Comment by neutronicus
12 hours ago
That's different from a dictatorship, though, especially if the CIA is not answerable to a supposed dictator.
12 hours ago
That's different from a dictatorship, though, especially if the CIA is not answerable to a supposed dictator.
> That's different from a dictatorship,
Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA, unless the CIA is effectively answerable to some other authority despite not being answerable to the law, and then it is equivalent to a dictatorship by that higher authority.
The CIA can’t rule by edict.
Being above the law is necessary but not sufficient to be a dictator.
We also don’t know enough about the internal politics of the CIA to assert much about the head of the CIA.
> Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA
No it's not. I can commit all manner of illegal acts in my home unnoticed, that doesn't make me a dictator.
Yes, and if the hypothetical were that the CIA was effectively outside of control of the law for actions committed in private by CIA personnel in their homes, then the conclusion would be different (even though an agency the scale of the CIA would still have different implications than an individual even then), but that wasn't the hypothetical under discussion, which had much fewer—as in zero—qualifications on the CIA’s lack of accountability.
Analogies don't work when they aren't analogous.
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The CIA ran torture prisons, got caught, then there was a congressional inquiry, and they hacked into the computers of the congresspeople to delete the evidence of torture.
Then they got caught hacking congressional computers to delete evidence.
Nothing happened to them.
They are above the law. You are not.
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