Deep State, Road to 9/11 by Peter Dale Scott - banksters

[outsider]

The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing アメリカの深層国家、深層事件、そして帳簿外資金調達

Peter Dale Scott:
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/4104

'..I have come to believe that most structural deep events (or SDEs) are interrelated, and that the study of any one of them helps understand others. Their interrelationship leads to two levels of history in America, and two levels of historical narrative: official or archival history, which ignores or marginalizes deep events, and a second level – called deep history by its practitioners or “conspiracy theory” by its critics – which incorporates them. As an example of an officially ignored or distorted deep event, I like to give the example of the Royal Canadian Mounted Policy (RCMP) detention in 1993 of a major al Qaeda figure, Ali Mohamed. In 1993 Ali Mohamed was ordered released by the FBI, freeing him to fly to Kenya where (as the 9/11/ commission report notes) he began the planning of the 1998 US Embassy bombing. This rather significant event was given a good account in Canada’s leading newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail; but it has never been properly reported in any American mainstream newspaper.3

Ali Mohamed

My study of the interrelationship between deep events has itself deepened over four decades. It began on a superficial level by noticing the overlap of apparently marginal personnel between the deep events of the John F. Kennedy assassination and Watergate; and again between Watergate and Iran-Contra.

I will never forget the New York Times front-page story on June 18, 1972, the day after the Watergate break-in. There were photographs of the Watergate burglars, including one of Frank Sturgis alias Fiorini, whom I had already written about two years earlier in my unpublished book manuscript about the JFK assassination, “The Dallas Conspiracy.”4 Sturgis was in fact no nonentity: well connected to the mob-linked former casino owners in Havana, he had maintained frequent contacts with the U.S. Air Attaché’s office in Havana after penetrating Castro’s July 26 Movement in the Sierra Maestra....'

'..
The Watergate Burglars – Frank Sturgis in the Center. Source


It is alleged that some of the bail money that released Sturgis and the other Watergate burglars was drug money from the CIA asset turned drug trafficker, Manuel Artime, and delivered by Artime’s money-launderer, Ramón Milián Rodríguez. After the Iran-Contra scandal went public, Milián Rodríguez was investigated by a congressional committee – not for Watergate, but because, in

support of the Contras, he had managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.6

A more recent example would be that of Ali Mohamed, the man detained and then released by the RCMP. In the 1980s Mohamed trained the CIA-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan. He then trained some of those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, before arranging for the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Kenya.

Since 9/11 my study of structural deep events has progressed from such overlaps of personnel to three deeper levels, which I call the operational, by which I mean a common modus operandi, the institutional, by which I mean a shared agency of implementation, and the financial, by which I mean a common source of funding.

I was myself startled to recognize more than a dozen common operational modalities between two outwardly dissimilar events: the JFK assassination and 9/11. Among the most striking are


1) the almost instant identification of what I call the designated culprits, Lee Harvey Oswald and the nineteen alleged hijackers,

2) the hidden intelligence backgrounds of the designated culprits, and

3) the protection by the FBI and CIA of the designated culprits in the weeks before the events, to ensure that they would not be placed under surveillance or taken off the streets.7

I have written at some length about this in my 2008 book The War Conspiracy, and also elsewhere. But I will repeat a passage here about the last item -- protection.


Both the JFK assassination and 9/11 were facilitated by the way the CIA and FBI manipulated their files about [designated culprits in] each event (the alleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of this facilitation was the decision on October 9, 1963 of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald from the FBI watch list for surveillance. This was shortly after Oswald’s arrest in New Orleans in August and his reported travel to Mexico in September. …. Gheesling’s behavior fits very neatly with the CIA’s culpable withholding from the FBI, in the same month of October, information that Oswald had allegedly met in Mexico City with a suspected KGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov. This also helped ensure that Oswald would not be placed under surveillance. Indeed, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that the CIA’s withholding of information was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963….

Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000-2001, again flagrantly withheld crucial evidence from the FBI: evidence that, if shared, would have led the FBI to surveil two of the alleged hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. This sustained withholding of evidence provoked an FBI agent to predict accurately in August, 2001, [three weeks before 9/11] that “someday someone will die.”… The CIA’s withholding of relevant evidence before 9/11 (which it was required by its own rules to supply) was matched in this case by the NSA.8

On the institutional level, it is striking that in every structural deep event since the JFK assassination we find some role played by the National Communications System (NCS), the shadow network created to ensure continuity of government (COG) in the event of an atomic attack. The NCS was formally established by a JFK Presidential Memorandum on August 21, 1963. By 1969 at least $175 million had been spent “to increase the survivability of national communications resources” in a nuclear attack.9 In June 1979 the system was tested under Carter, in the first known instance of the COG exercise GLOBAL SHIELD. By the Reagan era the NCS had mushroomed into an $8 billion communications and logistics program for an alternative emergency communications network.10

This alternative network played a central role in Iran-Contra, when Oliver North, arranging for the arms shipments to Iran that eventually cost him his job, used the nation’s top secret COG communications network. North’s network, known as Flashboard, “excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints…[and] had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, … by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad.”11 North was also actively developing plans, which originated with Hoover, for emergency detentions on a large scale.12

So, before him, was James McCord, famous for having participated in the burglary that precipitated the 1972 Watergate crisis.


McCord was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned “to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war.”His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating “contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian ‘security risks,’ who would be placed in military ‘camps.’”13

(Since I first advanced the hypothesis that the COG communications network was involved in all our structural deep events, I have found further corroborations for it. For example, John Dean, perhaps the central Watergate figure, had participated in COG activities when serving as the associate deputy attorney general.14 And an army reserve officer, Norman Katz, revealed in October 2013 that, because of his work in COG communications, he was summoned to Washington in November 1963, in connection with President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas.15)

But 9/11 is the deep event in which the COG network played a most central role. In The Road to 9/11 I advance reasons to believe that Cheney and Rumsfeld, during the short period that morning when they were inexplicably not in their command posts, were instead using the COG network to finalize emergency measures, soon to include the first ever implementation that same morning of COG measures.16

This is the more remarkable because, for two decades before 9/11, Rumsfeld and Cheney had both been part of a small secret committee planning with the assistance of Oliver North – even in the 1990s when neither man was in the government – for extreme COG measures, including, allegedly, “suspension of the constitution.” In the Iran-Contra Hearings North was asked about planning to suspend the constitution, but the Chairman would not allow discussion in an open session...'


Same perps, same basic MO..

[TonyGosling]

PETER DALE SCOTT’S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW FOR VOLTAIRE NETWORK
The "Deep State" behind U.S. democracy
In his book The Road to 9/11, now available in French, Professor Peter Dale Scott traces back the history of the "Deep State" in the United States, that is to say the secret structure that steers defense and foreign policy behind the facade of democracy. His analysis lifts the veil on the group that organised the September 11 attacks and which finances itself through international trafficking networks. Regarded as a reference book, The Road to 9/11 already features as recommended reading at military-diplomatic academies.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article169316.html

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | BERKELEY (ÉTATS-UNIS) | 6 APRIL 2011
FRANÇAIS ESPAÑOL
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This interview is a follow-up to the article "
Afghanistan: Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration", by Peter Dale Scott, Voltaire Network, 13 December 2010.

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VoltaireNet: Professor Scott, as your work is not as widely known as it ought to be in French-speaking countries, could you please start by defining what “Deep politics” is, and explain the distinction between what you call the “Deep state” and the “Public state”?

Peter Dale Scott: The term “Deep state” comes from Turkey. They invented it after the wreck of a speeding Mercedes in 1996 in which the passengers were a Member of Parliament, a beauty queen, a local senior police captain, and an important drug trafficker in Turkey who was also the head of a criminal paramilitary organization – the Grey Wolves – that went around killing people. And it became very obvious in Turkey that there were a covert relationship between the police who officially were looking for this man – even though a policeman was there with him in the car – and these people who committed crimes on behalf of the state. The state that you commit crimes for is not a state that can show its hand to the people, it’s a hidden state, a covert structure. In Turkey, they called it the Deep state, [1] and I had been talking about deep politics for a long time so I used the term in The Road to 9/11. This is why I have defined deep politics as all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged. So the term “Deep state” – coming from Turkey – is not mine.

It refers to a parallel secret government, organized by the intelligence and security apparatus, financed by drugs, and engaging in illicit violence, to protect the status and interests of the military against threats from intellectuals, religious groups, and occasionally the constitutional government. In this book, I adapt the term somewhat to refer to the wider interface in America between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government. You might call it the back door of the Public state, giving access to dark forces outside the law. The analogy with Turkey is not perfect, because what we see today in America is less a parallel structure than a wide zone or milieu of interaction between the public state and unseen dark forces, as I expound in my latest book The American War Machine. But this interaction is significant, and we need a name, such as Deep state, to describe it.

