.
Oct. 19, 2015,
"A CIA Tie to JFK Assassination? Book on Ex-Director Allen Dulles Questions Agency's Role," DemocracyNow.org
"David Talbot, author of "The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA,
and the Rise of America’s Secret Government," re-examines what happened
in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and looks at John F. Kennedy’s
relationship with his former CIA director.
"The weekend of Kennedy’s assassination, Allen Dulles is not at home
watching television like the rest of America," Talbot said. "He’s at a
remote CIA facility, two years after being
pushed out of the agency by Kennedy, called The Farm, in northern
Virginia, that he used when he was director of the CIA as a kind of an alternate command post." Talbot also asks why the agency has refused to publicly release travel documents of CIA officials who have been identified for having a possible role in Kennedy’s death."
"Transcript"
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we continue Part 2 of our conversation with David Talbot on his new book, "The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government." I asked him why he was—
why Allen Dulles was fired by JFK.
DAVID TALBOT:
Well, he was fired after the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy realized he shouldn’t
have kept Dulles on from the Eisenhower years. They were
philosophically too different. And the Bay of Pigs was the final straw for him. So he was pushed out after that.
And—but Dulles, as I say, continued to sort of set up an anti-Kennedy
government in exile in his home in Georgetown. Many of the people he
was meeting with, several of the people, including Howard Hunt and
others, later became figures of suspicion during the House Select
Committee on Assassination hearings in Washington in the 1970s. You
know, most Americans don’t know that that was the last official
statement, the last official report, on the Kennedy assassination, not
the Warren Report back in 1964. But the Congress reopened the
investigation into John Kennedy’s assassination, and they did determine
he was killed as the result of a conspiracy.
So a number of the people who came up during this investigation by
Congress were figures of interest who were meeting with Allen Dulles.
They had no, you know, obvious reason to be meeting with a "retired" CIA
official. The weekend of Kennedy’s assassination, Allen Dulles is not
at home watching television like the rest of America. He’s at a remote CIA
facility, two years after being pushed out of the agency by Kennedy,
called The Farm, in northern Virginia, that he used when he was director
of the CIA as a kind of an alternate command
post. Well, he’s there while Kennedy is killed, after Kennedy is killed,
when Jack Ruby then kills Lee Harvey Oswald. That whole fateful
weekend, he’s hunkered down in a CIA command post. So, there are many odd circumstances like this.
I also found out from interviewing the children of another former CIA official that one of the key figures of interest in the Kennedy assassination, a guy named William Harvey, who was head of the CIA-Mafia
plot against Castro and hated the Kennedys, thought that they were weak
and so on, he was seen leaving his Rome station and flying to Dallas,
by his own deputy, on an airplane early in November 1963. This is a
remarkable sighting, because to place someone like William Harvey, the
head of the CIA’s assassination unit, put there by Allen Dulles, in
Dallas in November of '63 before the assassination is a very important
fact. The CIA, by the way, refuses, even at this late date, to release the travel vouchers for people like William Harvey. Under the JFK
Records Act, that was passed back in the 1990s, they are compelled by
federal law to release all documents related to the Kennedy
assassination, but they're still withholding over 1,100 of these
documents, including—and I used the Freedom of Information Act to try
and get the travel vouchers for William Harvey. They’re still holding
onto them.
AMY GOODMAN: How many calls are you getting in the mainstream media to do interviews?
DAVID TALBOT:
Well, thank God, I was saying earlier, for alternative media, like
this, Amy, because there is resistance to this book. First of all, I
call out the mainstream media. I say that New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, they were all under his thumb. They did his bidding.
AMY GOODMAN: Whose thumb?
DAVID TALBOT: Allen Dulles’s thumb. So, when the Warren Report came out [Dulles was on the Warren Commission], I was saying that one of the editors, top editors, at Newsweek
wrote to him and said, "Thank you so much, Mr. Dulles, for helping
shape our coverage of the Warren Report." Well, of course, Allen Dulles
was on the Warren Commission. In fact, some people thought it should
have been called the Dulles Commission, because he dominated it so much.
So, you know,
it’s way too cozy, the relationship between Washington
power and the media. And—
AMY GOODMAN: What was the relationship between Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA?
