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    How to Break Up the CIA

    By Doctor Cleveland on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 6:14pm | Politics

    We have reached the point where the CIA is publicly bucking the right of the Senate Intelligence committee to oversee it. If even half of the charges in Amy Davidson's superb piece are true, the CIA has become totally unmoored and no longer seems even to acknowledge the idea that it has to answer to our elected officials. But you don't have to believe Davidson, or even Dianne Feinstein, to read CIA director John O. Brennan's public statements. Brennan does not speak as if he were answerable to the Senate. When your spies are trying to have the oversight committee's staff arrested, you're down the rabbit hole. Once the spies aren't accountable to the elected leaders, you don't really have a democracy any more.

    How to deal with an insubordinate intelligence service? It's a difficult question that the CIA has unfortunately raised before. You can't disrupt their genuinely necessary defense work. But you also can't let them be the ones who decide what's necessary and what's not, or to be the sole judges of their own behavior. Putting in new leadership has been tried. Congressional hearings have been tried. It might be time for the death penalty: not an end to American intelligence work, but the end of a specific dysfunctional intelligence agency. How could that be done?

    Step 1: Divide the CIA between other intelligence services. The good news is our complicated security establishment means that the CIA is not the only game in town. The CIA can be carved up, in stages if that's needed to prevent disruption, and transferred to other agencies. Much of the Directorate of Operations, which does the covert-action stuff, could go straight to the Pentagon. Various intelligence-gathering and analysis units could go to the NSA or to military intelligence. A lot of the counter-espionage and domestic counter-terrorism could go to the FBI. Ongoing operations would not be interrupted. But the CIA personnel transferred to those other agencies would be accountable to the supervisors there.

    My thinking here is that the CIA certainly contains many valuable officers, but has apparently developed a deep-rooted culture of insubordination to authorities outside the CIA. (I am especially tired of hearing people ask whether the old CIA hands will be willing to accept this or that nominee for Director.) The point here is to keep the officers but break up the unit and its problematic culture. As soon as practical, the former-CIA personnel should be dispersed within their new agencies, so that ex-CIA hands no longer form their own little units or clubs. They need to be supervised, isolated from one another, and absorbed into a different organizational culture.

    Of course, an agency that recognizes no authority but its own will resist being broken up, so two more steps would have to be taken right at the beginning:

    Step 2. Another authority needs to take immediate custody of ALL CIA records. Either the NSA, the FBI, or some new group created for the purpose needs to take everything the CIA has. The CIA should be able to copy records they need, and to request copies from the custodian, but the custodial agency keeps the originals. Anyone destroying records or holding them back gets charged for national-security crimes. Because destroying or stealing intelligence actually is a crime.

    Step 3. A watchdog office needs to be created to supervise CIA employees during the breakup and for at least a decade after.  Congress needs to empower a special inspector's office with full security clearance to oversee the CIA's compliance. After all, the agency would be dissolved because of its refusal to comply with authority, and the dissolution would make many of its old hands angry. The new inspector's office would also need a separate criminal-prosecution wing, to whom those who disobeyed lawful commands would be referred. The inspector's office would need to check in periodically on all ex-CIA agents, to make sure they hadn't held onto classified material and that they weren't colluding with each other. And the inspector's office needs to be able to turn their lives inside out if necessary. Those who refuse to accept transfer to new agencies and resign instead should expect the inspector's office to look at them much more closely and much more often. If that means that some ex-spies lose a good deal of their privacy to a surveillance regime in the name of national security, well, it may be us or them.

    Topics: 
    Politics

    Comments

    I keep thinking this might be the "straw" that gets Congress to rein our whole intelligence apparatus. Feinstein seemed (to me) to be somewhat blasé about the NSA and Snowden, etc., but now she's up in arms.


    by Peter Schwartz on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 8:44pm

    She became concerned when she thought that she was the target of surveillance.


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 9:06pm

    The only thing or things that hit my mind with this post is that or are that:

    Krushchev was a KGB agent prior to his installation as TOP RUSSIAN.

    Putin was a KGB agent prior to his installation as TOP RUSSIAN.

    George HW Bush was IN CHARGE OF THE CIA prior to his installation as the top American President.

