Originally Posted by
Legion
Our modern form of government does make technocrats a force to be reckoned with, and they abide supervision and oversight only by other progressives.
When a constitutionalist has the temerity to observe that technocrats are subordinate to executive political leadership and must answer to the legislature that created and funds their agencies, they brood about their “independence.”
In their minds, they are an unaccountable fourth branch of government — at least until their fellow non-ideological pragmatists return to power.
For this species of arrogance, setting the narrative is a jealously guarded prerogative. We are to understand the bureaucracy’s work as unimpeachably noble and that so, therefore, are its tactics. Consequently, the government’s “cooperator” is never to be called a spy.
He’s a “confidential informant” or, as James Comey put it, a “confidential human source.”
These are not neutral terms. The implication is that these operatives are always benign, even vital.
A “source” is that most treasured of intelligence assets, to be protected at all costs — even the need for accountability when power is abused must give way to the confidentiality of intelligence “methods and sources.” “Source” connotes a well-placed asset who has bored into the inner sanctum of jihadists or gangsters — an “informant” whose information saves lives.
But there is another side of the story.
By and large, “confidential informants” do not emerge from the womb with a passion to protect the United States.
Quite often, they become informants because they’ve gotten themselves jammed up with the police. Some are sociopaths: shrewd enough to know that the only way out of either a long prison term or a short life expectancy is to become the government’s eyes and ears; self-aware enough to know that, in undercover work, bad character, mendacity, and survival instincts are tools of the trade.
Not many Mother Teresas can infiltrate hostile foreign powers, drug cartels, and organized-crime networks.
According to the government, these effective but unsavory operatives are “confidential human sources,” too. To the rest of us, spy may be too nice a word for them. The printable labels are more like “snitch,” “rat,” “Judas,” etc. “
Many spies are real heroes. The CIA’s operations directorate performs the most commendable feats of valor — the kind that can never be celebrated, or even spoken of; the kind that are memorialized at Langley only by stars carved into a cold marble wall — now, 125 of them. Where would we be without FBI and DEA agents who bravely accept undercover assignments, at great strain on their families and their well-being, to take down society’s worst predators? And many informants, though they may not risk their lives the same way, patriotically serve their country by volunteering critical intelligence they come upon through their professions and their travels.
In the Trump–Russia affair, officials of the Obama-era intelligence agencies suggest that there are grounds to believe that the Trump campaign was in a traitorous conspiracy with the Kremlin. On what grounds?
They’d rather not say. You’ll just have to trust them.
It is not about who the spies are. It is about why they were spying.
In our democratic republic, there is an important norm against an incumbent administration’s use of government’s enormous intelligence-gathering capabilities to — if we may borrow a phrase — interfere in an election. To justify disregarding that norm would require strong evidence of egregious wrongdoing. Enough bobbing and weaving.
Let’s see the evidence.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/obama-administration-politicized-intelligence-law-enforcement-apparatus/
Bookmarks