ANATOMY OF THE DEEP STATE. February
21, 2014 by Mike Lofgren
[HERE ONLY EXTRACTS]
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]
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 impliedquid 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.
----------
========
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario