I think it’s exceptionally appropriate on 911 for us to reconcile and understand that as a nation from the 1960s onward, and accelerating with the growth of the intelligence community since 9/11, the United States has covertly or clandestinely interfered with every nations political process worldwide since the end of WWII and the “Pax Americana.”
I was an intelligence officer for ~17 years, served in Iraq and saw first hand how heavy of a hand the US plays globally in a way that is so expansive and embedded there’s no single body (HPSCI, commissions etc…) that can control it.
Yes technically all collection, processing, dissemination etc… activities are still under congressional budget authorities and executive control and subject to judicial review.
However, the fact that title 10 and title 50 authorities are so broad and interchangable, in addition to the reach into industry for any ability to do data collection, that you couldn’t dismantle the US influence system even from the inside at this point. There’s also a million checks internally to ensure OPs are LEGALLY allowed, but that just means you found a loophole or have topcover, or find an OCA that will make your activity SAP
50 years from now the official position of representatives of powers (Russia, US, China, Israel, etc.) on their own actions from today will still be completely avoiding the topic. But some might, at best, halfheartedly admit that what happened "back then" was not their proudest moment and they could have done better, all while actually being worse. But that will be their water under someone else's bridge and as long as that water sill allows them to reap the benefits of their "not proudest moments" then it's just going to happen again and again with the next generations getting a minor point of conversation.
If Russia can "poison" Eastern Ukraine for their benefit, if the US can cut the legs from under a democracy for their benefit, if Israel can eradicate the people from a land for their benefit, etc. and live to fully enjoy that benefit, people are going to have these conversations on "ancient" history time and time again.
Its sad but that's a reality of the world. The idea that freedom and democracy mean some 100% fair and just system, where amoral actions just don't happen, or if they happen they are either very well justifiable or always punished are lovely, we all like that idea very much but... thats not the reality, not in 2024, not even with champions of western democracies.
Reality is extremely messy, mistakes, negligence, or sometimes outright evil behavior does and will happen.
There is the saying - the bigger dog f*ks all other dogs.
TBH such behavior massively feeds pro-russian propaganda and emotions in ie Europe or Middle east. Since they don't really have to invent massive fantasies just spin mildly actual history, if even needed and continue from there. I manage to see easily forest for the trees so to say, but I personally know quite a few smart people fail at that and lean more into anti-american sentiment, and with less educated minds its even easier.
It is, indeed, true that the dead-eyed psychotics who run the US view the world this way. As do many of the folks who have had that rule inflicted on them, inside the US and out.
Looking at the actual relations between, say, the Soviets and Korea or China or Vietnam and the picture of every state as a vassal of a larger state doesn't seem to hold- there are a lot of reasons the USSR was not as interventionist in various people in the US would like to believe. And there are a lot of reasons China and Iran are both viewed as monstrous threats by folks in the US (and their vassals) and thought of as benign (compared to the US) by much of the wider world: if you're not part of a multi-century colonialist project then "establishing world dominance" doesn't make sense.
If you see yourself as "the big dog" and you view a "dog-eat-dog world" as a historical necessity, then if you have enough resources you can create that reality.
> But that will be their water under someone else's bridge and as long as that water sill allows them to reap the benefits of their "not proudest moments" then it's just going to happen again and again with the next generations getting a minor point of conversation.
You are claiming at once that deepening our understanding of historic CIA misdeeds misses the forest for the trees, and then ignoring the trees to project current CIA misdeeds out 50+ years.
It's like the coastline paradox and the gambler's fallacy had a baby.
On the off chance that this was not written by some bad LLM that will miss the point again... I'm claiming that some countries with power are in a never ending cycle of pulling some appalling, odious crap that furthers their interest and keep that crap buried for a generation or so, then after enough time passes the crap surfaces and the new generation who also benefited from that offers some weak platitudes about how the appalling, odious crap "was not a very nice thing to do" while pulling their generation's version of odious, appalling crap to further their interest and keep that crap buried for a generation or so. And so on.
In the chorus of voices that say today "wow, what the CIA was doing back then was pretty not ok" are people who benefit from what the CIA did and is still doing as we speak. People who vote, support, subsidize these acts, or take part in committing them even without knowing.
If you just read to answer you'll never get the point. And big words can only take you so far in hiding it.
In my opinion, the transformation of the role of intelligence gathering arms of the state in the United States occurred after World War 2. What emerged from that heady moment was a transplantation of the ethos of the British Empire's intelligence apparatus. I noted in your bio a pdf -- "The Myth of Scarcity" -- that indicates that you have an inclination to pursue a matter to its root cause. What is proposed to you is that you review the provenance of 'Anglo-American' intelligence services to its beginnings in Elizabethan England.
Those who are familiar with that period of English history know full well that the 'realm' was engulfed in internal conflicts and that the 'system' devised to "protect the realm" viewed the "subjects of the Crown" as potential adversaries. There you will find the 'DNA' of CIA. [So r/1960s/1947 ..]
Secret police and the maintenance and extension of power through internal/external covert ops seem to be an inevitable feature of government at any scale.
Rome had the Frumentarii, and there are examples from Persia, China, and Sparta.
These were overt empires run by emperors. What we've had since the end of WWII is a covert empire directed by an informal pseudo-government of oligarchs, hidden under a veneer of democracy.
In the UK the Crown never changed its mind about internal adversaries, as the recent "spycops" inquiry shows.
In fact, we directly inherited the British spying apparatus via George Washington’s first counterintelligence apparatus which pre-existed the revolutionary war
People forget that George Washington was a traitor of the British crown directly - Which, of course I support however, Washington did not actually dismantle such power structures, simply transferring ownership of them
One of my history professors once took an aside to note that the American “Revolution” is a bad name for the event, because there was very little change in power structures: the people in power before the war, were largely still in power after.
War for independence, yes. Revolution? Eh, not really.
I'll do my best not to sound glib or combative, or judgmental; but I genuinely would love to know:
How did people working as 'intelligence officers' manage to make informed decisions without the fundamental knowledge that Iraq (and Afghanistan and Syria and Yemen etc) was basically a murderous, internationally illegal money laundering operation?
Or, to try and put it another way, what processes are used to make sure that people have enough information to be effective in their jobs, while also making sure they don't know/care about the unspeakable evil they're enabling? ... Is it just effective compartmentalization? Camaraderie? Nationalism?
Did you guys know, but just sort of not look at the elephant in the room? I'm probably failing at sounding non-judgmental... Apologies if so, but I've wondered this for a long time.
My answer would be too nuance for the Amount I’m interested in writing on this forum. I think it’s a combination of youthful exuberance, propagandized indoctrination from parents and society, etc. that leads certain groups to believe that you’re doing the right thing so whatever doubts you have, and even to whatever extent that you acknowledge the disconnect, there’s really no space to Change it even at the highest levels
Ultimately you decide whether or not you’re going to put blinders on, try to fix the system or exit the system.
I tried my best to Fix the system, but ultimately it was clear that I was going to be more effective outside of it and so I left it.
Genuinely the best thing you can do is build non-governmental non-oligarchic cooperatively owned organizations
The only way out is through and it is by seizing the means of production, such that the ownership and control is exclusively and explicitly done by labor power
While I was speaking to the intel-community-run-amok aspects, I can soeak to tbe governance-economic aspect frim your reply:
I appreciated DK too, but I think its usage of the word 'seize' (or tyoical attribution to it in any case) may have been counterproductive to its author's motivations.
Perhaps because I don't believe the English language contains precisely the alternative concept I'm looking for in one word, but I'm inclined to think 'saturate & outclass' is both much more palatable to all the parties concerned, in place of 'seize', and better-descriptive of what modus operandi I believe will be more effective. The image I want to convey is of a market producton volume under the co-op context that performs so much betterand is so much more engaged with by its 'customer-stakeholders' that the oligarchic-driven incumbents are rendered irrelevant into insignificance by tbe size, expansion, and caliber of the cooperativrly-owned concerns.
I totally concur that the idealized firm would be able to actually sit in the space that you describe, namely, providing a better more coherent, more integrated service at a more equitable price point across the range of services
However, that’s not the world we live in and the reality is that existing monopolies don’t remain entrenched accidentally. They remain entrenched because they use state power via the law to entrenche their immoral activities.
In the face of that, you actually have to be - not just passive - because you will be faced with active attack.
So seizing really does a certain point mean at the detriment to existing monopoly power, and more or less whatever that takes to fight
Limit CIA Role To Intelligence
by Harry S. Truman
December 22, 1963
The Washington Post, page A11
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21—I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being “upset.”
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
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.
I was an intelligence officer for ~17 years, served in Iraq and saw first hand how heavy of a hand the US plays globally in a way that is so expansive and embedded there’s no single body (HPSCI, commissions etc…) that can control it.
Yes technically all collection, processing, dissemination etc… activities are still under congressional budget authorities and executive control and subject to judicial review.
However, the fact that title 10 and title 50 authorities are so broad and interchangable, in addition to the reach into industry for any ability to do data collection, that you couldn’t dismantle the US influence system even from the inside at this point. There’s also a million checks internally to ensure OPs are LEGALLY allowed, but that just means you found a loophole or have topcover, or find an OCA that will make your activity SAP