Little-noticed authority granted to the president several decades ago may be helping the architects of the crackdown in Iran. The unintended consequences are enough to justify a second look at whether those powers should stay in place.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Last week digby posted on a report that the CIA is now looking to recruit Wall Street financial analysts to offer their guidance on economic matters. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the CIA’s retirement program is a government pension and not a 401(k). She followed up this week by pulling a May 2006 Business Week article from Dawn Kopecki back from the memory hole. The BW piece reports on a 1977 amendment to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that allows the president to exempt companies from accounting and reporting requirements in the name of national security. (Think presidents Bush or Obama have considered national security at stake during the economic crisis?) One of the comments to the article is fascinating:
…It makes perfect sense. If you want to keep an operation black, you have to prevent any public record of any kind from existing. Look at how enemy-loving activists were able to troll records of landings and takeoffs and from that figure out the pattern of CIA rendition flights. It is easy to see how financial records can open up similar vulnerabilities, especially when ostensibly small companies undertake large black projects that involve a lot of federal expenditure. While a big operation like General Dynamics probably doesn’t need this, an small operation might. So might [companies] that are wholly government owned and pretend to be investor owned as a ruse. Remember, the CIA has the authority to create dummy companies, and some of these [companies] might issue stock as a ruse to hide their real ownership from foreign targets. The CIA might also run financial black ops against our enemies to wipe out enemies financially, and need a way of keeping investigators at bay.
It is the prospect of such an operation that is putting us at a disadvantage in Iran. One of our most pressing international issues at the moment has been actively harmed by a report of CIA involvement: Almost a year ago Seymour Hersh wrote (via) that the agency had received around $400 million to destabilize Iran’s leadership. That story has taken on new life as it gets referenced in the Muslim world and Iranian Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsuli repeats it for popular consumption. Given the heavy level of censorship there it does not matter that Barack Obama says such claims are “patently false,” what matters is whether the Iranian people believe it. In this critical moment where traditional media is blockaded and new media is not widely distributed or reliable we have provided the mullahs a propaganda windfall. The fact that state-run outlets can point to a prior report by a prestigious American journalist of CIA meddling contributes greatly to their cause. No one knows what we did with that money. Maybe nothing ever got off the ground, or there was some modest and fruitless effort, or a Bay of Pigs style bungle, or an attempt to catalyze unrest into actual demonstrations. The bottom line is, they simply toss the claim out there and let their citizens’ imaginations fill in the rest. Given our history we should not expect those details to be flattering.
It seems like the only time we learn about CIA covert activity abroad the details are not good, and spare me the talk of hidden successes. One of the logical devices I am officially out of patience with is the argument that some top secret bit of intelligence or operations has been fabulously productive in advancing the national interest, but unfortunately is too sensitive to share with the unwashed masses. We need to draw a line: if it is not in the public domain it does not exist. We have been far too willing to let officials get by with dark intimations of security breaches in order to skip the inconvenient exercise of carrying a debate via persuasion. If you can’t tell us about it and we cannot ask questions about it or dig into it, then don’t even bring it up.
Moreover, even if such triumphs really do exist we do not ever seem to account for the simple trust- and credibility-destroying quality that the mere existence of CIA those operations cause us. We never discuss the price we pay in terms of lost goodwill or increased suspicion. The fact that it is working so decisively against us in such a crucial moment should prompt a re-examination, though. There is a strong case to be made that the president should not have the power to launch such intrigues abroad, and certainly should not have been granted the authority to secretly bend the law at home. The two are linked, and perhaps both should be taken away from the executive branch.
