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
Could you elaborate / point me in the right direction on this? Would love to read up on this spun out operation
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.
JamesSwift · 4h ago
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.
cuuupid · 3h ago
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.
actionfromafar · 2h ago
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.
Uhh, no? In what way does the CIA fund and direct the FBI and/or NSA?
threemux · 4h ago
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.
cuuupid · 3h ago
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)
hackandthink · 4h ago
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.
IdSayThatllDoIt · 4h ago
It's a nash equilibrium, the primary value of spycraft is opposition to hostile spycraft.
It's like wishing militaries didn't exist.
thrance · 4h ago
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.
randomname93857 · 3h ago
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
jMyles · 4h ago
> It's like wishing militaries didn't exist.
I'm convinced that the evolution of the internet will bring this as well.
ambicapter · 4h ago
I think the internet is making this problem worse, actually.
arp242 · 3h ago
> 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.
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.
arp242 · 1h ago
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.
ElevenLathe · 3h ago
> 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?
ACCount36 · 1h ago
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.
ElevenLathe · 1h ago
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.
jxf · 4h ago
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.
scarecrowbob · 1h ago
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.
0x5FC3 · 4h ago
How much is a foreign intelligence service tied to nation's capacity to govern?
standardUser · 4h ago
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.
nine_k · 4h ago
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.
0x5FC3 · 4h ago
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.
margalabargala · 3h ago
What things has the CIA done in the last quarter century that you object to as being out of line?
cycomanic · 2h ago
Torture, black prison sites, lied to Congress?
How is that even a question?
pphysch · 3h ago
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.
0x5FC3 · 3h ago
We will probably have to wait another quarter century for them to be public.
margalabargala · 3h ago
Okay, so then when you were talking about your problems with the CIA "Specifically in its current iteration", you were talking about what exactly?
0x5FC3 · 3h ago
The behemoth it has become after years of toppling govts, slinging drugs, the MKs, etc., without any real repercussions.
Animats · 3h ago
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.
reginald78 · 4h ago
Can't they just go back to selling crack cocaine to fund themselves again?
yieldcrv · 3h ago
In accordance with the Executive Order, sounds like great “budget neutral” candidates to fund the bitcoin reserve
caseysoftware · 4h ago
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?
amluto · 4h ago
> 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.
cardamomo · 4h ago
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.
caseysoftware · 4h ago
Which cases do you mean specifically?
cardamomo · 3h ago
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.
caseysoftware · 3h ago
> 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.
schnable · 4h ago
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.
caseysoftware · 3h ago
> "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.
pessimizer · 3h ago
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.
goatlover · 2h ago
By Republicans you mean the party hijacked by an authoritarian cult of personality.
immibis · 3h ago
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.
ike2792 · 4h ago
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.
pessimizer · 3h ago
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.
markus_zhang · 4h ago
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.
redeeman · 2h ago
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
evilduck · 3h ago
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.
karaterobot · 4h ago
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.
smsm42 · 3h ago
> 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.
goatlover · 4h ago
Hopefully the rule of law and democracy since the current POTUS is undermining those. Which is kind of ironic, given it's the CIA.
marknutter · 4h ago
> Hopefully the rule of law and democracy since the current POTUS is undermining those
The current POTUS is doing neither of those things.
goatlover · 3h ago
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.
kevingadd · 4h ago
> if they're working against the elected leadership of the US, who are they working FOR?
Unironically: Either themselves, or the American people.
didibus · 4h ago
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.
markus_zhang · 4h ago
It depends on the definition of "people" I guess.
freejazz · 4h ago
I find it incredibly weird that people stroll into a conversation like this, basically flexing the complete lack of civic knowledge they have.
throwaway290 · 4h ago
There's the "at the pleasure of the president" kind of thing.
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
deanCommie · 3h ago
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.
NoelJacob · 3h ago
Nice try, CIA
ml-anon · 4h ago
The CIA spectacularly failed to prevent the US from being compromised by a foreign power. That was sort of its only reason for existing.
pphysch · 3h ago
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.
runjake · 3h ago
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.
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.
Would also mention the last two DNI were CIA directors. The two before that were NSA directors during a time where the NSA was largely controlled by the CIA and its leadership largely shared positions on the CIA’s senior leadership team.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gabbard-c...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is that even a question?
To some extent, the CIA (unintentionally?) aided and abetted the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That's pretty egregious, in my opinion.
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 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?
The various executive branch departments were created by Congress and are supposed to follow the instructions given by Congress. Various theorists disagree as to the extent to which the President is permitted to override the instructions from Congress.
The Dept of Ed had ~4200 employees and they laid of ~1400. It is not "essentially shuttered" currently regardless of the goal.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ed...
The important question is: "Can they fulfill their legally mandated obligations with the smaller staff?"
If the answer is "yes" then we saved money and still did the job. If the answer is "no" then we have a problem.
So far I haven't seen anyone identify "here are the legally mandated obligations that won't be fulfilled any longer" which would be useful and could be compelling.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
The current supreme court (which was also the supreme court past term) has a very consistent pattern of taking away power from Democrats and granting power to Republicans. Since the president is a Republican, they've been consistently granting power to the president; since the last president was a Democrat, they were consistently taking away his power. You can watch the pattern continue in 2029.
They ruled the president has unlimited power to do anything at all, without punishment, if it can be justified as a presidential duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States - during the last term, but in relation to Trump.
Very soon after Trump took power, they ruled that courts cannot challenge the constitutionality of Trump's orders: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf?...
Notice all of these sorts of decisions are always 6-3: the 6 conservative justices forming a voting bloc in support of expanding Trump's power (specifically Trump, not just any president), and all 3 non-conservative ones voting against.
No, specifically they said district judges couldn't write rulings that applied to other districts.
Your local city council would hit the same limitation if they attempted to write laws for other cities.
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 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
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 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.
The current POTUS is doing neither of those things.
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
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.
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.
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.