What will become of the CIA?

Many would argue there are 2-3 agencies that fit this description but the most famous and clear cut is the NRO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Offi...

Good thing the current CIA director helped the current president avoid accountability for his first putch attempt.

On paper sure, but ODNI & CIA are interchangeable highside. The NRO is spun off the CIA, NSA’s network sits in a network gated by the CIA, and everything under DIA is overseen by the NSC which is “advised” by the CIA. They also control all HUMINT which is critical to the mission of nearly every agency.

Would also mention the last two DNI were CIA directors. The two before that were NSA directors during a time where the NSA was largely controlled by the CIA and its leadership largely shared positions on the CIA’s senior leadership team.

It should be heavily emphasized that pre and post 9/11 IC are two completely different entities. One of the biggest changes post 9/11 was a fundamental analysis of how our agencies are split up and how they share information.

The existance of the President's brief makes me smirk these days. It's probably a 10 second cartoon now, if it's used at all.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gabbard-c...

They don't. This guy is talking out of his ass. They don't have the same funding streams (NSA falls under DoD for example) or missions. Hell, several IC members are military organizations and definitely do not fall under CIA in any way.

Until 2004 directly via DCI, since then via embedding officers in leadership across the rest of the IC.

Today, NSA SIGINT still flows directly to the CIA. They are also the only agency without an independent mission, and must rely on the CIA or CYBERCOM to actually do anything with SIGINT (they are only allowed to gather)

Also an open secret that the FBI and CIA often collude and any operation that they can’t get a warrant for just gets performed by the CIA. The FBI’s threat matrix is coordinated by the CIA and despite the Church probes their collusion has only incentivized and even been codified (eg NCTC)

Congress gave the president the power to create national security agencies with the National Security Act of 1947. Eisenhower created the NRO in 1960 (well if was named differently and renamed to NRO in 61) There have been several changes to the relationship of the various national security agencies and Congress over the years.

The CIA does more than counterespionage. For example, Chile would be a much better place if the CIA didn't overthrow its democracy and install a fascist dictator, Pinochet, in its stead.

> It's like wishing militaries didn't exist.

I'm convinced that the evolution of the internet will bring this as well.

>How many $bad_things has the CIA prevented? I don't have a clear answer for that

Well that's the problem for your steelman on a position being an unfalsifiable hypothesis, isn't it? We DON'T know - and neither you or I know if it's actually non-zero either. We can probably list 20 main atrocities committed by the CIA together, and with a few hours of research we can probably get it up to a few hundred. But we can't find the inverse, so why introduce is as support in your argument?

> I don't have a clear answer for that but it's obviously non-zero.

This isn't obvious to me. Can you help me understand?

It's worth noting that the CIA effectively created Al-Qaeda, and also likely had some hands in Putins rise to power (https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/how-america-helped-mak...).

However, the big issue is that you can't argue the values of liberal democracy, the rule of law, elections, freedom of speech, but at the same time overthrow democratically elected leaders, torture innocents, run vile ph psychological experiments and keep people believing you.

I believe that the CIA has done more to destroy the trust in democracy and promote the rise of totalitarian regimes that we are seeing now, than any other single entity. Even if they prevented some terror attacks (and as we know they failed spectacularly to prevente several), that's not a price worth paying IMO.

That depends on the degree to which a nation is entangled in foreign trade and security and the threat it faces from foreign aggressors. The US of course being one the the most integrated, most meddling and most targeted nations in the world.

Averting threats from abroad is sort of important. E.g. a more capable foreign intelligence organization could have averted 9/11, and with it, an avalanche of changes in the way US citizens live and are governed.

Yup, as they say, get divided and prosper. Hmm...

What an excellent outcome for China et al.

> The various executive branch departments were created by Congress

Yes

> and are supposed to follow the instructions given by Congress.

Well, yes, but also no. Executive agencies must adhere to the law, but Congress cannot fully set the Executive's policy. Congress has very limited powers to force policy on the Executive, mainly advice and consent (for appointments and treaty ratification) and impeachment.

Past Presidents have wielded vastly more power relative to Congress than the current one. You should see the things that Lincoln did! Lincoln: suspended Habeas Corpus even though the Constitution says only Congress can, he abrogated treaties against the will of the Senate even though the Senate believed that since ratification requires their advice and consent then so much abrogation (but the Constitution is silent on the matter of abrogation) and as a result modern treaties have abrogation clauses to try to hem in heads of state but obviously those clauses can only go so far, and many other things. President Jefferson denied Adams' 18 lame duck federal judge appointees their commissions (and Marbury had something to say about that, namely that it was unconstitutional but also that he couldn't do anything about it). And that's just some of the notable things that Presidents have done that Congress (or in Jefferson's case, the preceding Congress) didn't like.

It hardly matters what various theorists think while 6 justices on the Supreme Court are dedicated to giving the President as much power to override Congress as he pleases.

Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests the entire executive power to the President, so technically it is the President who is responsible for following and implementing the laws that Congress has passed. Since recent Congresses (going back to at least the 70s and somewhat even to the 1930s) have written laws somewhat vaguely to give the executive branch a lot of discretion, there is a lot of legal uncertainty as to what actions are allowed in this discretion. This is why so many of Trump's executive actions are working their way through the courts as it isn't immediately clear what he's allowed to do with his executive authority vs where he is stepping on Congress's toes. For example, it is an open legal question whether the President and executive agencies are required to spend every dollar allocated by Congress or if they can decide they've already spent enough to meet the Congressional intent of the spending and can decide to not spend anymore.

The President is chosen during an election for this very job. We can't discard democracy in order to save it if sovereignty is meant to be popular. We're not lucky like theocracies or kingdoms, where everything boils down to expert sages or raw power; the vote is the only thing that justifies our country. The only thing that makes people from the US a nation is their commitment to popular rule, one which inspired the world.

The Executive was made to serve the country and the law, not Congress. Congress is meant to serve the country and make the law. The Judiciary is meant to serve the country and rule on the Executive's service to Congress's written law, when asked. At any time and for any reason, Congress can impeach the President, and refer his case to the courts if they think it appropriate.

If law (as regulation) is made from arbitrary agencies, denying people access to the courts when disputing that law is not helpful for democracy, it is anti-democratic, because it denies access to the judicial interpretation of Congress's intent. Congress, however, is free to make itself clear at any time, if it has the votes.

This all comes down to complaining about not having the votes. And in democracies, we shouldn't be sympathetic to people who don't have the votes.

yes, such as when schumer warned trump that "the intelligence community has six ways from sunday to get back at you" on television.

Regardless of what one thinks of trump, this should be enough to have serious consequences for the CIA and other three letter agencies

>"The legislative branch being at odds with an executive branch representative isn't inherently problematic unless you think the President should be king."

There's another lens: You could think this, and have it rooted in the belief that separation of powers and the "checks and balances" against political institutions should have expanded beyond 'Executive' <-> 'Legislative' <-> 'Judiciary'.

> This would be the CIA working for the people but without it being aligned with the President.

If the POTUS feels the CIA is not obeying legal orders then he can roll heads till they do.

> Hopefully the rule of law and democracy since the current POTUS is undermining those

The current POTUS is doing neither of those things.