VoltaireNet: Your critically acclaimed book, The Road to 9/11, was published in 2007 under the Bush regime in the United States. In November 2010, you have published your latest body of work, The American War Machine, two years after Obama’s electoral victory; in your opinion, did the influence of the Deep state decrease in favor of the Public state after Mr. Obama’s election, or did it stay the same or even increase?

Peter Dale Scott: After almost two years of the Obama presidency, I have to conclude, regretfully, that the influence of the deep state, or more accurately what in my new book I call the American war machine, has continued to increase, just as it has under every US president since Kennedy. A key sign is the extent to which Obama, despite his campaign rhetoric, has continued to expand the scope of secrecy in US government, and especially to punish whistle-blowers: his campaign against Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who has not been charged yet with any crime, is without precedent in US history. I suspect that Washington’s fear of publicity is related to its awareness that US war policies are increasingly at odds with reality. In Afghanistan Obama appears to have capitulated to the efforts of General Petraeus and other generals to ensure that US troops do not begin to withdraw from combat in 2011, as originally foreseen when in 2009 Obama authorized a troop increase. Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, reports that during that protracted administration debate over whether to escalate in Afghanistan, CIA Director Leon Panetta advised Obama that “no Democratic president can go against military advice… So just do it. Do what they say.” Obama recently told US troops in Afghanistan that “you’re achieving your objectives, you will succeed in your mission.” This echo of earlier, fatuously optimistic statements from Petraeus explains why there were no realistic appraisal of the war’s progress inside the White House in December 2010, as was originally mandated.

Like Johnson before him, the president is now trapped in a quagmire war he dare not lose, and which threatens to spread to both Pakistan and Yemen, if not further. I suspect that the deep forces dominating both political parties are now so powerful, so affluent, and above all so invested in the profits from war-making, that a president is farther than ever from challenging this power – even as it becomes more and more clear that America’s era of world dominance, like Britain’s before it, is drawing to a close.

In addition Obama, without debate or review, has extended the domestic state of emergency proclaimed after 9/11, with its drastic limitations of civil rights (see below). In September 2010 the FBI raided the homes or offices of nonviolent human rights workers in Minneapolis and Chicago, citing a recent Supreme Court ruling that nonviolent first amendment speech and advocacy was a crime if "coordinated with" or "under the direction of" a foreign group designated as "terrorist." It is worth noting that, in nine years, Congress has not once met to discuss the State of Emergency declared by George W. Bush in response to 9/11, a State of Emergency that remains in effect today. Former Congressman Dan Hamburg and I appealed publicly in 2009, both to President Obama to terminate the emergency, and to Congress to hold the hearings required of them by statute. But Obama, without discussion, extended the 9/11 Emergency again on September 2009, and again a year later. Meanwhile Congress has continued to ignore its statutory obligations.

One Congressman explained to a constituent that the provisions of the National Emergencies Act have now been rendered inoperative by COG ("Continuity of Government"), a secret program to deal with running the state in the event of national emergency. The COG program was partially implemented on 9/11 by Dick Cheney, one of its main designers on a committee operating outside regular government since 1981. (See below for more details about COG). If it’s true that the National Emergencies Act have been rendered inoperative by COG, this would indicate that the constitutional system of checks and balances no longer applies, and also that secret decrees now override public legislation.

VoltaireNet: In this context, why doesn’t the U.S. Congress fulfill its legal obligations in overseeing the limitation of the secret powers of the Deep state – a limitation implemented after the Watergate scandal? What were the consequences of Nixon’s impeachment and the subsequent strengthening of Congress oversight on the secret operations of the United States intelligence agencies?

Peter Dale Scott: Nixon’s Vietnam strategy consisted of attempting to gain the other hand by making strategic deals with both the Soviet Union and China. This produced violent opposition from both hawks and doves in a deeply divided nation; and I believe that hawks from both the CIA and Pentagon were part of the engineered Watergate crisis that led to his resignation. In the aftermath, doves in the 1974 “McGovernite Congress” achieved a number of reforms in the name of more public politics, abolishing a state of emergency that had survived since the Korean War, and establishing Congressional and legal restraints on the CIA and other aspects of secret government. These reforms in turn immediately produced a concerted mobilization to overturn them, and restore the status quo ante. Underlying this political debate was a disagreement in the nation’s leadership between so-called “traders” and “Prussians,” as to whether America, in the wake of the Vietnam fiasco, should strive to return to its former role as a preeminent trading nation, or whether it should respond to the Vietnam defeat by a further buildup of its armed forces.