    It caught me by surprise in the 80's when I came to this epiphany in the 80's.

    What do I know?

    I PAID FOR THIS MIC AND.....

    What do I know?


    by Richard Day on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 10:17pm

    I was just going to make a point with a snarky comment, but I see Brennan already has:

    “If I did something wrong,” Brennan said. “I will go to the president and I will explain to him what I did and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.”

    Some people seem to be talking like he's a George Bush appointee or something.  Obama chose him.

    I thought if you were on the Dem team, you were supposed to support the Dem president's appointees unless he fires them for cause? No? (As a proud Independent, I believe what I've been told, that I'm not an expert on this party patriotrism thing, so feel free to splain to me what happens with something like this.cheeky)


    by artappraiser on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 11:23pm

    Is your point that I'm criticizing an appointee of the party I support?

    Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

     

     


    by Doctor Cleveland on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 11:52pm

    No, I'm happy to see people do that, I think it makes for good government. I'm sorta alluding to conversations elsewhere on this site that you probably missed, sorry about that, guess I'm a little bitter about it. blush Ignore me, carry on, good thought provocations in your post.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 11:58pm

    One would have to be unfamiliar with the record of the CIA the last 50 years, even the last 10, what they 'got away with', to believe any of this will ever happen. I hope it does but doubt it.

    Politicians come and go, Deep Politics and the CIA go on and on.

    CIA past:

    1) October 1963, one month before the assassination of JFK, Arthur Krock, NYT Op-Ed:

    ""according to a high United States source here, twice the C.I.A. flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge . . ..The C.I.A.'s growth was "likened to a malignancy" which the "very high official was not sure even the White House could control . . . any longer." "If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government] it will come from the C.I.A. and not the Pentagon." The agency "represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone..."

    2) Former President Harry Truman, December 22, 1963, WaPO:

    "..We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it."

    3) Mark Lane, 2011, Last Word, My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK

    4) Watergate was a CIA ops to speed removal of Richard Nixon:

    Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA

    5) Daniel Ellsberg, his CIA connections, and the Pentagon Papers

    Will the Real Daniel Ellsberg Please Stand Up! by Douglas Valentine

    Ellsberg worked with CIA in Vietnam, Edward Lansdale and the Phoenix Program assassinations of thousands there. No one needed his psychologist records, they already had it all as he had top secret clearance. The doctor office caper got the case thrown out.

    The papers were the PENTAGON Papers, not the CIA papers.

    Deflected blame from the CIA to Pentagon for the war and for the CIA associations with drug cartels in Vietnam. Added benefit, it weakened Nixon, who had an adversarial relation with the CIA, see Roger Stone on this point from his time in the Nixon White House, 2013 book: The Man Who Killed Kennedy.

    6) If Ellsberg became a peace advocate later, it may have been a late life conversion somewhat similar to Sidney Gottlieb,  who headed MK Ultra, a CIA unit that used mind altering drugs, poisons, torture, brain surgery and recruited former Nazi scientists in their work on human subjects from the 50's to the 70's. For his work he received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Gottlieb ended his life working in a leper colony in India, perhaps as penance for crimes against humanity.

    7) Recently we have the Iraq War, the use of torture, the destruction of evidence and the reluctance of either Congress or the President to do anything real or lasting about it. To top it off the lawyer who OK'ed the water torture just made the criminal referral to the DOJ against Senate staff, he is still there on the job at the CIA!

    And Obama/White House says nothing.

    8) The only CIA employee to go to jail over the water boarding torture, destruction of videos/evidence, is the guy who leaked about the torture to the press! He was convicted and jailed in 2012.

    Why does the CIA get away with this stuff? It seems the politicians are either personally afraid or intimidated to delve into stopping it, or underneath it all they don't want to stop these operations by the CIA. 

     


    by NCD on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 1:35am

    Very fine list there... Thanks . . .

    I do recall your comments back in June in my post here:

    Where to Start to Walk Back the NSA Actions?

    Now. Will someone please write a book titled:

    Will the Real Edward Snowden Please Stand Up!

     

    Or ... Maybe someone has already started on the novel.

    Is Edward Snowden an NSA Mole? - by Stephen Merrill October 2013

    He writes:

    Consider a few possibilities.

    1.   Snowden worked with journalists for quite a long time, even while working at Dell also as an NSA analyst.  Snowden would have had the benefit of useful research and advice from many in that way.

    If true, such a story will likely be confirmed sometime in the near future.

    2.  Snowden had the help or the direction of foreign governments, possibly the Chinese he targeted for cyber-attacks or the Russians his world travels later led him to embracing. Not needing funding to speak of, it is hard to see what great help foreign intelligence agencies would have been to Snowden: no more it seems than say connections with journalists.  It certainly would be unlike the Chinese and the Russians to publish the work of a US double-agent in The Guardian and the New York Times. Even Dick Cheney seemed to be bashful about making this case.

    3.  Edward Snowden, in effect, is one of several or many NSA leakers working in concert for some time.  He may not even be the true “deep throat” in this counter-espionage drama.  Snowden just takes all of the credit and the downside too, the front man.


    Keep in mind that the author there states that he served in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps and as a Navy Reserve Intelligence Officer. And I take him and his online publication Alaska Freedom News as highly Libertarian were he works as it's editor.

    I take everything with a grain of salt.

    Although, whatever shakes down through all of this, I hope I live long enough to read the actual scenario.

    ~OGD~

    .


    by oldenGoldenDecoy on Fri, 03/14/2014 - 3:07pm

    One of the problems has always been the agreed-upon hands-off of the CIA.  They've always lived by other rules--which too often meant no rules at all. 

    In order to stay ahead in the Cold War we needed a shadow entity that could function outside and with minimal scrutiny.  Our enemies didn't wear uniforms and gather on a battlefield.  There was no "Front".  The nasty stuff went underground and so did the CIA.

    The problem with shadow entities like the CIA is that the more they get into, the more they believe there are no limits to what they have to do to keep us safe.  While they might not like the use of the word "torture", they keep it in their bag of tricks.  If they get a lead on something that will help them they'll use any method to get at it.

    This is what they've been trained to do, and if Congress and the President turn a blind eye, it's because, rightly or wrongly, they still see a need for an organization that will do almost anything to get the job done. They most often would prefer not to know what that is.

    The criticism against Feinstein is that she didn't say anything until her own committee was involved, and I get that, but I also give her credit for bringing this out in the open.  She didn't have to.  The investigation could have been done internally--and obviously it was for about a year and got nowhere, which is why she finally decided to go public. Whatever it is, it's out there now and something will happen because of it.

    I doubt that a day goes by when someone isn't suspicious of the CIA.  They are the one outfit in this country that is expected to do bad things.  The secrecy surrounding them allows them to do bad things.  The trouble is, we expect them to do those things to the bad guys, not to us.  

    Your ideas are good ones, Doc.  Somebody needs to know what they're doing.  They need to know that somebody on the outside knows what they're doing.  They have to be answerable to someone, and they can't be so far above the law that they're completely lawless.  But who should know?  And how much leeway should they allow?

    The itch comes with where do we draw the line?  Should they still operate outside the bounds or should they be tethered by rules and laws?  What makes them the Central Intelligence Agency and why do we need them? 


    by Ramona on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 7:02am

    Things were so much "clearer" during the Cold War and the CIA--and perhaps the whole intelligence apparatus--is a relic of that.

    In fact, our entire "national security state," which includes a massive standing military, was born in the belly of the then-new state of permanent antagonism between the USSR and Russia. I guess it began with the OSS during the war.

    The problem is...we can all agree to shrink this massive spying apparatus...until something really bad happens. Then, virtually everyone says, "Why didn't we see that coming? Why were we left flatfooted? Why isn't our government protecting us?"

    Mostly the failure is used as fuel for building it back up. Sometimes, especially on the left, it's used as a reason for further dismantling it, as in, "If the NSA wasn't even able to catch a soft pitch like the Boston Bombers, pitched to us by none other than the Russians who knew these guys, then why have it at all?"

    Peracles' remark from way back still stays with me. In his year-end remarks, he was disappointed that Americans' haven't been more resilient in the face of the slings and arrows of terrorist acts that other countries face much more often and more harshly. Some terrorist acts are going to work. We can't freak out every time one does. Hard to say when your brother dies in Flight XX, but still true.