DAVID TALBOT:
Well, they were social friends, not just him, but other members of the
Sulzberger family. I found, you know, cozy correspondence between them,
congratulating him when he was inaugurated, Dulles, as CIA
director. They called him "Ally," one of the Sulzberger families, in
one letter. They would get together, you know, every year. Dulles would
hold these media sort of drink fests for New Year’s. And these were, you
know, top reporters, top editors, would get together with the CIA
guys and rub elbows
and get a little drunk.
And, you know, when Allen
Dulles didn’t want a reporter, because he felt he was being overly
aggressive, covering, say, Guatemala—Sydney Gruson, the reporter—in the
run-up to the coup there in 1954, he had—
he made a call to The New York Times
and had him removed. That was because of his relationship with
Sulzberger, the publisher. So, that was the kind of pull that Allen
Dulles had.
AMY GOODMAN: How did that work?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, they just took him out. They removed Gruson. They transferred him, I think to Mexico, at that point.
AMY GOODMAN: David Talbot on his new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. To see Parts 1 and 3, you can go to democracynow.org."
.................................
Added:
Author David Talbot is a founder of Salon.
.................................
Added: Allen
Dulles and older brother John Foster Dulles drove America's deadly
interventionist foreign policy. They're two reasons why the US is hated
in much of the world:
11/8/2013, "Overt and Covert: ‘The Brothers,’ by Stephen Kinzer," NY Times, Adam Lebor
"Anyone
wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world
need look no farther than this book. “The Brothers” is a riveting
chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of
“inconvenient” regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate
interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once
among the most powerful in the world.
John
Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, were scions of the American
establishment. Their grandfather John Watson Foster served as secretary
of state, as had their uncle Robert Lansing. Both brothers were lawyers,
partners in the immensely powerful firm of Sullivan and Cromwell,
whose New York offices were for decades and important link between big
business and American policy making.
John
Foster Dulles served as secretary of state from 1953 to 1959; his
brother ran the C.I.A. from 1953 to 1961. But their influence was felt
long before these official appointments. In his detailed,
well-constructed and highly readable book, Stephen Kinzer, formerly a
foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a columnist for The
Guardian, shows how the brothers drove America’s interventionist
foreign policy."...
.......................................
More on 2015 book about Allen Dulles
and rise of the CIA which depends on US taxpayer dollars but is
completely unaccountable to US taxpayers or anyone else:
11/2/2015, "A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal," The Intercept, Jon Schwarz
"As I read The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, a new book by Salon founder David Talbot, I couldn’t help thinking of an obscure corner of 1970s history: the Safari Club.
Dulles-the Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served
as CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency
history — died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived....But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu....
Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire
spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most
energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as
effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to
the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said
in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
“Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that
because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I
want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”"...
[4/24/2007: "Amazing Statement Of Congressional Impotence By Senate Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller," tinyrevolution.com
"Charles Davis, a
freelance reporter, briefly interviewed Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) last
Wednesday. Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, made this startling statement about how the U.S.
government really functions:
ROCKEFELLER: Don't you understand the way Intelligence
works? Do you think that because I'm Chairman of the Intelligence
Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They
control it. All of it. All of it. All the time. I only get, and my
committee only gets, what they want to give me."" mp3]
(continuing): "As [author] Talbot points out, Dulles stated his worldview publicly and
explicitly in 1938 during his only run for political office: “Democracy
only works if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can’t
sit back and let democracy run itself.” Unsurprisingly, homilies like
this did not carry him to victory. But so what? He went on to wield far
greater power than most elected officials ever have. And while Dulles is
the star of The Devil’s Chessboard, he’s surrounded by an enormous supporting cast.
As Talbot explains,
“What I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power
elite from World War II up to the 60s.” It’s a huge, sprawling book, and
an amalgam of all the appalling things Dulles and his cohort definitely
did, things the evidence suggests they probably did, and
speculation about things they might plausibly have done. More than
a biography, it’s a exploration of well-organized pathology.
It includes detailed reexaminations of Dulles’s most notorious
failures, such as the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the nightmarish mind
control program MK-ULTRA, as well as his most notorious “successes,” the
CIA’s overthrow of democratic governments in Iran in 1953 and in
Guatemala in 1954. Talbot notes that an internal CIA account of the Iran
coup fairly glowed with joy: “It
was a day that never should have ended. For it carried with it such a
sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is
doubtful whether any other can come up to it.” According to a
participant in an Oval Office briefing for President Eisenhower,
Dulles’s brother John Foster, then secretary of state, “seemed to be
purring like a giant cat.”