This struggle was simultaneously a struggle between moderates and militarists for control of the Republican Party. This culminated in the demise of Nixon and the gradual redirection of United States foreign policy in the Ford presidency from peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union towards plans for the weakening and destruction under Ronald Reagan of what Reagan called “the evil empire.” Thus in October 1975, the highly probable involvement of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the palace revolution known by historians as “The Halloween Massacre” meant the defeat of Nelson Rockefeller’s moderate Republicanism, and its gradual replacement by the hard-edged anti-communism of Ronald Reagan. Essentially, it meant the reorganization of Ford’s team toward the demise of détente, along with America’s huge defense budgets in the 1980’s and again today.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, then heading the White House staff of President Gerald Ford and controlling the Department of Defense, played a key part in securing the ultimate triumph of the Prussians, by demoting Henry Kissinger and appointing George H.W. Bush as head of the CIA, where he arranged for a new, more alarmist estimate of the Soviet threat (which explains the correlated skyrocketing of defense budgets, and the demise of détente). Since then, we have observed an increasing influence of what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex (in his farewell address of January 17th, 1961) on the United States’ political economy.

Today we have a new extended state of emergency, and Congressional oversight has become almost defunct. For example, legally mandated congressional oversight of the CIA’s covert operations has been successfully evaded by the creation in 1981 of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pentagon, which simply incorporates CIA personnel into its operations. JSOC, now known as the Special Operations Command, has become the locus of covert Pentagon operations, of the sort conducted under General Stanley McChrystal, before he was appointed the US commander in Afghanistan.

VoltaireNet: In the last question, you briefly invoked the important role played by Georges Bush Sr. in the demise of détente – a détente promoted by Henry Kissinger. Mr. Bush was the CIA head for a brief period though. Did the replacement of George H.W. Bush by the more moderate Admiral Stansfield Turner at the CIA increase the control of the secret operations led by different elements of the American Deep state?

Peter Dale Scott: No, it did not. It has been the contrary, because some of the key men who were squeezed out after Turner’s appointment found themselves a new home working for the so-called Safari Club, an off-the-books secret organization uniting the intelligence chiefs of several countries – including France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran – to supplement CIA actions with other anti-communist operations in Africa and the Third World over which the US Congress had no control. Then in 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski – who was not part of the Safari Club – engineered an end run around Turner by organizing a special unit in the White House under Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense who was a junior CIA operative at the time. Under Brzezinski’s guidance, CIA officers contrived with the Iranian agency SAVAK to send Islamist agents to Afghanistan, destabilizing the country in a way which led to the 1980 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.

The succeeding decade of covert CIA involvement in Afghanistan was crucial in converting that country into a centre for poppy culture, heroin trafficking, and jihadist Islamism. About the narcotics, there are some very good books about the CIA written a few years ago – one by Tim Weiner and one by John Prados. But because they talked to some CIA officers who showed them only a few recently declassified CIA documents – particularly Weiner – they don’t talk about the drugs. The narcotic connection is so deep its not mentioned in released CIA documents. But the collaboration of the CIA under William Casey with the drug-dealing Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) fostered the creation of a huge Afghan narco-economy, whose destabilizing consequences help explain why NATO soldiers, Afghans and Pakistanis are dying there today.

The BCCI was a huge global drug-laundering bank. It was corrupting – with its budgets, with its resources – leading politicians, presidents, prime ministers all over the world. And some of that money – it’s not much talked about, but it is true – was reaching politicians in the United States – politicians of both parties, which is one of the main reasons why we didn’t get a congressional investigation of BCCI. There was actually a Senate report that came out, under the names of one Republican, Hank Brown, and one Democrat, John Kerry. And Brown congratulated Kerry on having the courage to write that report when so many people in his party were affected by the BCCI. The latter was a big factor in creating the connexions with people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world during the 1980’s. He also became the leading recipient of CIA largesses supplemented by an equal amount of Saudi Arabian money. There’s something terribly wrong in a situation like this!

VoltaireNet: At the outcome of the presidential campaign of 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected in part on his pleas for a decrease in military spending and expanding détente with the Soviet Union. This did not happen in the four years of his presidency. Could you explain to us why? Did Zbigniew Brzezinski – whom you mentioned in the previous question – play any role in this then-unexpected hawkish foreign policy?

