Abolish the NSA and CIA
Citizens surely expect the government to be on watch against terrorist attacks like 9/11, against destabilizing aggression like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and against clandestine efforts to steal military secrets or undermine our elections. Those are the explicit goals of the 18 secret intelligence agencies in the federal government, but the leading ones are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). The mission statement of the CIA “is to preempt threats and further U.S. national security objectives,” while the NSA’s motto is: “Defending Our Nation. Securing the Future.”
So far, so good.
But secret agencies are fundamentally resistant to oversight, especially by the very governments that create them. The Roman poet Juvenal famously asked, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” That is usually translated as “Who will watch the watchers?” A more accurate translation is “Who will keep me safe from my watchers?”
In his 2020 book The Spymasters, journalist Chris Whipple quotes one former agency director as saying, “A president would never abolish the CIA because then he would have no one to blame.” And the agency is colossally blameworthy.
The CIA failed to anticipate North Korea’s invasion of the South, the Vietcong’s Tet Offensive, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the USSR, the 9/11 terror attacks, the Arab Spring uprisings, and Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula. The agency’s fingerprints were on the Bay of Pigs fiasco and on specious reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Blowback from the CIA’s covert political meddling gave us an Islamist regime in Iran and its concomitant support of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, not to mention the creation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. And then there’s the agency’s brutal, useless, and illegal post-9/11Â torture program.
As for the NSA: Americans should be grateful to Edward Snowden for revealing how that agency misused Section
Article from Reason.com
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