Intelligence Agencies Fighting Wars
There is something very distressing about the CIA and various others of America's maze of sixteen intelligence agencies gradually morphing into organizations which not only try to discover and analyze information for our military and our elected civilian leadership, but then also planning and executing frequent secret paramilitary missions.
If this is not unconstitutional, then it should be made so.
The annual budget for the military in America is enormous. It is an order of magnitude larger than any other country on the planet. If we were to take only one third of this budget for killing, we could provide full health and dental care to all citizens and visitors, legal or not, who are in America. We could substantially improve education and reduce poverty and suffering. This is only talking about the military budgets which are for the most part openly disclosed. The intelligence agencies are mostly funded through secret appropriations. Thus it is not possible for the citizens of the American “democracy” to find out how much of our tax money the government is spending upon these secret organizations.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan we find that the American government no longer trusts the military to protect our top diplomats. This task is handled by relatively unaccountable private contractors. The CIA no longer just tries to get good information on the enemy, they now also decide who to bomb, and then CIA employees actually operate the drone aircraft and do the killing. No judge or jury, and apparently very little oversight by the professional military or the elected civilian leadership. The CIA also has many firebases in Afghanistan.
These people set up Guantanamo and various secret prisons outside of America so that the government could torture suspects and not be hindered by silly little things like the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights. This trend towards increasing secrecy is not healthy for the American democracy.
I haven't used the words “police state” or “authoritarian” but I probably should.
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