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“For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.” Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), 33rd U.S. President,(1945-1953), (in an editorial titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence“, The Washington Post, Dec. 22, 1963, p. A11).
[The CIA] “has become so removed from its intended role… I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations… The last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.” Harry S. Truman (1884-1972). Ibid.
“I think [the creation of the CIA] was a mistake. And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it.” Harry S. Truman (in an interview with his biographer Mr. Merle Miller, in the 1960’s).
“Let’s remember, the CIA’s job is to go out and create wars.” Jesse Ventura (James George Janos) (1951- ), American former wrestler, actor, author and Governor of Minnesota, 1999-2003, (in ‘Jesse Ventura suggests US may be behind Middle East violence’ Sept. 15, 2012).
On Friday, July 21, 2023, President Joe Biden (1942- ) made an ominous decision: He elevated William Burns, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), to the level of a member of his Cabinet. This made the CIA Director the second intelligence officer in the Biden Cabinet, alongside the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines.
This could be more than a symbolic move to reward a political ally. In fact, this could be a message that the Biden administration plans to be more heavily involved in foreign affairs in the near future, especially if the Ukraine war were to escalate from a proxy war to a more open U.S.-Russia military conflict.
This could also indicate that the U.S. president, mired in a low approval rating in public polls, has concluded that the only way for him to win a second term would be to wage a political campaign as Commander-in-Chief. That worked very well for President George W. Bush (1946- ) during the 2004 presidential campaign, after his administration’s military invasion of Iraq in March 2003, under false pretenses. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that it is easier for American politicians to win reelection during wartime elections.
A Quick History of the CIA
President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. His initial aim was to form a small information gathering office to keep the U.S. president informed on world affairs. Today, the CIA has evolved into the equivalent of a secret government for foreign affairs, within the U.S. government. Its annual budget, close to $100 billion, is larger than the budgets of three quarters of the world’s countries.
One of the CIA’s missions over time, besides collecting information and spying, has been to carry on covert operations and illegal acts to advance narrow American interests around the world. Most Americans are unaware of such secret operations conducted in their name.
President Harry S. Truman, Founder of the CIA, Wrote that He Was Deeply Disappointed About How the Agency Had Evolved
On December 22, 1963, only one month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, former President Truman wrote an editorial in the Washington Post, in which he revealed that he had serious misgivings about the increasing role of the CIA within the U.S. government.
Indeed, the former president and initiator of the CIA feared that it had been “diverted from its original assignment” (intelligence collection and analysis) and that it had “become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.”
Truman’s conclusion was quite damning: “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it”.
What President Truman and other American thinkers have feared is that the United States be turned into a lawless military empire with a self-serving imperial hubris. Indeed, a military empire in a perpetual state of war, however well disguised, cannot remain a democracy, because this would contradict the values of freedom and liberty at home.
Conclusion
President Truman’s words and warnings reverberate today, considering that the current American president is elevating the CIA Director to the level of a Secretary in his Cabinet.
President Joe Biden does not seem to have the same apprehensions about the danger to American democracy by having the CIA directly involved in the making of American foreign policy. This is not the first time that Joe Biden has distanced himself from American traditions. In fact, while forming his Cabinet, in 2021, he reneged on the tradition of naming a civilian as Secretary of Defense when he instead chose to name retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin to the post.
With such decisions, President Joe Biden reveals his preference for an imperial America, in contradiction to what President Harry S. Truman intended when he created the CIA. Biden may be more of a militarist and a warmonger than many people think.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay.
International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals “The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” of the book about geopolitics “The New American Empire“, and the recent book, in French, “La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018“. He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University. Please visit Dr Tremblay’s site or email to a friend here.
Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image is from The Unz Review
The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles
by
Publisher: Prometheus (April 27, 2010)
Hardcover: 300 pages
ISBN-10: 1616141727
ISBN-13: 978-1616141721
Humanists have long contended that morality is a strictly human concern and should be independent of religious creeds and dogma. This principle was clearly articulated in the two Humanist Manifestos issued in the mid-twentieth century and in Humanist Manifesto 2000, which appeared at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Now this code for global ethics further elaborates ten humanist principles designed for a world community that is growing ever closer together. In the face of the obvious challenges to international stability-from nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, economic turmoil, and reactionary and sometimes violent religious movements-a code based on the “natural dignity and inherent worth of all human beings” is needed more than ever. In separate chapters the author delves into the issues surrounding these ten humanist principles: preserving individual dignity and equality, respecting life and property, tolerance, sharing, preventing domination of others, eliminating superstition, conserving the natural environment, resolving differences cooperatively without resort to violence or war, political and economic democracy, and providing for universal education. This forward-looking, optimistic, and eminently reasonable discussion of humanist ideals makes an important contribution to laying the foundations for a just and peaceable global community.