But by this point these events are fairly well-known. Perhaps most
compelling is Talbot’s in-depth look at Dulles’s lesser-known yet still
extraordinarily sordid projects. As the Swiss director of the Office of
Strategic Services during World War II, Dulles — whose law firm had
represented German corporations and many U.S. corporations with German
interests — quietly attempted to undermine Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
demand that Germany surrender unconditionally, going so far as to order
the rescue of an SS general surrounded by Italian partisans. Dulles also
led the push to save Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi head of intelligence on the
Eastern Front and a genuine monster, from any post-war justice. Dulles
then made certain Gehlen and his spies received a cozy embrace from the
CIA, and helped push him to the top of West Germany’s Federal
Intelligence Service.
Also gruesome is the lurid story of how Jesus de Galindez, a lecturer
at Columbia University, was kidnapped in Manhattan by U.S. government
cutouts and delivered to Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Trujillo then had Galindez, whose exposés of corruption Trujillo feared,
boiled alive and fed to sharks, and ordered the murder of the American
pilot who’d flown Galindez there. All under the beneficent gaze of CIA
Director Allen Dulles.
In a sense, however, all of The Devil’s Chessboard seems to
exist to set the stage for the final chapters about the assassinations
of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. In the first 500 pages you are
convinced that Dulles would have had no moral qualms about killing any
politician, including Americans. You learn Dulles had a lifetime of
experience in arranging assassinations, and apparent ties to attempts to
overthrow or murder French president Charles de Gaulle. And you
discover the depth of his grudge against John F. Kennedy, who dismissed
him and several of his key underlings after the Bay of Pigs
.
But were JFK and possibly Robert Kennedy killed by conspiracies involving Dulles? That’s the conjecture of The Devil’s Chessboard. There’s
no question Talbot has pulled together a lot of suggestive old
information, and uncovered some that’s new. Furthermore, he certainly
proves there was a great deal of reluctance on the part of journalists
and politicians at the time to pull on even the most obvious threads.
But 50 years later, I don’t think there’s any way to say much for sure
on this subject, except that it’s pretty interesting....
In the end, whatever the reality of Talbot’s most sensational claims,
he unquestionably makes the case that...your darkest suspicions about how the world operates are likely an
underestimate. Yes, there is an amorphous group of unelected corporate
lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an
American “deep state,” setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of
line.
They do collaborate with and nurture their deep state counterparts
in other countries, to whom they feel far more loyalty than their
fellow citizens. The minions of the deep state hate and fear even the
mildest moves towards democracy, and fight against it by any means
available to them. They’re not all-powerful and don’t get exactly what
they want, but on the issues that matter most they almost always win in
the end. And while all this is mostly right there in the open,
discernible by anyone who’s curious and has a library card, if you don’t
go looking you will never hear a single word about it.
Moreover, it’s still right there in front of us today. Talbot recently argued,
“The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very
much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been
delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the
American security state to go much further than he went.”
Or as a staff member of the 1970s congressional investigation of
Kennedy’s murder said in an interview with Talbot: “One CIA official
told me, ‘So you’re from Congress — what the hell is that to us? You’ll
be packed up and gone in a couple of years, and we’ll still be here.’”"...
...................................
Added: More about Deep State, linked in above Intercept article:
2/21/2014, "Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State," by Mike Lofgren, BillMoyers.com ("Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His book about Congress, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, appeared in paperback on August 27, 2013.")
"The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread
that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and
deindustrialization of the American economy,
the rise of a plutocratic
social structure and political dysfunction....
Its failures,
such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it
is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking
personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent
ineptitude. [2]...
It is not too much
to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and
its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to
reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative
beyond the dreams of avarice...After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and depth of
surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly
evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well....Deep State has been
extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion....
Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure
to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human
and material capital, is slowly exhausted?"...
"In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach,
the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That
said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not
so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is
relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures,
such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it
is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking
personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent
ineptitude. [2]
How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I
equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years
specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security
clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing,
if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by
psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I
became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I
worked for, and only by slow degrees, sarting before the invasion of
Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that
motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis
called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the
views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to
Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating
biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then,
after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were
radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the
mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The
universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the
institutions they work for is always going to be a small one....
After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in
another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy....“You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes....
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a
hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department
of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland
Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I
also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction
over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its
organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated
by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security
Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State,
such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are
mysterious even to most members of Congress.
