"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
To some extent, the CIA (unintentionally?) aided and abetted the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That's pretty egregious, in my opinion.
How is that even a question?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
cuuupid•4h ago
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.
Havoc•4h ago
cuuupid•3h ago
JamesSwift•4h ago
threemux•4h ago
cuuupid•3h ago
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)
Animats•4h ago
JamesSwift•3h ago
cuuupid•3h ago
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.
actionfromafar•2h ago
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gabbard-c...