In Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes [wc] he writes at one point that what the US needed was an intelligence agency, but what it got was a “Department of Dirty Tricks.”
CIA propaganda campaign on Twitter
The CIA has dabbled in intelligence, but it seems to mostly specialize in dirty tricks and skullduggery. One of the popular accusations levied against the agency is that they managed to miss the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. That’s hardly the worst mistake the CIA has made, unfortunately, there was also that embarrassing “missile gap” thing, and the “Iraqi WMD” thing. CIA and FBI have been in a low-level state of warfare since the beginning and some historians believe that war has done a great deal to affect the upper levels of government; think about it this way – Watergate was the FBI blowing a CIA undercover operation to get rid of a president that was too close to the CIA, and who had not sufficiently supported the FBI by helping bury that heap of awkwardness called COINTELPRO.
The CIA’s “specialty” has been attempting “regime change” in many places and many ways; their record has been spotty. My belief is that a lot of their “regime change” actions have been classified to cover incompetence and crimes against humanity. If you’re unconvinced, go read about the Phoenix Program. [wik] The CIA can’t seem to let go of its desire to take people someplace private and break their bodies and minds. One other thing it’s pretty good at: cleaning up the evidence of its own crimes. In a notable incident, the CIA broke into computers it had provided congressional investigators who were investigating – The CIA. [nyt]
The inspector general’s account of how the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities touched off angry criticism from members of the Senate and amounted to vindication for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s Democratic chairwoman, who excoriated the C.I.A. in March when the agency’s monitoring of committee investigators became public.
In a normal world, the CIA would have suffered serious repercussions for interfering with an investigation, but it appears that congress backed off when it realized that the CIA has a history of being extremely dangerous. Seriously, I’d much rather investigate the mafia than the CIA; you can negotiate with the mafia, maybe.
If we’re pretending that there’s a justice system in the US, that means we’re also pretending there is process and evidence is properly collected and presented, etc. Like with the congressional investigation, that would mean that the CIA (and the FBI) are not interfering by shoveling sand in the gears of justice. The government’s department of dirty tricks ought to keep its hands out of investigations, right?
Now, it appears that the CIA has been interfering in the case against Julian Assange. As you can imagine, that’s going to give Assange’s lawyers a lot to work with; it may lose the government its case. Not that the government cares a whole lot, anyway – their plan is to keep Assange locked up in trials for the rest of his life; and they’ll probably do whatever they can to shorten that life by making him as miserable as possible in the process. But it certainly ruins the appearance that the government was trying to create: [the hill]
The Spanish newspaper El Pais broke the story that UC Global invaded Assange’s privacy at the Ecuadorian embassy and shared its surveillance with the CIA. It demonstrated step-by-step, document-by-document, UC Global’s actions and its contacts with the CIA. UC Global reportedly installed cameras throughout Assange’s space in the embassy – including his bathroom – and captured Assange’s every word and apparently livestreamed it, giving the CIA a free TV show of Assange’s daily life.
[…]
The behavior of UC Global and the CIA seems indistinguishable from the government’s behavior in the Ellsberg case, which a federal judge found to have “offended a sense of justice” and “incurably infected the prosecution” of the case. Accordingly, he concluded that the only remedy to ensure due process and the fair administration of justice was to dismiss Ellsberg’s case “with prejudice,” meaning that Ellsberg could not be retried.
Can anything be more offensive to a “sense of justice” than an unlimited surveillance, particularly of lawyer-client conversations, livestreamed to the opposing party in a criminal case? The alleged streaming unmasked the strategy of Assange’s lawyers, giving the government an advantage that is impossible to remove. Short of dismissing Assange’s indictment with prejudice, the government will always have an advantage that can never be matched by the defense.
The issue is not Assange’s privacy so much as that he was (arguably) a suspect in a criminal matter, but was placed under warrantless surveillance that completely violated his legal rights. Any evidence that the government might have regarding anything Assange did during that time is tainted. In other words, the CIA’s incompetence may have cost the government an important case.
One of my favorite jokes (it’s all in the timing):
Q: How do you know the CIA didn’t kill Kennedy?
A: He’s fucking dead, isn’t he?
And if you still believe that story that Assange’s accuser was not influenced by the CIA, I have 10 kilos of laotian heroin from the 60s that I’ll sell you for only $20.
I do not think Assange is an important case. In fact, if you recall, he helped Trump get elected – the only reason he’s sitting in prison having his rights violated is because he dared challenge the authority of the state.
This ought to be a massive scandal that ought to end with Gina Haspel resigning and “accepting full responsibility.” But under the Trump administration, it’s lost in the cloud of scandals and it will be forgotten soon. Like Assange, who is – for all intents and purposes – in an oubliette.
