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Among the questions that loomed after September 11, 2001, was how intelligence agencies would handle the power theyd acquired through a confluence of unprecedented public license, massive funding, and new technology.

As the internet fuelled a post-9/11 revolution in covert capabilities, that explosion in resources funded a multinational empire of contractors, freelancers, and off-the-books operatives. The degree to which that powertelegraphed in the early post-9/11 narratives of the Iraq intelligence fiasco and the reporting that legitimized itundermined democracy in the worlds sole superpower was evident in the hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee by the CIA over the post-9/11 torture report and the Edward Snowden revelations of global surveillance by what had become a borderless behemoth of intelligence agencies, including Canadas.

Two decades on from 9/11, its hard not to be struck by the irony that a fateful power shift from elected to unelected hands in Washington and elsewhere, justified by the need to protect democracy and uphold freedom, has produced a global bedlam of bullying authoritarians, stolen elections, weaponized imbeciles, and hourly instalments of intelligence-style, intelligence-insulting narrative warfare that has commodified deceit on an unprecedented scale.

The intelligence community has been the dog that didnt bark in the battle against what has proven to be a greater threat than terrorism to the rules-based international order: a reality-hijacking cocktail of corruption, propaganda, andfor lack of a less melodramatic, more accurate termweaponized evil; a Third World War waged with an industrial escalation of disinformation campaigns, deception operations, psychological warfare, and every other trick inEspionage for Dummies.

If the intelligence community isnt fighting fire with fire in a war its ideally equipped to win, whatisit doing?

Much of this has been rationalized by the concurrent, two-decade expansion of Chinas power as the bad cop in a systematic degradation of democracy and American influence across the globe. In their annual threat report before Congress in February 2019, U.S. intelligence officials offered an explanation for the past two decades preposterous even by todays stratospheric standards of preposterousness.

While we were sleeping in the last decade and a half, China had a remarkable rise in capabilities that are stunning, said then-director of national intelligence Dan Coats.

You do not have to have spent the past two decades as an intelligence asset, target, or operative to know that the post-9/11 era has been anything but drowsy for spooks. What were those doubled intelligence budgets spent on if not the gathering, analyzing, and acting upon of information about a geopolitical power realignment so obvious to the naked eye that some of us wrote quite a few words about it in real time, including from Washington? The War on Terror didnt come with blinders to the rest of reality and was not conducted by somnambulists.

How does a dog not only not bark but not twitch during an assault so brazen that it produced the relentless, deadly lunacy of Donald Trumps presidency and still spend$500 billion? If the intelligence community wasnt bugging, tracking, hacking, and counter-operating against global anti-democracy interests, who was it bugging, tracking, hacking, and counter-operating against?

Now, with a global pandemic being leveraged as a power grab by those same anti-democracy interests and a presidential election under attack by not just Russia and other usual suspects, but also by the incumbent himself, can the intelligence community marshal its formidable outcome-curating powers to thwart corruption, restore sanity, and save democracy?

Taking public responsibility for the integrity of the process that will produce Novembers U.S. election result might be a good start. If that fails, at least people will know precisely what sort of war theyre dealing with. It seemsso far, at leastits not a cold one.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and was a Washington and New York-based editor at UPI, AP, and ABC. She writes a weekly column for The Hill Times.

The Hill Times

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Can the intelligence community save democracy? - The Hill Times