Reddit reviews A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies

No. The IC doesn't even have a single dominant agency, although all the agencies theoretically all operate under the DHS now. It has even less capacity to dominate all of the USG.

I'm a little rusty on how the DHS has evolved, in part because so many of the recent developments are at least semi-secret. But if you look at US history, different agencies within the IC are often competing with one another for control and influence. Sometimes they cooperate, other times they compete.

The FBI, for example, has almost nothing at all to do with an agency like HUD, which has its own power base and purview. HUD has little coordination with the EPA. The EPA has little to do with the FDA. The CIA and the State Department are very close (even to the point of work environment -- the CIA often operates out of embassies).

The system of foundations and think tanks works closely with the IC in a symbiotic fashion. They share the same labor pool as well, as all of them prefer to recruit leadership from the Ivies.

There are also natural cozy connections between the IC and the finance community. Financial firms are often ideal shell organizations for cover identities, because the way that business works is that you exchange investment money for information and some degree of control.

Individuals within the different agencies often hate each other, because they're competing for the same pile of resources. They have to convince people in different intelligence committees that their agency should get funding and not the others. And in turn the agencies have to compete with private firms for funding (especially since the post-9/11 privatization explosion). Competition between the agencies can even result in the deaths of agents. The Israeli Air Force sunk the NSA spy ship, the USS Liberty, the State Department basically covered for the Israelis instead of treating it like an act of war.

On occasion, when certain elements in the government become too powerful, different elements group together to purge whatever agencies are threatening to tip the balance. The Church Committee put a boot to the neck of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA in particular. The ability of the IC to assassinate foreign leaders was a particular target of the committee. Arguably, this is because this put American elected politicians at greater risk of retaliation. Saying that politicians are valid targets of clandestine aggression naturally puts your own politicians in danger.

The historical context was also that, after Vietnam and Nixon's impeachment, the US was going through severe economic times. Cutting back on the military and the intelligence agencies in particular was much easier than going after other types of government spending. It was a good way for politicians to appear morally upright and fiscally responsible.

During the Bush administration, the different agencies competed for influence and money with the elected administration. The 9/11 attacks resulted in a bonanza of new financing and special powers within the IC. Different agencies competed with each other to provide usable pretexts for war [1] with Iraq and other governments. It may be hard to believe, but GBII authentically thought that he was on a mission from God to go to war with Iraq, and also wanted revenge for Saddam's attempt on GBI's life. The agencies competed with each other to fabricate evidence that Saddam had broken WMD treaties to make it easier to go to war. The agencies didn't even succeed at building a sufficiently credible fabrication to secure the strong support of all NATO countries, but the administration just went to war with the lies it had anyway.

So, the agencies are powerful, but they're still ultimately subordinate to other powerful elements within the state, and they still have to compete with each other. Other books that I would suggest would be Bob Baer's 'Sleeping With the Devil,' which talks about State/CIA subordination to the Saudi kingdom. You have a lot of different elements within the government that work at cross-purposes with each other. One working group might be funneling money to some Saudi shithead who is in turn funneling money to train terrorists to attack American cities while another agency is attempting to interdict their money flows. Meanwhile, another working group is collaborating with the Mossad to undermine the same arms network that another American agency is funding. Meanwhile, the FBI, the NSA, and the NYPD are all monitoring the same group of terrorists in NYC, but fail to actually act in time to stop a terrorist attack, because they don't want to disrupt their intelligence network. Also, due to lack of internal foreign language expertise, the agencies hire foreign-born graduates willy-nilly, resulting in total penetration by more foreign governments than you even want to think about, each with great access to classified material.

The result is less of that of a hyper-organized Illuminati, and more of that of a bunch of guys who hate each other spending 50% of their time covering their asses, 25% of the time being paranoid about other people in their own government, 15% of the time doing awful things, and the remaining 10% writing up nonsensical reports based on 8-year-old information.

The big problem is that America's foreign policy goals are insane when viewed at a 50,000 foot elevation level. But then when you get closer, it turns out that it's actually several different ways of crazy with no rational narrative to explain it. Then you get closer and closer, and see entire buildings full of people transcribing fights between American military husbands and wives. There are some funny passages in [1] about NSA people spending huge amounts of time just spying on the American military and people in the State department because those were the only people that they had the language capabilities to actually understand out of the intercepts that they had from target countries.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Pretext-War-Americas-Intelligence-Agencies/dp/140003034X
[2]http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1400052688

Are they readers? By them Pretext for War.

A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies https://www.amazon.com/dp/140003034X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_uPCODb4B4D1QA