Once upon a time, Democrats mistrusted spies.
[Added May 11, 2021]
From a 2019 article: “Resistance” liberals love the FBI and CIA. History says they don’t love you back.”
This situation evolved over the past 10 years or less. Here is a 2019 Slate article commenting on this change: “Hayden, the former director of both the National Security Agency and the CIA, has become a favorite critic of Trump’s irresponsible and reckless foreign policy posturing. It is almost as if liberals, including MSNBC superstars Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, have forgotten or chosen to overlook that Hayden oversaw the creation of a massive surveillance program in the NSA, argued that law enforcement officials do not require “probable cause” to search the person and property of terrorist suspects, and defended the use of torture as a means of extracting information from “enemy combatants. There is an understandable impulse among many or most liberals to avoid crawling around on all fours in the conspiracy-theory sewers with Donald Trump and his assembly of “Deep State,” “fake news” weirdos. But to embrace the FBI, the CIA and their most enthusiastic apologists, however, comes close to vandalizing the entire democratic project.
In all likelihood, American liberals will soon come to regret lionizing the military-intelligence industrial complex: For instance, the next time a president — whether it’s Donald Trump or a successor — pushes the country into a bloody and destructive overseas war for nebulous reasons, based on redacted intelligence reports, false premises and flat-out lies.
That was from 2019. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald have often pointed out that things have continued to worsen. Taibbi published this article today: “Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It. News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with the spy agencies they once oversaw.” First line of Taibbi’s article: “What a difference a decade makes.”
