A Modest Proposal

Reading the Senate Torture Report, there's plenty to be incensed about. This is a document of evil and there should be no bones made about that. But what strikes me most is the way that supposedly Very Serious People working In The Real World and For Our Safety were so happy to ignore the objections and criticisms coming from the people carrying out the programme. Concerns being completely being overridden, never discussed again and being forbidden from being put into any documentary evidence is distressingly reminiscent of the practices of Nazi Germany in its darker dealings. In fact, the similarity is not limited to the repugnance of the actions but also in the general incompetence of what was being done. Supposedly Serious People dealing with The Real World should be the ones telling you that any organisation regularly ignoring expert objections from below is a broken organisation. Yet here we are with the CIA looking precisely as useless as right-wingers might tell us a big government organisation should be.

Anyone who looks at the history of large authoritarian states would hardly be surprised to discover security services becoming states within states, unaccountable and therefore prone to both morally awful and operationally disastrous courses of action (these two aspects of unaccountable government action being utterly conjoined). It is ever America's failing that it believes that having escaped history it is no longer subject to the patterns of other states. In rejecting totalitarianism and the Old World as part of the founding creed of the country, it paradoxically makes it far harder for Americans to see the seeds of those same sins in their own institutions; to do so would be to admit that America, despite the very special circumstances of its founding, is not inherently special. This has allowed putative Caesars like MacArthur and crypto-fascists like J Edgar Hoover to ride unchecked far further than would be hoped for a nation with such high ideals: to see what is in front of one's nose is, of course, a constant struggle.

The CIA is an organisation with what could be charitably called a tarnished record - the overthrow of legitimate foreign governments, warrantless surveillance, assassination, torture - this is not the record befitting a country of America's moral stature. Nor is it surprising. Give a group of men a huge budget, tell them they are Very Serious and entrusted with the Safety Of The Nation, show them the extent of the very real threats out there and you end up with a vaster version of the police violence that has animated protests this year - you have a very big, very scared man with a lot of adrenaline and a very big gun. And like Captain Renault discovering gambling in Rick's Cafe, Americans are shocked, shocked when it turns out these people overstep boundaries. Of course they do. They have immediate security concerns and can plausibly count on the continued secrecy of their actions if they are ever called out on them.

This has happened in just about every powerful security apparatus ever. The states within states that appeared in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mubarak's Egypt, South American dictatorships and god knows where else were all originally powered not just by corruption but by many men who thought they were doing the best for their country. The CIA may work for a morally better government than these, but remove them from the cut-and-thrust of civic life, tell them they have different priorities than the pen-pushers in D.C, cast their critics as tree-hugging hippies and who is surprised that they end up torturing people? Moreover, who is surprised that they end up not terribly good at their basic job when doing so?

Here is a modest proposal, then. Given that we need intelligence services, and given that they are by their nature organised such that they will become states within states (welcome though the Senate report is, I won't hold my breath for the criminal convictions that would be required to show that America has a genuinely functioning check on executive power), we may as well write this acknowledgement into the constitutions of liberal states. In the expectation that our intelligence community will become over-mighty and contemptuous of civilian control due to the very real and respectable ever-increasing pressure of their duties, they should be subject to regular dissolution. The entire security apparatus should be closed down and reorganised every 20 years with new personnel. To prevent the loss of institutional knowledge and keep techniques refreshed, we could instigate a swap system with our allies, loaning our veteran intelligence community abroad until the locals were ready to take over again.

In doing so we could refresh the Enlightenment values of the organisations by hiring the kind of young turks who want to make a fresh start with a new, more idealistic and leaner security services. No more Hoovers or Brennans with their careers lived entirely in secrecy and fear and endless contempt of those who try to restrain them. If Obama, a constitutional law professor whose constitutional imagination I thoroughly respect, is not going to cut Brennan down to size then the threat of the CIA is simply too great. The CIA should fear the president, not the other way round. And if Obama fears them, I have little hope for his Republican successor, and certainly not for Clinton. That leaves only the forest fire approach - a burning and refertilising every few years to prevent the death of the forest. As the potential power of a security state increases in the digital age, we must be prepared for constitutional checks on our fear of terrorist attacks  - if popular opinion is incapable of castigating the CIA for torture (and why would it in this terrifying ISIS ridden world) then the job falls to our constitutions. If we cannot be brave, our laws must.