    All of this said...

    In this multi-threat world, where things develop seemingly out of nowhere and can come at us from any and all directions, intelligence might be the one effective (and cost-effective) tool we have for foiling it.

    Switching gears, I'm not entirely sure why the Snowden revelations were such bombshells. We've had Bamford's books for a long time now. And in this hyper-connected world in which Bloomies knows my sock size and preferred color, is it really that surprising that the NSA knows the numbers I've called or the Web sites I frequent? The whole point of the Web is to connect...reach out and get stuff and allow stuff in...not disconnect and stay walled in.

    Remember (Admiral) John Poindexter of Reagan and Iran-Contra fame? Remember his talking about Total Information Awareness? Way back in the late 1980s and 90s?


    by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 9:08am

    disappointed that Americans' haven't been more resilient in the face of the slings and arrows of terrorist acts that other countries face much more often and more harshly.

    I never really bought this argument, which has been a common one for years. After decades of terrorism, any London cab driver will opine for you how the UK is basically a police state with cameras everywhere. And other countries in the E.U. have gone way farther with hate speech laws in reaction than the U.S. would ever accept; Hezbollah TV is banned in France, Spain and Germany, for one milder example. Raids on mosques are not an unusual thing in Germany, this is another example of a place we haven't gone in reaction yet. France has long had a terrorism prosecutor with tremendous power (the head of it basically predicted 9/11.) Elsewhere: extraordinary rendition by the CIA wouldn't have been possible if there weren't lots of far more heavy duty security states willing to help.

    Look at Egypt right now, no overreaction there? Everyone is a terrorist there now. Give me a break.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 10:25am

    P.S. Serendipitous find by keyword search is actually more on topic of this thread itself, on division of intel power, my bold:

    News Analysis: Fighting Terrorism, French-Style, by Steven Erlanger, New York Times, March 30, 2012

    {....] The French state is highly centralized, not federal. Fed up with a series of bombings in the 1980s, France tried to better coordinate domestic and foreign intelligence with the establishment in 1984 of the Unité de coordination de la lutte anti-terroriste (the coordination unit of the anti-terrorist struggle), or Uclat, and tried something similar within the Justice Ministry.

    French law governing intelligence was reformed in 1986 and refined again after 1995 and 2001, with another reform in 2006 by Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, to give even more margin of maneuver to the investigating judges and the police. The Central Directorate of Domestic Intelligence was founded in 2008 as a merger of the intelligence services of the Interior Ministry, which were responsible for counterterrorism and counterespionage, and of the state police.

    THE fight against terrorism is more decentralized in the United States. That is not without complications. The tensions among the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and local or state agencies are legendary, especially between the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department, which has its own counterterrorism intelligence unit. That tension forms a sometimes entertaining, sometimes disconcerting spine for Christopher Dickey’s 2009 book, “Securing the City.”

    “France is a country with only two police forces,” Mr. Dickey notes, “both national, so there is less rivalry among agencies.”

    Legally, too, the French have centralized terrorism cases in one court and tried to reintegrate procedures for fighting terrorism into regular law, but with more flexibility for terrorism investigations to act on suspicion, order wiretaps or surveillance and hold suspects for a longer period of time. The United States is still trying to reconcile due process of law with fighting terrorism — look at the difficulty in finally shutting the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, or whether to hold criminal trials or military tribunals for detainees like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

    While easy to oversimplify, the French state also has a lot of power to pry into the lives of citizens and arrest suspects in the name of pre-emption.

    “France has a very aggressive system, and before 9/11 they were centralizing the intelligence process and fixing laws to let them grab people very early to disrupt anything in advance,” says Gary Schmitt, an intelligence expert and resident scholar in security studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “They do a lot of things, including telephone intercepts, that make the Patriot Act look namby-pamby. In the U.S., we talk of pre-emption in military terms, but the French talk of it on the home front, to discover plots and conspiracies.”

    The French approach has been criticized for overzealousness, racial bias and the abuse of civil rights [....]


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 11:03am

    Which "old" argument are you reacting to?

    The non-existent one that says other countries don't overreact?

    Or the one that says other countries have faced much worse violence and more regularly than we have?

    Or what?

    You seem to be all over the place here...comparing Egypt to the US? Really?

