gracchusdixit

One of the most unexpected consequences of the chaotic presidency of Donald Trump has been the emergence of our country’s principal intelligence agencies, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI, as the institutional equivalents of national heroes.  Because Trump has attacked these agencies so viciously—either because he thinks they’re out to get him or because he fears they have evidence of his sleazy and crooking dealing—many Americans have come to idolize them as our last, best hope for containing Trump’s worst impulses.  It has therefore become de rigueur for journalists and commentators to laud these agencies and those who work for them as patriots beyond reproach.  

This crescendo of praise reached a peak just days ago, when the White House decided to strip former CIA Director, John Brennan, of his security clearance, solely because he has become a vociferous critic of Donald Trump. Several hundred former intelligence and diplomatic officials from across the political spectrum promptly sprang to Brennan’s defense, signing their names to public letters of protest.  One distinguished former military officer even went so far as to demand the “honor” of joining the ranks of those, whose security clearances may be withdrawn, because they have dared to criticize the president.

Let it be said that the officials who criticized Donald Trump’s attack on John Brennan were entirely right to do so.  Trump is a petty thug, whose his attack on Brennan was an act of pure political retaliation.  There is also no doubt that the vast majority of CIA officers, NSA analysts, and FBI agents are patriotic Americans, whose purpose it is to defend our country.  It would be foolish, however, to close our eyes to the checkered and often dark history of the agencies they serve.  And it would be worse than foolish to transfer our hopes from one false idol to another.

The FBI, being the oldest of our intelligence agencies, has the longest history of serious misdeeds.  It did everything it could to suppress labor unrest during the Great Depression; to aid and abet Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt in the 1950s; to undermine the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s; to intimidate, compromise, and blackmail Martin Luther King; and to hound, harass, and criminalize those who exercised their First Amendment right to protest against the Vietnam War.  The founder and longest-serving Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, operated the agency as a personal fiefdom, conducting illegal surveillance and compiling secret dossiers on dozens of politicians, including presidents, to make sure they towed the line and did his bidding.

The CIA, which replaced the OSS after the Second World War, was responsible for engineering dozens of utterly illegal coups d’état, as well as assassinations and attempted assassinations, around the globe, the consequences of which bedevil our foreign policy to this day.  It was the CIA that armed the Taliban in Afghanistan in their war against the Russian invasion of their county in the 1980s, only to turn around and vilify the Taliban as enemies two decades later.  It was the CIA that operated—and for all we know, still operates—a host of off-shore “black sites,” where alleged terrorists were tortured in violation of both American and international law.  It was former CIA Director, George Tenet, who promised his boss, then President George W. Bush, that his agency had a “slam dunk” case, proving that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction—a lie that precipitated the disastrous invasion of Iraq, for which we are still paying the price.  The long list of the CIA’s calamitous miscalculations and shameless falsehoods truly boggles the mind.  

Then, there is the National Security Agency, or NSA, which used to be so secret that it was nicknamed “No Such Agency,” because no one in government would even admit to its  existence.  It was only thanks to Edward Snowden—universally branded a “traitor” by the intelligence officials now rallying around John Brennan—that we learned of the NSA’s illegal surveillance of millions of Americans.  Indeed, one of most important of those officials, former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, perjured himself before Congress, when he flat-out denied that such surveillance was taking place.  

Nor was that episode an aberration.  

Many of those defending John Brennan today, not to mention Brennan himself, also gathered ranks to support the nomination of Gina Haspel to head of the CIA.  This, despite the fact that she ordered, or at the very least did nothing to prevent, the destruction of videotapes documenting the illegal use of torture at a CIA “black site” in Thailand—a black site she was in charge of.

It is not my intention to vilify our intelligence agencies or to denigrate the thousands of decent Americans who work for those agencies with the patriotic purpose of defending our country.  Nor is it my intention to deny the obvious reality that these agencies serve a necessary purpose.  We live in a dangerous world, and like it or not, somebody has to do the sometimes dirty work of dealing with the dangers.

But we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the nature of the bargain we have struck with the Devil. The work done by our intelligence agencies is fundamentally incompatible with democratic freedoms.  Those agencies operate secretly, in the dark, where the temptation to bend the rules and break the law in the name of some “greater good” inevitably beckons.  All powerful institutions are subject to corruption, not in the common and trivial sense of bribes or kick-backs, but in the far more consequential sense of the moral disequilibrium which occurs when those on the “inside” begin to think they know better than those on the “outside”.  Those who operate in the dark are especially susceptible to this kind of corruption.

By all means, let us respect the work of our intelligence agencies…when they play by the rules and abide by the law.  But let us also be ever wary and watchful.  As we deplore the idolizing of Donald Trump by racist bigots and whining white people who worry that their centuries of privilege may be nearing an end, it would be a fatal mistake to replace one form of idolatry with another.  The FBI, CIA, and NSA aren’t going to save us.  Our salvation is up to us.