This is why Brennan is such a dangerous man, No doubt his baby. Even Feinstein finds the convergence of civilian and military operations worrisome at the last hearing. No Senate overview permitted or required for the most part. We know where this is headed, don’t we. Why a new agency? The new term they are using is Warfighters. We now have Warfighters.
The federal government is expanding the spy network, this time by adding an intelligence agency at the Department of Defense. The Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) is now active and operating under the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). According to the organization’s website, DCS’s mission will be to conduct:
human intelligence (HUMINT) operations to answer national-level defense objectives for the President, the Secretary of Defense, and senior policymakers. The civilian and military workforce of the DCS conducts clandestine and overt intelligence operations in concert with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and our Military Services to accomplish their mission in defense of the Nation.
It is this blending (convergence) of the civilian intelligence apparatus with the traditional military establishment that is not only worrisome and a threat to the Fourth Amendment, but may be a violation of the law, as well.
The DCS declares that it is “mission focused” and that mission is to accelerate the convergence of the military and the civilian authorities and obliterate constitutional boundaries around privacy and civil liberties.
The DCS website confirms the federal government’s quest for civilian/military convergence. Under the heading “What Does a Case Officer Do?” DSC states, “Our elite corps of Case Officers deploy globally alongside warfighters and interagency partners to protect our National security.”
Soldiers (“warfighters”) and spies working together to “protect our national security” globally, including inside the United States.
The basic idea is that the new spies will work in conjunction with their counterparts at the CIA’s National Clandestine Service to expand the scope of the federal intelligence community’s surveillance operations.
Professor Chesney summarizes the relevant legal (and constitutional question) in his paper. He writes:
the convergence trend undermines the existing legal architecture along the rule-of-law dimension by exposing latent confusion and disagreement regarding which substantive constraints apply to military and intelligence operations. Is international law equally applicable to all such operations? Is an agency operating under color of “Title 50” at liberty to act in locations or circumstances in which the armed forces ordinarily cannot?
Title 50 is the section of the U.S. Code governing the legal authority of the CIA. Title 10, on the other hand, is the provision covering the authority of the armed forces. As the two sections reveal, there are “distinct spheres of intelligence and military operations and that each is subject to a distinct set of standing statutory authorizations and constraints.”
Read the full post over atThe New American. Well worth the time.
BUNKERVILLE | God, Guns and Guts Comrades! 