the cuts. Both of those show your absolute numbers don't matter in the determination that this regime is in fact "dismantling" the government.
So you are saying "dismantling" is actually Trump speaking about what he's going to do rather than actual actions on the ground? In this case, the federal government has been "dismantled" by pretty much every President since FDR, they all promised to implement cuts and fight "waste and abuse" and the federal spending only grew. In fact, if Trump cuts all government spending in half (including mandatory spending, which is nearly impossible to do, but let's assume for a second he can do that) he'll just go to the size of the government as it was in 2008, and that's not exactly a tiny government, let alone a "dismantled" one. The actual cuts, of course, are way smaller than that, and will always remain so. And I am willing to bet that once Trump retires, not only the federal government will be alive and well, it likely would be spending a lot more than it had been when he first became President. And there's more than even chance it will also be spending more than when he took the oath of office for the second time.
It is quite discouraging though that people are now openly calling to ignore politician's actions and only take their words into account, even if not supported by any actual action. There was a time, not so long ago, where it was considered smart to do the opposite.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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" 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.
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?
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Maybe, or maybe not. All we know is what happened after the CIA did its thing. We cannot know what could have happened if they didn't.
The US needed access to Chilean copper mines. The Allende government wanted to nationalize the profits of Chile’s natural resources. Allende was democratically elected. Costa-Gavras made an excellent film about the coup & aftermath.
Okay? Can we let other countries sort out their own political issues without our meddling?
Sounds good to me
would you agree that this also goes for things in eastern europe and perhaps in the middle east? :)
How do you know, having some superpowers? Since when has US mandate to overthrow democratically elected government because its not leaning towards direction CIA wants? Saddam was also heavily supported by CIA and whole US government for example. And few other merry folks.
At least admit a fuckup and don't try to macho-out of this sin of your fathers. Decent folks would be at least ashamed of their mistakes and apologize (I know that's for decent nations to pick up, but its nice to lay clean moral actions and then watch reality divert because of blahs).
But at a lower cost to the American taxpayer, and a much lower cost to America's honor. Sounds like a win to me.
Agreed
Good one. I guess Allende being a socialist justifies killing him, disregarding the popular vote, dismantling a democracy, stripping Chileans of their rights and putting up a fascist dictator. Jesus Christ.
Look up walther rauff..
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What does a reprehensible leftist regime look like?
The head side of the coin comes with the tail side of the coin.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Republicans you mean the party hijacked by an authoritarian cult of personality.
Which sounds like a very trivializing way of saying that stuff's going to shit. And then we've gone full circle, haven't we?
Political happenings do have consequences. Severe ones. It's not like soccer where no matter who wins, the game is basically the same and the only difference is whose name goes on the leaderboard. No, politics is not like that at all.
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 the election." That response would make sense if you'd said it about Arsenal vs Manchester. When it's Stalin vs Trotsky it has real consequences, like the Holodomor.
Democracies are fragile, and the USA's lasted longer than most.
But you're just saying shit because you never experienced actual consequences of politics and get to laugh it all off as a case of stupid people taking everything too seriously.
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
The country and the people it exists to serve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
Nice try, CIA
The CIA spectacularly failed to prevent the US from being compromised by a foreign power. That was sort of its only reason for existing.
"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?
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.
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"Dismantling" is very far from what is happening. "Slightly reducing" would be more accurate - even if we concentrate on the discretionary budget, i.e. start with ignoring 3/4 of the whole federal spending - the projected 2025 spending is around $1.6 trln, where 2024 was at $1.8 trln. It is a cut of about 12%, which is substantial, as federal budgets go, but nowhere near "dismantling". If we dig further down and ignore defense and security spending (which is the whole point of this post, but let's go wild!) then it's projected that 2025 figure would be about $710 bln, down from $910 bln in 2024. Thats about 22% reduction (Trump's cuts, unsurprisingly, mostly go to nondefense budget parts) - again, a substantial reduction, but nowhere near "dismantling".
In fact, the government, spending 7 trillion dollars per year, does not look "dismantled" to me, dwarfing the GDP of every country on Earth excluding USA and China. And this is not likely to change much in the rest of Trump's term, more likely these are the biggest cuts we will see and some of them may even be quietly rolled back later in the term.
People pay attention to both SPOKEN/PUBLISHED intentions along with how cuts were implemented/planning for dealing with the cuts. Both of those show your absolute numbers don't matter in the determination that this regime is in fact "dismantling" the government.
So you are saying "dismantling" is actually Trump speaking about what he's going to do rather than actual actions on the ground? In this case, the federal government has been "dismantled" by pretty much every President since FDR, they all promised to implement cuts and fight "waste and abuse" and the federal spending only grew. In fact, if Trump cuts all government spending in half (including mandatory spending, which is nearly impossible to do, but let's assume for a second he can do that) he'll just go to the size of the government as it was in 2008, and that's not exactly a tiny government, let alone a "dismantled" one. The actual cuts, of course, are way smaller than that, and will always remain so. And I am willing to bet that once Trump retires, not only the federal government will be alive and well, it likely would be spending a lot more than it had been when he first became President. And there's more than even chance it will also be spending more than when he took the oath of office for the second time.
It is quite discouraging though that people are now openly calling to ignore politician's actions and only take their words into account, even if not supported by any actual action. There was a time, not so long ago, where it was considered smart to do the opposite.
Increasing spending, taking on record debts, and spraying a small army of masked cops on our streets... that's dismantling?
They're only increasing the parts that kill undesirables; the rest is being dismantled.
Don't forget 4 trillion in tax cuts going straight onto the national debt.
Sold to Trump's friends.
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.