Even going back to early post colonial history. Like Gen. Andrew Jackson (before he was president) was just unilaterally starting wars with Spain and indigenous peoples without asking for approval from anyone. Mexico was invaded by a cabal of US slave owners and their armies, which is essentially how Texas became a territory. Hawaii was similarly taken by a capitalist coup and just shoved under the empire’s umbrella for the sake of capitalist expansion. There are some accounts that JFK didn’t know about the bay of pigs invasion plans.
One thing I consider a good framework of history is this:
The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, was an information gathering agency. Parenthetically they were involved in doing a lot of money laundering to hide ties with Nazi Germany and other financial crimes. But it operated under the orders of the Presidential Office. When the CIA was proposed to replace the OSS after WW2, the Dulles brothers both made the argument that the CIA should not be constrained to:
Only gathering intelligence, but also capable of doing any covert or military type operation.
Require approval from any political office for any of its operations. This was argued because of chain of command could be disrupted, thus neutralizing the CIA.
That it’s operations do not need to be disclosed to higher political offices, in the interest of national security.
This created a shadow government that was only accountable to its self. We all probably know Allen Dulles was a Nazi sympathizer. Before WW2 he worked for the German agency which paid the SS. Allen even tried to convince his brother to get the US to join the war on the side of the Nazis. But after the war the CIA became the new center for Nazi power that was a state within a state. It filled it’s ranks with Nazis and other fascists, and purged any communist/socialist sympathizers which existed in the OSS (who, by some accounts may have saved Ho Chi Minh’s life when he had malaria).
The first Reichstag moment was probably the JFK assassination. The second was probably
We all probably know Allen Dulles was a Nazi sympathizer.
I often think about that. According to what I remember hearing or reading from Aaron Good, FDR would have charged Dulles with treason after the war. Dulles was literally helping Nazi leadership escape Germany towards the end of the war. Except that of course he died before then, and his nominally socdem VP Henry Wallace had been forced off the ballot for the 1944 election in favour of the more anti-communist and pro-capital Harry Truman. Truman would be convinced to start the CIA and give them the mission to do whatever they want in service of Wall Street, and the Dulleses went into history not as traitors and Nazi collaborators but as accomplished statesmen crucial to the foundations of the empire as we learned to know it since.
I think about it a lot too. I think those two laid the foundation that the State Department is the political branch of the CIA. The Nazi empire was rehabilitated and folded into the American empire largely because of those two.
I am not trying to argue that having this law shows any consiquence, as I said the law is a legal fiction, the issue is that the cries that this is illegal are not only irrelavant but arguably incorrect due to the power congress keeps delegating to the president.
I understand that, and I agree with you. I’m just looking at this from the point of the kinds of deep structural loopholes that invalidate those laws. They tried to litigate all this during Iraq 2, and it went nowhere. It proved the laws are only there for show. There were no consequences either, and even the opposition party rehabilitated Shrub as a shining example of a “good republican”.
Honestly, that kind of law never existed.
Even going back to early post colonial history. Like Gen. Andrew Jackson (before he was president) was just unilaterally starting wars with Spain and indigenous peoples without asking for approval from anyone. Mexico was invaded by a cabal of US slave owners and their armies, which is essentially how Texas became a territory. Hawaii was similarly taken by a capitalist coup and just shoved under the empire’s umbrella for the sake of capitalist expansion. There are some accounts that JFK didn’t know about the bay of pigs invasion plans.
One thing I consider a good framework of history is this:
The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, was an information gathering agency. Parenthetically they were involved in doing a lot of money laundering to hide ties with Nazi Germany and other financial crimes. But it operated under the orders of the Presidential Office. When the CIA was proposed to replace the OSS after WW2, the Dulles brothers both made the argument that the CIA should not be constrained to:
This created a shadow government that was only accountable to its self. We all probably know Allen Dulles was a Nazi sympathizer. Before WW2 he worked for the German agency which paid the SS. Allen even tried to convince his brother to get the US to join the war on the side of the Nazis. But after the war the CIA became the new center for Nazi power that was a state within a state. It filled it’s ranks with Nazis and other fascists, and purged any communist/socialist sympathizers which existed in the OSS (who, by some accounts may have saved Ho Chi Minh’s life when he had malaria).
The first Reichstag moment was probably the JFK assassination. The second was probably
I often think about that. According to what I remember hearing or reading from Aaron Good, FDR would have charged Dulles with treason after the war. Dulles was literally helping Nazi leadership escape Germany towards the end of the war. Except that of course he died before then, and his nominally socdem VP Henry Wallace had been forced off the ballot for the 1944 election in favour of the more anti-communist and pro-capital Harry Truman. Truman would be convinced to start the CIA and give them the mission to do whatever they want in service of Wall Street, and the Dulleses went into history not as traitors and Nazi collaborators but as accomplished statesmen crucial to the foundations of the empire as we learned to know it since.
I think about it a lot too. I think those two laid the foundation that the State Department is the political branch of the CIA. The Nazi empire was rehabilitated and folded into the American empire largely because of those two.
I am not trying to argue that having this law shows any consiquence, as I said the law is a legal fiction, the issue is that the cries that this is illegal are not only irrelavant but arguably incorrect due to the power congress keeps delegating to the president.
I understand that, and I agree with you. I’m just looking at this from the point of the kinds of deep structural loopholes that invalidate those laws. They tried to litigate all this during Iraq 2, and it went nowhere. It proved the laws are only there for show. There were no consequences either, and even the opposition party rehabilitated Shrub as a shining example of a “good republican”.