The U.S. Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws,
is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic
Politics
A letter from House Intelligence Committee members
demands answers from the DNI about illegal breaches
of the wall guarding against CIA and NSA domestic
activity.
By Glenn Greenwald
March 25, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - A report declassified last
Wednesday
by the Department of Homeland Security is
raising serious concerns about the possibly illegal
involvement by the intelligence community in U.S.
domestic political affairs.
Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses
Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1
Report from the Director of National
Intelligence states that it was prepared “in
consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary
of Homeland Security—and was drafted by the National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA).”
Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence
community] assesses that domestic violent extremists
(DVEs) who are motivated by a range of ideologies
and galvanized by recent political and societal
events in the United States pose an elevated threat
to the Homeland in 2021.” While asserting that “the
most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially
or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs)
and militia violent extremists (MVEs),” it makes
clear that its target encompasses a wide range of
groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and
environmental activists, pro-choice extremists and
anarchists: “those who oppose capitalism and all
forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign
citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those
deemed motivated by racial or ethnic hatreds).
The U.S. security state apparatus regards the
agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived
from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,”
which includes “opposition to perceived economic,
racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the
Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is
anyone who opposes the current prevailing ruling
class and system for distributing power. Anyone they
believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or
coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a
“domestic violent extremist,” subject to a vast
array of surveillance, monitoring and other forms of
legal restrictions:
It goes without saying that violence of any kind
— including that which is politically motivated — is
a serious crime under U.S. law, and it is the proper
role of the U.S. Government to investigate and
prevent it. But there are real and important legal
and institutional limits on the authority of the
intelligence community to involve itself in domestic
law enforcement, or other forms of domestic
political activity, that seem threatened here, if
not outright violated.
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In particular, the Report’s acknowledgement that
it was compiled by institutions including “the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with
contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)” has
alarmed numerous members of the House Intelligence
Committee. On Thursday, all ten minority members of
that Committee wrote a previously unreported letter
to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines
“to raise serious concerns about the production of
this document by the Intelligence Community (IC) and
to seek clarification of the facts related to its
production.”
Among the issues raised was that the DHS Report
was not subject to the standard rigors of an
intelligence community finding, yet continually
makes sweeping claims that it prefixes with the
authoritative phrase “the IC assesses.” The
Committee members found this “to be misleading,”
adding: we “urge you to clarify which elements in
the IC concurred with this judgement and the
intelligence basis, if any, for that concurrence.”
In other words, Haines claims that these dubious
assertions about various threats faced by Americans
are the findings of the intelligence community when
that is not true: just like the
originally false claim widely
spread by the media that “all seventeen
intelligence agencies” endorsed the 2016 election
findings about Russian interference when, in fact,
it was only a few which had done so. Haines’ claims
have support only from a few agencies as well.
But the more substantive danger is the role
played by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in
the domestic politics of the U.S., all in the name
of fighting “domestic terrorism” (similar dangers
were previously created by the Bush and Obama
administrations in the name of fighting
“international terrorism”). As the committee
members’ letter details:
The Intelligence Committee members, citing the
fact that the intelligence community is “subject to
longstanding prohibitions against domestic
activities,” then demanded answers to a series of
questions based on this substantive concern:
Involvement of the intelligence community in the
domestic activities of U.S. citizens is one of the
most dangerous breaches of civil liberties and
democratic order the U.S. Government can perpetrate.
It was after World War II when the CIA, the NSA and
other security state agencies that wield immense and
unlimited powers in the dark were created in the
name of fighting the Cold War. Legal and
institutional prohibitions on wielding that massive
machinery against the American public were central
to the always-dubious claim that this security
behemoth that operates completely in the dark was
compatible with democracy. As the ACLU
noted, “in its 1947 charter, the CIA was
prohibited from spying against Americans, in part
because President Truman was afraid that the agency
would engage in political abuse.”
Since then, Truman’s fear has been realized over
and over. Some of the worst post-WW2 civil liberties
abuses have been the result of breaches by the CIA
and other agencies of this prohibition. As the ACLU
documents, the CIA in the 1960s was caught
infiltrating and manipulating numerous domestic
political activist groups. Under the auspices of the
War on Terror, entire new bureaucracies (such as the
Department of Homeland Security) and new legal
regimes (such as the Patriot Act and the FISA
Amendments Act) were designed to erode these
long-standing limitations by dramatically increasing
surveillance powers aimed at U.S. citizens. And by
design, the infiltration of these security state
agencies in U.S. domestic politics has dramatically
escalated.
As the first War on Terror was escalating,
The Washington Post — under the headline “CIA
Is Expanding Domestic Operations” —
reported in October, 2002, that “The Central
Intelligence Agency is expanding its domestic
presence, placing agents with nearly all of the
FBI's 56 terrorism task forces in U.S. cities.”
