When an institution considered a pillar of national security errs, reform is usually promised.
What if reform in any substantial way never happens and errors keep eventuating?
There are two organizations that keep making oopsies and other than minor wrist slaps, go on their wayward path and no one makes a serious effort for change.
One might come to the conclusion that what is irreformable should cease to exist.
In the case of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, few raise their voices against what are powerful entities.
Well, it has happened. Former CIA analyst and case officer John Kiriakou has called for an end to what calls itself "the Nation's first line of defense" in CovertAction Magazine.
If that wasn't enough, Boston lawyer Harvey Silveglate suggests we do the same to the FBI in Compact.
John Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer from 1990 to 2004. His bio notes that Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing.
Talk about an Oscar Wilde "no good deed goes unpunished" moment.
Harvey A. Silverglate is a Boston attorney known for civil liberties advocacy.
His book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent* is about, as the subtitle has it, the targeting of the innocent.
Atty. Silverglate is co-founder of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE. FIRE is a foundation that valiantly supports free speech on U.S. campi.
More about Harvey here.
Mr. Kiriakou made his case in the December 16, 2022 issue of Covert Action Magazine in the article, "Time to Revive the 1995 Act that Called for Abolishing the CIA."
The 1995 act he references was a bill filed by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The senator had been a friend of the CIA, but with the end of the Cold War, according to Kiriakou, "Moynihan started arguing that the country did not need a CIA—which accords with my own view."
Now, one might say this was sour grapes on Mr. Kiriakou's part, and who knows, it might be, but he makes the case well referencing an article by Amy Davidson Sorkin in the New Yorker titled, "Has the C.I.A. Done More Harm Than Good?"
The conclusion would be a resounding heck yeah, just from her sub-title: "The paramilitary pursuits of the C.I.A.—including assassination attempts, coup plots, and drone strikes—seldom end well."
There is a litany of agency sins that range from criminality to buffoonery.
Mr. Kiriakou's sub-title "CIA detracts from national security by purporting to know what it doesn’t." makes the point that team Langley is both a danger to us and a joke.
"There is no credible evidence that the CIA has ever materially influenced the future to alter the course of history to the advantage of the United States, whether through covert action, spying, or intelligence estimates. There is no credible evidence that economic markets are impacted by CIA projections.
The CIA detracts from national security by purporting to know what it doesn’t know, for example, that the Chinese would not enter the Korean War or that Cubans would revolt against Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Astrologers are as reliable and much less costly. Countless former policymakers over the years have said, sometimes with a chuckle, that they learned more about foreign leaders’ intentions from the New York Times and Washington Post than they ever did from a CIA analysis or an Intelligence Community estimate. The old CIA taunt of, “Well, if you had access to the information that I have access to…” just doesn’t hold water."
If a reader is scared to think the nation would be blind without it, we have 18 other intelligence agencies.
We should see the agency's demise with no successor, but it probably will not happen soon as Mr. Kiriakou notes:
"But in the meantime, abolishing the CIA and its functions would strengthen the national security, not weaken it. But who on Capitol Hill has the courage to say it? Who will blurt out like the child, “the Emperor has no clothes”?
So much for the CIA, on to the FBI.
Attorney Harvey Silverglate has had his innings with the Bureau, but the article goes mainly into the well-documented transgressions.
He starts off with a not too bad rationale for abolition, the fear of the FBI among those associated with government:
"Few in either the executive or legislative branches of the federal government, and few even in state and local law-enforcement agencies as well as those occupying state political offices, are inclined to do anything to incur the bureau’s wrath. This is because of the breadth and vagueness of federal criminal statutes and the numerous regulations enacted pursuant to those statutes. The FBI, as a virtually autonomous fiefdom, can get just about anybody indicted. (As critics like to joke, “the FBI can indict a ham sandwich.”)"
Like the CIA, The Bureau has a list of sins that our good barrister can point out.
He starts with J. Edgar Hoover, how could one not? Hoover "unlawfully and stealthily investigated many whom he considered Communists or subversives because of their leftist political views. He even investigated President John F. Kennedy, as well as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He kept an “enemies” list of his critics."
And of course after Hoover, the Bureau reformed. Nah.
Harvey comments on Robert Mueller of Russiagate infamy.
"Hoover’s successors have had their black marks as well. I recall a meeting with FBI Director Robert Mueller, which I had requested to discuss my then-client, Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, whose conviction and life sentence for the 1970 murder of his wife and two young daughters while stationed at Fort Bragg, NC, had proved very controversial, due in large measure to FBI misconduct. (The case is the subject of a major study by the documentarian Errol Morris in his 2012 book, A Wilderness of Error.) I, along with other members of the legal team, sat in a conference room waiting for Mueller to arrive, which he did, accompanied by several FBI agents. Mueller opened the meeting by announcing: “Criticism of the bureau is a non-starter.” The meeting was over before it started."
That was light action compared to a contretemps with Mueller that was personal to Silverglate but he is too classy to mention in the compact piece.
Mueller, almost canonized during Russiagate, tried to entrap Silverglate. The story is recounted in the transcript of a story on WGBH in Boston, Harvey recounts how Mueller sent a dubious fellow to his office with an offer of information that was not true. It ended with Silverglate throwing the man out of his office, and noting he was wired during the ejection.
"Years later I ran into Mueller, and I told him of my disappointment in being the target of a sting where there was no reason to think that I would knowingly present perjured evidence to a court. Mueller, half-apologetically, told me that he never really thought that I would suborn perjury, but that he had a duty to pursue the lead given to him. (That “lead,” of course, was provided by a fellow that we lawyers, among ourselves, would indelicately refer to as a “scumbag.”)"
As they said on the old time radio show, "This is your FBI."
While Harvey was on the board of the ACLU in Massachusetts, challenging dubious FBI prosecutions, the FBI was locally almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the Whitey Bulger mob.
There was "Mark Felt, who rose from being an FBI agent to fill the post of associate director in 1971, and was convicted in 1980 for violating the civil rights of those associated with members of the so-called Weather Underground by ordering his agents to illegally break into the homes of suspected revolutionaries and anarchists." Did he make up for it by being the "Deep Throat" of Watergate Fame?
Silverglate finishes strongly,
"Given its consistent history of being a lawless agency, from its very beginning until today, it is remarkable that no sitting president has moved to abolish the FBI. We need an entirely new agency and a director who has no history of having worked in or with the FBI. Agency culture is a powerful force, and if we are to have any success in ridding the nation of this menace, we best eradicate it completely and start over. Once this is done, Congress must impose real, not fanciful, oversight, which it may be more likely to do since the FBI’s in terrorem power over the members of Congress will be a thing of the past."
One wishes one could have confidence that Congress could do oversight in a lasting way, but being pessimistic, it is hard to see such a result. The best we can hope for is a reset wherein the embryo again eventually grows into a monster, but slowly.
At the Long Hill Institute we have posited it is a law of nature that in government everything eventually reduces to its absurd.
*Reviewed by the writer of this article in the April, 2016 Sturbridge Times Magazine.