UC is a contracting company. I.e.: spies for hire. The CIA apparently thought that they’d get some plausible deniability by not sending their own people in to do the job. More likely, CIA hasn’t got anyone competent enough to plant a camera properly anymore.
Intelligence agencies have a legitimate, and necessary, purpose – to prevent the political arms of government from making bad decisions. That they all to often misconceive that intention is a signification problem, but it’s not a reason for getting rid of intelligence organizations; it’s a reason for finding a way to insure that they cannot overstep their bounds. Unfortunately, that’s very difficult. The biggest political fuck-up of the past twenty years was the Iraq war, but the intelligence agencies largely got that one right; the majority of the agencies stated that there was no incontrovertible evidence that Iraq even had programs to produce WMDs. That’s pretty much as far as they could go; it was possible, though not probable, that they were mistaken. But the Bush administration was determined to follow one policy, and the intelligence summary was cooked up in such a way as to exclude all doubt among congressmen who might have otherwise been opposed to intervention, but failed to read the entire report. Even then, they should have been highly skeptical, given that it was obvious that the administration was set on invasion.
There was always a good argument for removing Saddam Hussein by diplomatic means; there was never a good case for removing him by force. Unfortunately, certain elements of the antiwar community seem to have adopted the idea that it’s not even permissible to call someone like Bashar al-Assad a monster; they’ve implicitly accepted the hawk position that that’s enough reason to justify the use of force, and it simply isn’t. We should all be willing to call tyranny what it is, rather than abandon our consciences out of fear of finding ourselves in bad company. That’s actually an abdication of humanitarian principles, not a support of them.
… and the “Iraqi WMD” thing.
Which, to be fair, was imposed on the CIA by Dick Cheney’s “stovepiping” trick to bypass standard Agency review processes.
I do not think Assange is an important case.
As a potential legal precedent, his case matters a great deal. Putting those who assist whistleblowers in the “traitor” category would give authoritarians a gigantic boost.
As an individual, well – he helped Trump get elected… Every aware American owes him a hard kick in the ass, every day, forever.
As a potential legal precedent, his case matters a great deal. Putting those who assist whistleblowers in the “traitor” category would give authoritarians a gigantic boost.
This is also particularly true as Assange is an Australian citizen whose involvement in Wikileaks was not carried out on US territory. As far as I can see he cannot be a “traitor”. It appears that he is guilty of good journalism something that seems to be becoming increasingly rare in the English-speaking world
Long ago I got the idea that the US “intelligence” services just after WWII thought they were modelling themselves on the British but misunderstood the model.
Fair enough, the British had been doing this sort of thing since’ at least, the time of Sir Francis Walsingham and probably a lot was not written down. And the Brits, I am sure, got lots of things wrong.
@4 One of the reasons we got the CIA in the first place was that the OSS was right about Vietnam – we could have retained an alliance with Ho Chi Minh by not allowing the French to return to SE Asia.
Pierce R. Butler@#2: (and others)
Which, to be fair, was imposed on the CIA by Dick Cheney’s “stovepiping” trick to bypass standard Agency review processes.
Sure. But, as we’ve seen thanks to Donald Trump, there is a great big cloud of departmental enablers that have a choice of going along with things, or throwing a red flag on the play. Part of my attitude toward CIA is informed by its historical subservience to American imperialism and violence. If they were actually being an intelligence agency that the US government needed, they’d have used the traditional Washington weapons (leaks, slow-walking, executive resignations leading to book deals, etc) – but they didn’t. There are any number of CIA folks who’ve said they knew the administration was lying, so they … went along with the lie. Fuck them.
As an individual, well – he helped Trump get elected… Every aware American owes him a hard kick in the ass, every day, forever.
He is also reaping what he sowed.
jrkrideau@#3:
This is also particularly true as Assange is an Australian citizen whose involvement in Wikileaks was not carried out on US territory. As far as I can see he cannot be a “traitor”.
Yes, thank you for raising that point. I would have expected that the worst that could happen to him is that he be sent to Australia, where the Australians would naturally lock him away in a black site somewhere and let the CIA at him.
The US’ intelligence services are vicious incompetents; when they get a chance to punish someone who makes them look bad, they’re going to pull out all the stops.
In terms of geopolitics, I think Assange did more damage than Anwar Al Awlaki, and they killed him and his son and daughter in 3 separate assassination strikes. Awlaki was a US citizen, but killing his kids was pretty off the hook.
And yet if Feinstein and her committee had used a private server just as Clinton did, that’s all we’d ever hear about. “Who’s unethical now?” they sneer.