The Post added that in the name of that War on
Terror:
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III recently
described the new arrangement as his answer to
MI5, Britain's internal security service. Unlike
the CIA, MI5 is empowered to collect
intelligence within Britain and to act to
disrupt domestic threats to British national
security. "It goes some distance to
accomplishing what the MI5 does," Mueller told a
House-Senate intelligence panel last week in
describing the new CIA role in the FBI task
forces.
In the years following, two NSA whistleblowers —
William Binney and
Edward Snowden — both cited their horror over
the turning of the surveillance machinery
against American citizens as the reason for
their decision to denounce their agency. One of the
aspects that most disturbed me about the Russiagate
conspiracy theory from the start was that it was
created and disseminated by the CIA and related
agencies with the intent, first, to alter the
outcome of the 2016 election, and then to
undermine the elected president with whom they
were at war. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration,
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) went on The Rachel
Maddow Show to warn — or more accurately:
threaten — Trump that the CIA would destroy his
presidency if he continued to criticize or otherwise
oppose them:
It is encouraging to see Republican members of
the House Intelligence Committee starting to express
serious concerns over the dangers of intelligence
community involvement in domestic politics. That is
underscored by their approving citation to the mild
mid-1970s reforms of the intelligence community
ushered in by the Senate’s Church Committee, once
primarily a liberal cause. Indeed, many of the same
House Republicans who wrote this important letter to
the DNI have in the past supported laws that allow
greater involvement of the CIA, NSA and other
agencies in activities on U.S. soil — including the
Patriot Act.
The head of the Church Committee, Sen. Frank
Church (D-ID), made clear in his iconic quote on
Meet the Press in 1975 that those reforms were
primarily motivated by fears that the U.S.
Government would one day turn its vast intelligence
powers onto the American people, rendering core
civil liberties an illusion:
In the need to develop a capacity to know
what potential enemies are doing, the United
States government has perfected a technological
capability that enables us to monitor the
messages that go through the air. (...) We must
know, at the same time, that capability at any
time could be turned around on the American
people, and no American would have any privacy
left: such is the capability to monitor
everything—telephone conversations, telegrams,
it doesn't matter. There would be no place to
hide.
(That quote from Sen. Church was the first one
that appeared in my 2014 book on the NSA reporting I
did with Edward Snowden, and the title of that book,
No Place to Hide, was a nod toward Church’s
chilling warning,
now come true).
As I have been
repeatedly noting over the last two months, the
Biden administration, along with leading Democrats
such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), have been stating
explicitly that one of their top priorities is the
adoption of new laws designed to import the
Bush/Cheney/Obama War on Terror onto U.S. soil for
domestic purposes. As recently as February 14,
The Washington Post — under the headline: “The
agency founded because of 9/11 is shifting to face
the threat of domestic terrorism” —
noted that Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.),
chairman of the House Homeland Security
Committee, is now demanding that homeland security
resources be re-directed toward domestic
extremists, and “lawmakers of both parties spoke
favorably of new legislation to specifically address
domestic terrorism.”
Nobody from the Biden administration or
Congressional members demanding enactment of
Schiff’s proposed new “domestic terrorism” law can
identify any activities that are not now
criminal that they believe ought to be. Unless it is
to permit intelligence agencies to start policing
constitutionally protected speech and associational
activities among U.S. citizens, why are any new laws
needed? Unless it is to empower them to escalate
their already-aggressive use of War on Terror
tactics against U.S. citizens, what do they want
security state agencies to be able to do on U.S.
soil that they cannot now do?
But just as the fear of international terrorism
was constantly inflated to place such questions off
limits when it came to the War on Terror, and just
as critics of the excesses of the first War on
Terror were constantly accused of downplaying the
threat of Islamic extremism if not harboring
outright sympathy for it, the same tactics are being
used now. Anyone raising civil liberties concerns
about what is being done in the name of combating
“domestic extremism” is vilified as ignoring and
even supporting such domestic extremism.
No matter: there are few dangers more acute than
the weaponization of these security state
instruments against U.S. citizens for political
ends. The DNI should provide full, complete and
truthful answers to the important questions posed by
these Intelligence Committee members, and should do
so promptly. The evidence of growing incursions by
the intelligence community in U.S. domestic politics
is already strong and ample, and further incursions
would be both dangerous and illegal.
Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,
constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York
Times bestselling books on politics and law. His
most recent book, “No Place to Hide,” is about the
U.S. surveillance state and his experiences
reporting on the Snowden documents around the world.
Prior to co-founding The Intercept, Greenwald’s
column was featured in The Guardian and Salon.
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