Donald Trump can and must abolish the CIA

Donald Trump’s war with the CIA can only be won through a combination of radial measures on the part of the Trump administration and a ferocious purge of those who seek to use espionage tactics to subvert the legitimacy of the elected President of the United States. The CIA threatens not only to damage Donald Trump personally, but also to undermine the authority of the office of President of the United States. The CIA is a rogue organisation and its power must be severely curtailed.

It is clear that the hour for compromise has passed. With the CIA aiding Donald Trump’s political opponents who have accused him of being a kind of foreign agent, Donald Trump must take decisive action to assert his legitimacy which he earned the hard way, the real way, the democratic way.

Trump must create a new intelligence agency which will either wholly replace or take over the majority of duties currently assigned to the CIA. Through either eliminating the CIA or reducing the scope of its mission and consequently its power, Donald Trump will be able to start fresh with a new state organ that will be loyal, sympathetic and confined to the restrictions of the Constitutional law.

At the same time he must work to bring special prosecutions of CIA agents who have had an active hand in trying to sabotage  Trump’s young presidency.

Such moves have many historical precedents.

In 2002, George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security in order to allegedly better unify various civil defence and security programmes. In the process, the former INS was swallowed up by the DHS which now carries out the former tasks of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

A more blood-soaked example of consolidating power through reducing the power of a former organisation occurred in Germany during the summer of 1934. The Night of The Long Knives is a phrase used to refer to a period when Adolf Hitler sent his newly formed Schutzstaffel or SS to violently attack members of his former militant loyalists in the Sturmabteilung or SA.

Hitler had feared that SA leader Ernst Röhm was aiming to challenge Hitler’s supreme authority and he consequently had Röhm and his more important cohorts executed.

For the sake of clarity, I am not suggesting that Nazi Germany is a model for government, quite the opposite is true. But one can study the details of the execution of Julius Caesar without endorsing the policies of Brutus and his fellow conspirators.

In any country, when an organ of state becomes too powerful, leaders often work to curtail its power. When the body in question serves the interests of the people as Russia’s Supreme Soviet and Congress of People’s Deputies did, one can say that its purge from existence was a bad thing. Indeed, Boris Yeltsin was totally wrong in his brutal assault on these state bodies during his power grab in 1993.

But in the case of Trump, the CIA is not working in the name of the public good in their attempts to undermine him. They are working for narrow interests including their own personal enrichment, the wider military-industrial complex and Donald Trump’s feckless political opponents who just lost an election in the Senate, House of Representatives and White House. The CIA has become a thing unto itself and as Ron Paul and his supporters have said many times, its mission has nothing to do with preserving the liberty of ordinary Americans. The CIA is furthermore, a menace to world peace.

The CIA didn’t just spring to life from nowhere, it was created in 1947 to replace the Office of Strategic Services. If the OSS can be replaced by the CIA, the CIA itself can be replaced by something new.

Donald Trump may feel that he is too embattled to replace or jettison the CIA at this time, but sooner or later, he will have no choice. He would be wise to act with the same urgency and zeal as his opponents.