Also included are a handful
of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia
and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in
national security cases are conducted. The final government component
(and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government
established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting
of the congressional leadership and
some (but not all) of the members of
the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally
so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the
Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words
from the State’s emissaries.
I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008.
This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s
illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times
in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their
cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required
was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress
responded like iron filings obeying a magnet.
One who responded in that
fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the
presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He
had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his
main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on
terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties.
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist
only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private
enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special
series
in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,”
Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized
Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the
September 11 attacks.
There are now 854,000 contract personnel with
top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared
civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the
country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the
Washington suburbs is unmistakable
: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for
top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction.
Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about
17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s
budget goes to paying contracts.
And the membrane between government and
industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper,
is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s
largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director,
Admiral Mike McConnell,
is the current vice chairman of the same company;
Booz Allen is 99
percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the
political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly
setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly,
their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken
over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and
ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which
supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and
operating as a diversionary marionette theater.
Should the politicians
forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the
town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own
best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de
facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate
Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following:
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so
large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are
hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a
criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy,
perhaps even the world economy.” This, from the chief law enforcement
officer of a justice system that has practically
abolished the constitutional right to trial
for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes.
It is not too much
to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and
its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to
reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative
beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried
government employee.
[3]
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden
highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period
since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence
Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the
traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations
of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus
joined KKR
(formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a
private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in
management buyouts and leveraged finance.
General Petraeus’ expertise in
these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a
known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders
of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword.
Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy. [4]
Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State — the White House
advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall
Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us
to “stay the course” in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually
demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that
makes us all better off in the long run —
are careful to pretend that
they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically
neutral technocrat offering well considered advice based on profound
expertise.
That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the
official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither
specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might
privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as
abortion or gay marriage,
they almost invariably believe in the
“Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization,
deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they
espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”
: the right and duty of
the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive
diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology.
[5]
That is why describing torture with the word “torture” on broadcast
television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable
lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these
days it is simply “not done.”
After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and depth of
surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly
evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well.
Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley
overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so
important to the government that a strange relationship has emerged.
While the government could simply dragoon the high technology companies
to do the NSA’s bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important
an engine of the nation’s economy, perhaps with an implied
quid pro quo.
Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows
the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American
“jailbreaks” his smartphone (i.e., modifies it so that it can use a
service provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he
could receive
a fine of up to $500,000 and several years in prison;
so much for a citizen’s vaunted property rights to what he purchases.
The libertarian pose of the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully
cultivated in their public relations, has always been a sham. Silicon
Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of
every person who uses an electronic device, so it is hardly surprising
that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same for its
own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the Valley’s
assistance.
Still, despite the essential roles of lower Manhattan and Silicon
Valley, the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in
and around the Beltway.
The Deep State’s physical expansion and
consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the
frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional
and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely
above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the
paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data
mining, secret prisons and
Panopticon-like control
on the one hand; and on the other,
the ordinary, visible parliamentary
institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana
republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.
The results of this contradiction are not abstract,
as a tour of the
rotting, decaying, bankrupt cities of the American Midwest will attest.
It is not even confined to those parts of the country left behind by a
Washington Consensus that decreed the financialization and
deindustrialization of the economy in the interests of efficiency and
shareholder value. This paradox is evident even within the Beltway
itself, the richest metropolitan area in the nation. Although
demographers and urban researchers invariably count Washington as a
“world city,” that is not always evident to those who live there.
Virtually every time there is a severe summer thunderstorm, tens — or
even hundreds — of thousands of residents
lose power,
often for many days. There are occasional water restrictions over wide
areas because water mains, poorly constructed and inadequately
maintained,
have burst.
[6]
The Washington metropolitan area considers it a Herculean task just to
build a rail link to its international airport — with luck it may be
completed by 2018.
It is as if Hadrian’s Wall was still fully manned and the
fortifications along the border with Germania were never stronger, even
as the city of Rome disintegrates from within and the life-sustaining
aqueducts leading down from the hills begin to crumble.
The governing
classes of the Deep State may continue to deceive themselves with their
dreams of Zeus-like omnipotence, but others do not....
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread
that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and
deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic
social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the
headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to
Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening
sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome,
to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.” “Living
upon its principal,” in this case, means that the
Deep State has been
extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.
We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep
State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance,
firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost
impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires,
the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the
failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in
the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly
propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed
for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred
by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya;
the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging
further misadventure, seemed
merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria.
Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure
to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human
and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is
strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves
in like manner.
But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed
to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless
collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president,
advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this
time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that
he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to
him by Vladimir Putin. [7]
Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison
and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the
claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The
unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance
have become so egregious that
even institutional apologists such as
Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal — if only rhetorically —
from their knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to
waken from the fearful and suggestible state that 9/11 created in their
minds, it is possible that the Deep State’s
decade-old tactic of crying “terrorism!”
every time it faces resistance is no longer eliciting the same
Pavlovian response of meek obedience.
And the American people, possibly
even their legislators, are growing tired of endless quagmires in the Middle East.
But there is another more structural reason the Deep State may have
peaked in the extent of its dominance. While it seems to float above the
constitutional state,
its essentially parasitic, extractive nature
means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance.
The Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the
day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as
appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed,
black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies
for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as
too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state
will mesh noiselessly.
But when one house of Congress is taken over by
tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying.
If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted
cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the
past....
The final factor is Silicon Valley. Owing to secrecy and obfuscation, it
is hard to know how much of the NSA’s relationship with the Valley is
based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through
FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously
breaking into technology companies’ systems. Given the Valley’s public
relations requirement to mollify its customers who have privacy
concerns,
it is difficult to take the tech firms’ libertarian
protestations about government compromise of their systems at face
value, especially since they engage in similar activity against their
own customers for commercial purposes. That said, evidence is
accumulating that Silicon Valley
is losing billions in overseas business
from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain
privacy.
For high tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more
compelling than the Deep State’s demand for patriotic cooperation. Even
legal compulsion can be combatted: Unlike the individual citizen, tech
firms have deep pockets and batteries of lawyers with which to fight
government diktat.
This pushback has gone so far that on January 17, President Obama
announced revisions to the NSA’s data collection programs, including
withdrawing the agency’s custody of a domestic telephone record
database, expanding requirements for judicial warrants and ceasing to
spy on (undefined) “friendly foreign leaders.”
Critics have denounced
the changes as a cosmetic public relations move,
but they are still significant in that the clamor has gotten so loud
that the president feels the political need to address it.
When the contradictions within a ruling ideology are pushed too far,
factionalism appears and that ideology begins slowly to crumble.
Corporate oligarchs such as the Koch brothers
are no longer entirely happy with the faux-populist political front
group they helped fund and groom. Silicon Valley, for all the Ayn Rand-like tendencies of its major players, its offshoring strategies and its further exacerbation of income inequality, is now lobbying Congress to restrain the NSA, a core component of the Deep State. Some tech firms are moving to
encrypt their data.
High tech corporations and governments alike seek dominance over people
though collection of personal data, but the corporations are jumping
ship now that adverse public reaction to the NSA scandals threatens
their profits.
The outcome of all these developments is uncertain. The Deep State,
based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and corporate
hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events may
only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a
way of toppling the altars of the mighty.
While the two great
materialist and determinist ideologies of the twentieth century, Marxism
and the Washington Consensus, successively decreed that the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the market were
inevitable,
the future is actually indeterminate. It may be that deep
economic and social currents create the framework of history, but those
currents can be channeled, eddied, or even reversed by circumstance,
chance and human agency. We have only to reflect upon defunct glacial
despotisms such as the USSR or East Germany to realize that nothing is
forever.
Throughout history, state systems with outsized pretensions to power
have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first strategy,
reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of repeating
that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation’s unique
good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change
are merely subversive troublemakers. As the French ancien régime, the
Romanov dynasty and the Habsburg emperors discovered, the strategy works
splendidly for a while, particularly if one has a talent for dismissing
unpleasant facts. The final results, however, are likely to be
thoroughly disappointing....
The Snowden revelations
(the impact of which have been surprisingly strong), the derailed drive
for military intervention in Syria and a fractious Congress, whose
dysfunction has begun to be a serious inconvenience to the Deep State,
show that there is now a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change.
What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence
to tell
us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are
outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled,
the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed."
Also from above article:
"President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due
processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet
surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage
in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts
against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”).
Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive
displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement.
Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually
any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from
Congress, such as arranging the forced landing
of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory.
Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive
overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard
very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of
comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a
few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled,
either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials [James Clapper] on the subject of illegal surveillance.
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been
so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise."...
"Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His book about Congress,
The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, appeared in paperback on August 27, 2013."
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