    Anyway...

    As I recall it, Peracles wished that Americans were more resilient in the face of terrorist attacks and took a more sensible, even-keeled attitude to these events which, I gathered, he felt were inevitable.

     

     


    by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 10:34am

    The argument that U.S. overreacted much more than other countries have who have suffered longer with terrorism. That other countries who have experienced it longer just grin and bear it and have learned to live with it as something that's going to happen, and that we have overreacted much more in fear. Most of those countries reacted curtailing a lot of rights, more than we have.

    Peracles wished that Americans were more resilient in the face of terrorist attacks and took a more sensible, even-keeled attitude to these events which, I gathered, he felt were inevitable.

    Even keeled like this?

    German Police Raid 70 Mosques,Homes and Schools
    Hans-Peter Friedrich, Germany's interior minister, banned one Salafist network, Millatu Ibrahim, for "working against our constitutional order and against understanding between peoples".

    There is no country that reacts much better than we do. That is what I am saying. To the contrary, there's a lot of evidence we are still higher up on the even-keeled scale than most other countries.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 10:52am

    Okay, that's fair enough.

    If you read through the entirety of what I wrote, however, I wasn't making an argument or a comparison with other countries so much as I was mulling over the various issues in response to what Ramona had said.

    Peracles' comment was some time ago, and I can't remember if he was comparing us to other countries or not.

    It wasn't what I remember, and it wasn't what I took away from it, but who knows? Maybe he'll comment.

    Lots of times when we're talking about what the US should do or not do, someone will say, "Yeah, but we're not as bad as Russia," or somewhere else.

    And someone else will respond, "Who cares what Russia does? I'm an American, and I'm criticizing what we do and what I, as a citizen, am responsible for."

    This happens a lot when the subject is Israel. "At least we're not wiping out the Palestinians like Assad did at Hama," and so on.

    Of course, comparing the US favorably to Russia or Egypt or Syria is damning with faint praise.

    I see both sides to this.

    OTOH, we do have to set our own standards according to our own values, law, and Constitution, and what other countries do is their business, not ours.

    OTOH, it does make sense to put things into context and maybe cut ourselves a break. No one would keep an even keel when attacked, and the proof of this is that no one does keep an even keel when attacked.

    And then there's what every mother says to her children: Are you going to jump off a bridge and kill yourself just because Johnny jumped off a bridge and killed himself?

    I'm not sure there's a clear-cut answer to this issue...

     


    by Anonymous PS (not verified) on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 11:13am

    The argument that U.S. overreacted much more than other countries have who have suffered longer with terrorism.

    One could make the argument, of course, that countries who've suffered longer with terrorism have a greater reason to "overreact." Which is to say, maybe they aren't overreacting, but responding reasonably to the threat they face. A threat that has proved itself to be real time and time again.

    During this whole NSA thing, one of the things I've heard constantly, here and elsewhere, and mostly from the left (and libertarians) is: These measures aren't necessary, and the proof of this is, they haven't foiled a single terrorist plot. Moreover, they failed to foil the Boston Bomber attack which was sort of handed to them on a silver platter by Russia. So let's ditch 'em.

    My question has been: Do we know what the threat is (or if it is)? Until we get a handle on the threat, it's hard to answer these questions, IMO. Fear is the great destabilizer because it generates its own rationale for being and acting in certain ways. Like carrying a gun all the time.


    by Anonymous PS (not verified) on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 11:23am

    I wasn't arguing with you, I was suggesting that I think the premise of that particular very common argument (which I have been seeing in the left-of-center blogosphere since the Bush years) is false and you might rethink on that point. That's why I selected out a quote and responded only to it. Don't know about others, but when I select out a quote and respond to it, I am responding only to that point, offering input only on that point. If you don't like me doing that, I guess you could say "what about the rest of my argument?" And I guess I could reply that I am not interested in getting into it. But I think it should be pretty clear, because I selected out that point.

    Yes, of course, arguing that we should be better than most other countries is a different thing.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 11:53am

    I'm not sure I was particularly aware of this argument, and it wasn't what I was saying, but I'll follow you there...

