On intelligence agencies – Richard Norton-Taylor in TLS:

‘The CIA may have saved thousands of lives in the past, but the most immediate danger facing the US, warns Tim Weiner in The Mission, is “the threat to American democracy itself”. And that is something, he says, the CIA would be “powerless to prevent”. A Pulitzer-winning reporter and author of a number of acclaimed books on intelligence and national security, Weiner makes his view clear from the start. “Among the CIA’s greatest challenges in the days to come”, he writes in his prologue, “will be the man in the White House, an authoritarian leader who presents the clearest danger to the national security of the United States since this century began.”’

(…)

‘The dystopian picture Weiner paints of America’s future was encouraged by the US Supreme Court’s majority ruling last year that US presidents are immune from prosecution for their “official acts”. The author notes that one of the dissenting justices warned that a president “who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics … has a fair shot at getting immunity”. The president “is now a king above the law”, writes Weiner. The Mission’s subtitle may prejudge the future – we are only a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century – and, despite Trump’s decisions and rhetoric in the early months of his second administration, how far the US Congress, or the Pentagon, or White House advisers, will allow a president to go remains to be seen.’

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‘There was once a concern among members of Congress, and in the wider American public, that espionage was a dirty game, at odds with the US constitution and the principles of an open society. He quotes an intelligence officer commenting at the end of the Second World War that “secrets themselves” were “held by many to be basically ‘un-American’”. Headlines, fed by leaks about the plans to set up the CIA, warned of an American “Gestapo”. Rogg quotes President Truman, who warned in 1963: “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”.’

(…)

‘As Rogg neatly puts it, Congress and US public opinion swung “from liberty” in the 1970s to “security” by the end of that decade in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The pendulum stayed there after the 9/11 attacks, only to swing back a little after evidence of abuses emerged during the War on Terror. But it has remained largely in the “security” camp despite concerns about threats to civil liberties, disclosed notably by Edward Snowden, who revealed the extent to which US intelligence agencies, in co-operation with large tech companies, were intercepting the personal communications of Americans. While the tension between “liberty” and “security” endures, the scales are tipping away from the former, Rogg warns.
Despite complaints from Congress and the White House about being kept in the dark about what the CIA, FBI and other US intelligence agencies were up to, successive presidents accepted ultimate constitutional responsibility for covert operations. Constitutional checks and balances fell by the wayside.’

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‘Democratic governments need effective and trusted intelligence agencies to protect their citizens from hostile forces, perhaps especially so at our current time of disinformation and hybrid warfare. The CIA was set up in the first place to engage not in assassinations or coups, but in old-fashioned espionage, the task of gathering “humint” (human intelligence) to find out the real intentions of individual enemies amid all the noise from communications cables, as well as the potential threats posed by AI and the wishful thinking of their political masters. This is a crucial time for the West’s security and intelligence agencies, and the American ones above all. The coming years should be decisive ones in their long history, and will need a new chapter in Jeffrey P. Rogg’s book, and a new book by Tim Weiner.’

Read the article here.

‘Checks and balances fell by the wayside.’ Yes, and when exactly will the checks and balances come back, if ever again?

And if security agencies cannot protect the state and its citizens against domestic tyrants, what are they good for?

Besides throwing checks and balances in the ravine.