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Born in Montreal in 1929, Peter Dale Scott is a former diplomat, a poet and a writer. He is also Professor emeritus of English literature at the University of California, Berkely. Known for his anti-war stance and his criticism of U.S. foreign policy dating back to the Vietnam War, Peter Dale Scott is an author and political analyst hailed by critics and acknowledged by his peers, including Daniel Ellsberg known as the "man who toppled Nixon".
Peter Dale Scott: The media presented Carter as a populist candidate, a peanut farmer from the South. But the deep reality was that Carter had been prepared for the presidency by Wall Street, and particularly by the Trilateral Commission that was funded by David Rockefeller, and directed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski, a passionately anti-Soviet Pole, then became Carter’s national security adviser; and from the outset overruled Secretary of State Cyrus Vance repeatedly in pursuit of a more vigorous anti-Soviet foreign policy. In this Brzezinski went against the stated goals of the Trilateral Commission, of which President Carter had been a member. The underlying idea of the Trilateral Commission was a rather attractive picture of a multipolar world in which America would mediate between the Second World, which was the Soviet block, and the Third World, which was what we used to call in those days the underdeveloped or lesser developed countries… By the way I hate that term, because I lived in Thailand: in some ways they are very much more developed than we are!

When he was elected, Carter nominated a genuine trilateralist, Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, and he had as his National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was determined to use the Deep state to inflict as much damage on the Soviet Union as he could. A lot of things which are thought of as the successes of the Reagan regime clearly had their origins under Brzezinski. And it was a total repudiation of what trilateralism stood for. Carter – the poor man – was elected promising cuts in the defence budget, and before he had left, he had committed the Defense Department to huge increases which we associate with the Reagan administration but were initiated before.

As a consequence, under the surface a massive campaign for increased defense spending, mobilized by wealthy military industrialists through the Committee on the Present Danger, brought public opinion to reinforce Brzezinski’s push for a more militant U.S. presence and policy, particularly in the Indian Ocean.

VoltaireNet: After being a very influential man under President Gerald Ford, Dick Cheney – allied with his mentor Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-president George Bush senior – has been since the onset of the Reagan presidency one of the key men in the development of the ultra-secret so-called “Continuity of Government” (COG) program. Could you explain to us what that program is? Has it ever been implemented, even partially?

Peter Dale Scott: From the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981, arrangements were made for a secret group outside government to work on so-called “Continuity of Government” or COG plans for running the state in the event of national emergency. Initially this was an extension of existing plans for a response to a nuclear attack which would decapitate the United States’ leadership, but before Reagan retired the terms were modified by his Executive Order 12686 of 1988 to cover any emergency.

The COG is another thing which we associate with Reagan but actually began under Carter, although Carter may have never been aware of it. The latter did create FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has always been charged with being the infrastructure for this COG planning. What is kind of shocking is that the COG plans were extreme plans, but that Congress didn’t know about them in the 1980’s. Only a small group of people – including Oliver North, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – were secretly assigned to work on them by a 1981 top secret executive order from Reagan. The COG issue was first publicly brought up in 1987 during the Iran-Contra hearings, when congressman Jack Brooks asked Oliver North: “Colonel North, in your work at the N.S.C. were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?” Congressman Brooks further added: “I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was an area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.” Senator Inouye, the Chairman of this congressional commission, answered: “May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I’m certain arrangements can be made for an executive session” What Congressman Brooks was asking about was “continuity of government” (COG), and those arrangements for an executive session were never made.

Cheney and Rumsfeld – two key figure of the COG program – continued to participate in these very expensive plans and exercises for the next two decades, even though by the late 1990’s both men were corporate executives with no official government connection whatsoever. Reportedly the new target replacing the Soviet threat was terrorism, but some journalists have claimed that from the early 1980’s on there were major plans to deal with the kind of anti-war protests which (in the mind of Oliver North and those like him) had been responsible for the American defeat in Vietnam.

It is not disputed that on 9/11 COG plans were implemented, along with an officially proclaimed state of emergency that is still in effect after nine years, ignoring a post-Watergate law calling for either approval or termination of an emergency by Congress. The COG plans are a closely kept secret, but there were reports in the 1980’s that these involved warrantless surveillance and detention, and a permanent militarization of government. To some extent these changes have clearly been put in place since 9/11.

There is no way to determine how many of the constitutional changes since 9/11 can be traced to COG planning. However we do know that new COG planning measures were still being introduced in 2007, when President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51/HSPD-20). This Directive set out what FEMA later called “a new vision to ensure the continuity of our Government,” and was followed in August by a new National Continuity Policy Implementation Plan. NSPD-51 also nullified PDD 67, Richard Clarke’s COG directive of a decade earlier; and it referred to new “classified Continuity Annexes” which shall “be protected from unauthorized disclosure.”

