historian said:
It's easy to make asinine comparisons. Education is not mentioned in the constitution and arguable is not a federal responsibility. Defense is mentioned and is one of the primary functions of a national government. Intelligence, too often a misnomer, is clearly part of the function of national defense.
The CIA has been abused far too much for far too long. It needs to be reigned in and significantly reformed. FBI too along with any agency corrupted by Obama & Biden (actually it hours back to the Cljnton's). No intelligence agency should be spying on Americans, especially presidential candidates, or creating fake scandals to use against candidates. Those in the agency & elsewhere involved in trying to rig elections should be prosecuted and punished adversely. There's a list of 51 of them involved in a single act of fraud & election tampering.
I know you must be smarter than that!
for the most part, we only hear about CIA's failures. Successes typically go unheralded.
CIA is the closest thing there is a meritocracy in the USG.
CIA protections for Amcits was bright line that was in my day strictly respected. Too much so. Good, obvious things were usually not done if it involved Amcits. I had dinner one night with a target who ran a business owned by a famous terrorist (and the word "famous" understates it). Target was ripe for recruitment. Hqs said no. Target's spouse was an American citizen, which in the eyes of the law made the target a "US Person." And CIA reflexively treats "US Persons" as US CItizens. Today, that guy is in a federal prison for involvement in an terrorist attack against US facilities. I still get frustrated when I think about it. Bad call by the lawyers. I (and my junior officer) was right where we were supposed to be, doing what we were supposed to do. We had an opportunity to penetrate a notable terror group. (again, "notable" understates it). But, at that moment in time, lawyers were more concerned about not getting involved in the sticky business of dealing with AMCITS. Thus an opportunity to stop an attack was missed. And not just that attack, but a whole bunch of other ones that changed history. (Target has a WIKI page 3 screens long....)
I'd be very skeptical of the nonsense we see about CIA operations in the USA to influence things, collect on things against citizens. The ONLY charter CIA has to collect in USA is against foreign targets who are traveling to/thru USA, or to seek voluntary debriefings from US citizens (almost always business execs) who travel to denied areas like USSR, NoKo, China, etc....who might have met with targets of interest. Note that in the Russia Hoax, FBI was wanting to go after Carter Page and sent an email to CIA to see if he was cooperating with CIA. CIA responded yes he was. He would go to Russia, then have dinner and a debrief, all voluntarily. But the FBI officer involved doctored the email to say the opposite and then used that doctored email as the basis to launch an investigation of Page. That FBI officer is the ONLY person who got prison time for the Russia Hoax. That is an outrage, given how extensively FBI ran amok in the Russia Hoax. But the affair does give a window inside the closed world of intelligence. The proper protections are in place. We just don't always hold the proper people accountable. And CIA came out smelling like a rose on that one.
The problem CIA has is all its former directors using their resumes to build credibility for partisan political attacks. Every one of those retired directors/officers should lose their security clearances and be investigated like Trump was for how they might have misused their clearances. The need in that regard is to re-establish the firewall between intelligence and domestic politics. If they want to get involved in politics, fine. But leave their CIA credentials at the door. Their actions did great harm to the agency, inviting public skepticism of the agency, leading to loss of credibility with the American People.
At some point, we are going to have to crush some bureaucrats to re-instill their respect for firewalls.
