Very good article. I honestly can’t think of any good resolution to the situation. I wish Trump could simply dissolve the intelligence services and start over, just using military intelligence and lower-level law enforcement agencies. But what if they refused to be dissolved? I think, unfortunately, that’s what would happen.
The CIA has been a leftist rogue agency for decades and I think has often betrayed US interests by deliberately misinforming presidents and thus shaping their policy. Bush certainly was misinformed by the regarding Iraq, and I think it may even go all the way back to JFK, who I think sincerely wanted to end Communism in Cuba but was betrayed by the CIA.
As for the FBI, I think they had a combination of arrogance (ask any police force in the country that has had to work with them or had a case taken away by them!) and ruthlessness that made them a prime candidate for use towards political ends. I think their politicization really began under Clinton.
But their current open and openly political attack on the executive is a wholly new thing and I too am concerned about how it will end. I think if he fired them, they’d just refuse to go and proclaim that they were now in charge. And the Democrats would support them. Very frightening times, which Taibbi seems to acknowledge even though he’d be on the winning side. The only encouraging thing is that he shows that there are at least a few sane leftists out there.
You’ve made a good argument to dissolve the CIA. What little good they do doesn’t balance out to all the bad they do in my humble opinion.
After WWII Truman dissolved the CIA, or its OSS predecessor. But the reality of the Cold War dictated the need for a way to counter Soviet attempts to overthrow free world governments so it was revived.
The last time that the CIA was reigned in was the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. Something that wasn’t necessarily popular on the Right.
” I think it may even go all the way back to JFK, who I think sincerely wanted to end Communism in Cuba but was betrayed by the CIA.”
JFK botched that all on his own. He was handed a perfectly good invasion plan by a man who knew a hell of a lot about warfighting, Dwight Eisenhower. But JFK stripped away all of the air support as well as some of the sea power and his reduced Bay of Pigs invasion failed as a result.