Why does any country – particularly a democratic one – require 18 different intelligence agencies?
It doesn't, of course, unless these cells of fetid political surveillance are also working with the growing list of armed security forces in America to rob people of their democratic rights and freedoms.
Nazi Germany only had two intel agencies: the Abwehr, which was the state’s military intelligence arm and the notorious Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, which was the Nazi party’s own intelligence agency attached to the SS and under the command of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most evil and ambitious men in the Third Reich.
Yet the U.S. actually brags about having so many intelligence groups that most Americans have lost count. Just have a look at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence website and find out how your tax dollars are being spent to replicate intelligence operations that are apparently often devoid of success and characterized by gross incompetence and flagrant disregard for the democratic rights of American citizens who are subject to chronic spying by these agencies.
Perhaps the primary problem with intelligence agencies is the nomenclature itself. When we refer to intelligence, we are speaking of course about spying and no one for a moment should imply that this sort of intelligence has anything to do with an excess of gray matter or a marked intellectual capability – we’ve all heard the old joke about military intelligence being an oxymoron. That remark may be both cruel and not entirely accurate but it is time we spoke of the intelligence community – as if these spooks all lived in some tidy suburban hideaway – as the spy community because that is in fact what they are doing.
There may be a community of spies – both active and retired – but it is a febrile collective of professional busybodies who have become adept at monitoring the political activities of prominent Americans but abysmal at actually countering foreign threats.
If you doubt that Americans are the primary target of the spy community, remember the prevarication of former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, one of the most dishonest and oleaginous figures ever to haunt high office in America.
In March 2013, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Clapper before the Senate Intelligence Committee whether the National Security Agency can “collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?”
The spymaster responded, “No, sir… Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect. But not wittingly.”
His answer of course was a repellent lie and Clapper would of course have known it was. If he did not know, he hadn’t been paying much attention to his job and could be assessed as a straight incompetent. Because, as we now know, the NSA did spy on Americans’ daily communications and did so legally under the odious Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
But if Clapper lied before Congress, he also committed perjury. But as legal scholar and George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley noted, “perjury is not simply tolerated, it is rewarded, in Washington. In a city of made men and women, nothing says loyalty quite as much as lying under oath.”
And loyalty to the spy community is increasingly defined by surveillance of Americans and being in the pocket of the Democratic Party.
Remember the infamous letter signed by 51 retired members of that spy community that insisted without any evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop was nothing more than “Russian disinformation?”
Amid paragraph after paragraph of sentences employing weasel words like “we believe” and “if we are right,” the letter buries the admission “that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”
So if you do not have any evidence for anything you are saying – in direct opposition to what was glaringly obvious to anyone who examined the story – why are 51 of these “intelligence” hacks singing this letter and revealing that whatever intelligence they possess is indirectly proportional to their political partisanship?
This letter constituted a war on Trump voters and Americans writ large and a shocking attempt to influence a presidential election – which was exactly what these intelligence nabobs were suggesting Russia was trying to do.
It is another aspect of how the spy community contributes to the American police state by indirectly telling U.S. voters whom they should support and who is guilty by association with nefarious foreign actors.
The sordid and squalid story of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan provides overwhelming evidence of how having 18 different intelligence agencies doesn’t guarantee higher performance but merely replication of the same falsehoods.
The catastrophic failure of U.S. intelligence might just signal organizational ineptitude but if it so bad at forecasting the intentions and abilities of foreign actors, why has it proven to be so efficacious at spying on Americans unless it was directly seeking to subvert democracy?
You might recall NSA flak RAdm (Ret’d) John Kirby standing before reporters during the withdrawal, staring into the cameras like a man about to be executed and refashioning the same pathetic talking points everyday: the essential untruth of Kirby’s world was that the Taliban was nowhere near Kabul and that the U.S. had an abundance of time to evacuate American citizens and loyal Afghans on the ground. Kirby didn’t talk much about the billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment that was left waiting for the Taliban. But of course he knew about it.
Kirby, who should have been retired again for his Afghanistan performance, remained the talking head of the NSA and continues to tell you massive lies about foreign wars – particularly Ukraine, which has been lost for months.
But because this war has absolutely nothing to do with preserving democracy in an authoritarian state that just canceled it latest presidential election and everything to do with feeding the coffers of the Military Industrial Complex that is actively lobbying to keep the armaments flowing until the bitter end, Kirby continues to tell you that you should be more concerned about Ukraine’s frontiers than your own at the southern border.
All the fretting and spending to revitalize Ukrainian sovereignty has not altered the inevitable fact that if NATO is actually serious about defeating Russia it will have to provoke a nuclear war to do so.
The interlocking of U.S. security and spy agencies is the foundation of the American police state because the parameters of both groups have been so widened in the past two decades.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is the best and most blatant example of this. The FISA legislation – just renewed by a spineless Congress anxious to keep Americans under the surveillance thumb – is not just an affront to democracy, it is a mechanism that can be used by both organizations like the FBI and the CIA to target the political opponents of American presidents.
FISA was used to create a phony Russian collusion hoax and then prosecute people who were accused of being part of this imagined operation. It has made secrecy – untethered by the oversight of elected officials – ascendant in American life and given hegemony to the Deep State over the free state.
The United States desperately needs to untangle itself from the security and intelligence weights that so beset it. I don’t know if this is possible – even with a second Donald Trump presidency. Trump’s rhetoric always outshines his actions and the fact that he is being crushed by the judicial system today even as he runs for the presidency is proof that he ultimately failed to reverse the police state trajectory of America.
If he is re-elected he will need to realistically assess and effectively restrain the excesses of the police state. He can’t just talk about it. If Americans want to be free to speak their minds without it being recorded for future prosecution or engage in political activity without the FBI or ATF showing up on their doorsteps, there needs to be a conscious de-escalation of security and intelligence services. This is not just an argument for limited government anymore; it is a basic plea for freedom.