    If I were to put myself into the argument you reference, I'd note that the US also had a habit of overreacting by invading countries for ten or so years, deposing governments, killing lots of folks and, afterwards, droning them from afar. And claiming all kinds of bogus provocation for doing so, etc., etc.

    I imagine this fed into the left's judgment against the US. If we'd simply been swooping up data a la the NSA, I'm not sure the outcry would've been as great. Some, to be sure, but the retort that the swooping and scooping were all done in the name of defense and not offense would probably have been more compelling.

    Now, you could argue that the other countries would've done what we did had they been able to. And they did join us in pretty small numbers comparatively. But still, we're the biggest bull in the China shop, and our freak outs and overreactions cost the world (and us) more than other countries' freak outs and overreactions.


    by Anonymous PS (not verified) on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 2:41pm

    Sorry...china shop.


    by Anonymous PS (not verified) on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 2:42pm

    Of course most weren't with us on Iraq, that's because it was stupid. But that doesn't mean everyone else is against intervention elsewhere for terrorism prevention purposes! People forget that it was a NATO based coalition in Afghanistan, not just the U.S. France just did Ivory Coast, Mali and now C.A.R. The E.U. led the way with Libya. Everybody's been trying to intervene in Somalia since forever. I'm sure that even right at this moment Russian intel would be happy to share with the C.I.A. anything they have on any possible Chechen drone target of the U.S. in northwest Pakistan. Don't kid yourself, there aren't many first, or even second world governments that worry too much about national sovereignity issues where international terrorism is concerned.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 3:14pm

    I'm sorry. You can't compare the scale of the US effort in Afghanistan and Iraq to any of these others. And, as a consequence, you can't compare the level of damage done. Or the level of "freak out" that spawned these two decade-long wars.

    The French now have about 2,000 troops in CAR. We occupied ALL of Iraq for all of GWB's presidency, 8 years and then some with our entire military. We went in with all five legs.

    It doesn't matter to this argument whether most were with us or not. When we were first attacked, virtually the whole world was with us and most, as I recall, were basically with us in the early days of the Afghanistan invasion.

    We started losing a lot of support after that...


    by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 10:15pm

    Anyway, I'm happy to allow that other countries are concerned with terrorism and have taken measures against it. As you note, many other countries have taken much more draconian measures internally than we have.

    I'm not sure the point was ever that we, or anyone, should be blasé about terrorism and just "take it" without responding (resilience isn't that). It had more to do (at least EYE would say) with the level of the response, its fecklessness, the damage it has caused to other countries, the money we've spent on it, the lives we've lost and maimed, and now drones and kill lists and so on.

    These two wars have been a spasm of revenge more than a sensible response to the terrorist threat. Unfortunately, GWB was able to channel the shock and anger provoked by 911 into fairly broad support (at least for a good number of years) for an enormously destructive, nonsensical military adventure in other countries.

    Instead of directing the shock and anger in productive ways and leading us in clear thinking about how to understand the terrorist threat and defend against it, he whipped it all into a foamier froth, doused it in cheap whiskey, and set flame to it.

    In short, we overreacted.

    So to pose a counterfactual in a general way: If GWB had been a leader, we might have had an effective and reasonable approach to counter-terrorism instead of what we got and are still getting.

    So, just to change gears, it's often said that the NSA programs, constitutional or not, have been ineffective at foiling terrorist attacks. They can't point to any real examples, and they missed the Boston Bombing completely.

    I wonder whether the French or German much more draconian measures have proven more effective. Do you know?


    by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 10:39pm

    Which is to say, maybe they aren't overreacting, but responding reasonably to the threat they face.

    In fact, reading your article about the German raid on mosques, there seems to be some genuine and well-founded concern about the activities of these groups. Explosive vests for one.


    by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 10:47pm

    Not often I agree with what appears here, but this time you've done it right.  The CIA's been out of control for a long time.  There were attempts to rein it in after the revelations of the '60's, but those restraints were used as the excuse for why they didn't stop 9-11, and were subsequently lifted.  Bush had a good chance to reform the place, because of its manifest gross incompetence (it took scores of terrorists many months of work in several countries to get it together, but the CIA missed it all), but instead he gave a medal to the Director.  I guess they had something on him.

    I'm pessimistic about your chances of reforming the place, though.


    by Lurker on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 11:42am