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Imagine the world in which instead of forming the Department of Homeland Security, we had abolished the CIA.
If those two things sound unconnected, you might not have been following me for long. https://twitter.com/Lollardfish/status/1304393872286658560
If those two things sound unconnected, you might not have been following me for long. https://twitter.com/Lollardfish/status/1304393872286658560
In the months following 9/11, a lot of the talking points from the talking heads about how it had happened, how we had failed to prevent the attacks when we had all the puzzle pieces, intelligence-wise, amounted to "no one was watching the big picture."
The consensus was we had a whole hodgepodge of national security agencies, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement agencies that were all doing their own thing within their own fiefdoms and we needed someone to take all the intelligence they generated and centralize it.
Some kind of, I don't know. Agency of centralized intelligence. An intelligence agency, but make it central.
Like a central intelligence agency, you know?
That's what we needed. We couldn't stop 9/11 because we didn't have a central intelligence agency.
Oh, but you know what?
Like a central intelligence agency, you know?
That's what we needed. We couldn't stop 9/11 because we didn't have a central intelligence agency.
Oh, but you know what?
We DID. We DID have a central intelligence agency, THE Central Intelligence Agency, founded in the post-World War II era because of the proliferation of intelligence agencies from the war and on into the Cold War meant we saw this problem coming long before it led to 9/11.
The original writ of the CIA was to do the thing we didn't have anyone doing on 9/11, and ONLY that. The law that established them included one last bullet point along the lines of "and other duties as directed", as boilerplate so Congress didn't have to think of everything.
But almost right away, the CIA realized that "other duties" could include things that increased their power and influence beyond directing the big picture view of US intelligence. And the government realized it was useful to interpret "other duties" as broadly as possible.
The US does not have an agency devoted to fomenting coups and assassinating people we don't like. That would be horrible. Can you imagine? We would never.
Not when we've got the CIA.
What's the CIA do?
Um, you know. Mostly other duties.
What duties?
You know. OTHER ones.
Not when we've got the CIA.
What's the CIA do?
Um, you know. Mostly other duties.
What duties?
You know. OTHER ones.
We don't have a Department of Mind Control Experiments, but we've got a CIA that does other duties. We don't have a Department of Bombs That Make The Enemy Gay: Are They A Thing? but we've got a CIA that does other duties.
We don't have a Department of Interfering in Foreign Countries for the Direct Benefit of Private Companies but we've got a CIA. We don't have a Department of Domestic & International Drug Trafficking but we've got a CIA.
We've got a CIA that does anything and everything ranging from shockingly evil to ridiculous cartoonish-sounding villainy to just plain cartoony, anything and everything except the one thing it was formed to do.
The original "You had one job. ONE."
The original "You had one job. ONE."
I cannot think of a single organization in the history of the United States that has so consistently failed to uphold its mission. The CIA is like if the Department of Justice had immediately become the president's goon squad five minutes after it formed, instead of recently.
So when the talking heads, after 9/11, kept talking about how there were too many alphabet agencies and no one playing Scrabble with their individual pieces... the exact same dilemma that faced the post-War/Cold War US... and on one brought up the CIA? I had a very bad feeling.
Because the thing to do, if you had any sense of history, would have been to realize: wow, the CIA failed. The whole experiment of having the CIA was a failure. They decided to be our semi-feral homegrown Bond villains instead of minding the store.
Time to get rid of them.
Time to get rid of them.
And because we didn't do that, because we learned the wrong lesson from 9/11, here we are again. The DHS was formed to do the job the CIA was meant to do, but even in the conceptual stage its focus shifted to cover immigration.
And now it's a heavily politicized, heavily militarized police agency that answers directly to the president's racist, power-hungry agenda.
We should have abolished the CIA and replaced them with a centralized intelligence agency that explicitly does NOTHING, no field agents, no operations of any kind, just collects the intelligence and other data and analyzes it and puts it together and shares it.
But we didn't, and now we've got both a CIA and a DHS to abolish.
