By Edward Snowden
Continuing Ed
September 22, 2022
"Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace."― Baruch Spinoza
It hasn't been a month since President Biden mounted the steps of Philadelphia's Independence Hall, declaring it his duty to ensure each of us understands the central faction of his political opposition are extremists that "threaten the very foundations of our Republic." Flanked by the uniformed icons of his military and standing atop a Leni Riefenstahl stage, the leader clenched his fists to illustrate seizing the future from the forces of "fear, division, and darkness." The words falling from the teleprompter ran rich with the language of violence, a "dagger at the throat" emerging from the "shadow of lies."
"What's happening in our country," the President said, "is not normal."
Is he wrong to think that? The question the speech intended to raise-the one lost in the unintentionally villainous pageantry-is whether and how we are to continue as a democracy and a nation of laws. For all the Twitter arguments over Biden's propositions, there has been little consideration of his premises.
Democracy and the rule of law have been so frequently invoked as a part of the American political brand that we simply take it for granted that we enjoy both.
Are we right to think that?
Our glittering nation of laws observes this year two birthdays: the 70th anniversary of the National Security Agency, on which my thoughts have been recorded, and the 75th anniversary of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA was founded in the wake of the 1947 National Security Act. The Act foresaw no need for the Courts and Congress to oversee a simple information-aggregation facility, and therefore subordinated it exclusively to the President, through the National Security Council he controls.
Within a year, the young agency had already slipped the leash of its intended role of intelligence collection and analysis to establish a covert operations division. Within a decade, the CIA was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favored corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and-gasp- interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to wiretapping journalists and compiling files on Americans who opposed its wars.
In 1963, no less than former President Harry Truman confessed that the very agency he personally signed into law had transformed into something altogether different than he intended, writing:
"For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble..."
Many today comfort themselves by imagining that the Agency has been reformed, and that such abuses are relics of the distant past, but what few reforms our democracy has won have been watered-down or compromised. The limited "Intelligence Oversight" role that was eventually conceded to Congress in order to placate the public has never been taken seriously by either the committee's majority-which prefers cheerleading over investigating-or by the Agency itself, which continues to conceal politically-sensitive operations from the very group most likely to defend them.
"Congress should have been told," said [Senator] Dianne Feinstein. "We should have been briefed before the commencement of this kind of sensitive program. Director Panetta... was told that the vice president had ordered that the program not be briefed to Congress."
How can we judge the ultimate effectiveness of oversight and reforms? Well, the CIA plotted to assassinate my friend, American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, in 1972, yet nearly fifty years of "reforms" did little to inhibit them from recently sketching out another political murder targeting Julian Assange. Putting that in perspective, you probably own shoes older than the CIA's most recent plot to murder a dissident... or rather the most recent plot that we know of.
If you believe the Assange case to be a historical anomaly, some aberration unique to Trump White House, recall that the CIA's killings have continued in series across administrations. Obama ordered the killing of an American far from any battlefield, and killed his 16 year-old American son a few weeks later, but the man's American daughter was still alive by the time Obama left.