DICTATORSHIPS SUCCEED THROUGH WHATEVER UNLAWFUL ACTIONS ARE NEEDED

…Putin’s intelligence operations are scoring wins while Trump is attacking his own FBI.

 

Can the FBI remain effective if the nation’s leaders remain in partisan conflict?

 

Why is it that under the current administration there has been nothing done in a comprehensive way to deal with the Russian hacking into our elections.  Just as so many individuals in the administration have been operating without having a proper security clearance, that issue, and doing nothing about the Russian hacking does not bode well for the 2018 mid-terms in November.

 

The reality of having an effective intelligence operation is that some of the most effective intelligence agencies in history have served the most disgusting dictatorships.  The Soviet KGB, the East German Stasi, the Cuban state security, these services have run rings around their Western counterparts, even if some of these single-state regimes eventually collapsed.  

 

This reality has been attested to by many American intelligence professionals.

 

The reason for this, is that one-party states, as that description implies, combines an unlawful ability that is insulated from any democratic accountability. This gives these state’s secret agents the latitude to get their jobs done through extortion, infiltration, assassination or whatever unlawful action it takes.

 

In a multi-party democracy, such methods go against all the rules. Yes, a government may resort to unlawful actions in situations as happened in the Watergate Scandal and the Iran-Contra affair, but those mandates are fleeting.  A democratic government depends on an underlying, voluntary political consensus that supports the obvious moral trade-offs.

 

As compared to the United States, Israel is sometimes referred to as a “fractious democracy”.  But within its government, there is a wide agreement about continuing to secure itself as a continually embattled Jewish state, and their Mossad agency has performed accordingly.

 

And that brings us to the current attacks on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) by President Trump and the Republican Party.  This raises the question of whether it’s possible to maintain an effective, and legitimate, intelligence establishment, while the elected leaders who are supposed to control it are engage in open-ended, winner-take-all, partisan conflict.

 

For decades, bipartisan consensus has played an important but underappreciated role in the history of US intelligence.

 

If you look back in the history of the American intelligence operations, the United States did not form the FBI until 1908, whereas the European states such as France, Russia and Prussia had started their intelligence operations back in the mid 19^th century..

 

And why was that the case for the United States?

 

It was as simple as the early mistrust between two American political parties in these United States.

 

It took the US political parties finally giving way to the international realities that occurred during and after World War I.  That forced a relative domestic American harmony in the early 20th century where the Republicans and Democrats were required to share their national interests and accept the need for permanent, non-partisan secret agencies to protect the general American public.

 

Actually, this political consensus almost broke down due to major abuses by the FBI and CIA during the 1960s and 1970s.  It took serious bipartisan reforms and enhanced congressional oversight, coupled with limited judicial review of spying by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to salvaged it.

 

That is all seriously at risk today as President Trump continually attacks the very concept of bipartisan consensus.  Trump does not consider the bipartisan concept as healthy national unity, but instead as an corrupt situation that has developed into a “deep state”.  Trump and his House Intelligence Committee Chairman (and stooge), Devin Nunes (R-CA) are faking congressional oversight for selfish short-term political interests.  They continue to support a devastating concept of suspicion of secret government wrong-doing whose roots go all the way back to the nation’s founding.

 

Trump’s co-harts are harking back to the revelations when the National Security Agency, and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee brought out the damning report on the CIA torture that took place during President George W. Bush’s administration.  This is how they are trying to use the Democratic-funded opposition research paper, and the secret warrant from the FISC, to  look into the actions of a former Republican campaign adviser as political espionage.

 

In short, the American national consensus about intelligence, and many other political issues, was all in deep trouble long before Trump came on the scene. If there had been a robust political understanding between both parties, most likely Trump would never have been elected.

 

Acting on the current lack of national consensus, the president is now exploiting the instability and political confusion to remove any threats to his power.  The most important threat is, in the short term, the current investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.  .

We are witnessing a national democratic nightmare of “partisan competition over secret and semi-secret intelligence within the law-enforcement agencies”.  

 

As Trump still has his favors to dispense and punishments to dish out, if the Dems cannot take over the House, and/or the Senate in the mid-terms, Trump could come out the winner in this lack of consensus in this political nightmare.

 

Only time and the mid-terms will tell.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018