Under pressure from his 911Truth constituents, Congressman Peter DeFazio of the Homeland Security Committee twice requested to see these Annexes. His request was denied. DeFazio then requested a second time, in a letter signed by the Chair of his committee. The request was denied one more time. Again, as I said in the second question, this would indicate that the constitutional system of checks and balances no longer applies, and also that secret decrees now override public legislation.

VoltaireNet: In The Road to 9/11 as well as in The American War Machine you assert in a very well-documented fashion that the 9/11 Commission - whose members were nominated by and worked directly under the control of President George W. Bush – covered up what happened on that fateful day, especially when it comes to Cheney’s actions on that particular morning. Could you say more about this?

Peter Dale Scott: Bush initially resisted any review of 9/11, until Congress imposed a 9/11 Commission in response to an effective political campaign by the victims’ families. (Editor’s note: See documentary 9/11 Press for Truth Kean & Hamilton, the two chairmen of the Commission promised publicly to be guided by the families’ unanswered questions, such as who the alleged hijackers were and how three buildings in the World Trade Center collapsed, one of them without being hit by a plane. These and other questions were in the end not addressed at all. Meanwhile the Commission received a great deal of conflicting testimony and repeatedly revised accounts.

Under the close supervision of Commission director, Philip Zelikow, a man with a government security background, the The 9/11 Commission Report ignored some conflicts altogether and reconciled others in a way many critics have challenged. The Report attributed the lack of response that day to a systemic chaos and breakdown, ignoring Cheney’s own statements elsewhere that he played a dominant role that day, and ignoring also important conflicts in and authoritative challenges to his own testimony.

One topic the Commission and Report explicitly did not investigate was the implementation of COG plans on 9/11 (p.555, note 9). Nor did they say anything about Cheney’s terrorism task force of May 2001, which has been cited as a source for a June 1st 2001 JCS order, modifying the conditions for the military interception of hijacked planes. To arrive at their reduced account of Cheney’s responsibility on that day, the Commission also flagrantly overlooked eyewitness accounts at odds with their chronology, notably by Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta.

VoltaireNet: One of the most fascinating aspects of The Road to 9/11 – and there are many – analyzes the geo-strategic decisions set up by the Deep state within the U.S. since the Carter presidency, in Central Asia as well as in the Middle East in relations to the oil/gas/drugs/military and weapons industries. In your latest book, The American War Machine, you analyze the roots of this oil/gas/drugs shadowy pattern, tracing them even before the creation of the CIA – which is a very interesting view. Given that the “War on Terror” is still going on, (albeit under new names such as pacification, democratization, etc.) and that it is currently spreading in over 60 countries across the globe (mainly through secret operations), what are the real goals – as well as the origins – of this war?

Peter Dale Scott: At the outset of the “War on Terror”, it was very clear that strategic advisers to both parties, as well as in think-tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations, were concerned about the U.S. need to preserve its historic dominance over the global petroleum markets. They produced documents pushing for increased U.S. military strength in the Persian Gulf region, and for military plans to deal with Saddam Hussein in particular. Now the "War on Terror" has continued to expand, as we are told that Salafi militants have predictably moved to new areas, notably Yemen and Somalia, to plan their retaliations. So the “War on Terror” has become a test of the current U.S. global strategic posture calling for “Full-spectrum dominance” as defined in the Pentagon’s Joint Vision 2020: “The ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.”

Driving all of these escalations since World War Two has been a defense lobby funded originally by the military-industrial complex, and now also by a half dozen right-wing foundations with unlimited funds. Over time the personnel have migrated from one group to the next – the American Security Council, the Committee on the Present Danger, the Project for the new American Century, and now the Center for Security Policy (CSP). [2] But the goals have expanded over the years, from maximizing the American military presence to also shrinking individual liberties, to forestall the resurgence of any future U.S. antiwar movement. (I discuss the growth of this defense faction in my most recent book, The American War Machine)

Increasingly this agenda smacks of McCarthyism if not fascism. A number of groups are feeding an anti-Muslim hysteria reminiscent of the anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s, and calling for an apparently endless war against Islam. For example the CSP recently published a document, Shariah, The Threat to America, [3] proclaiming sharia to be “the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time,” with dire warnings of “stealth jihad” and “demographic jihad.”

VoltaireNet: This “War on Terror” – whose real goals are far from being openly admitted by NATO member-state governments – was initiated in Afghanistan in late 2001. There, some powerful local warlords formerly allied with the United States during the USSR-led war in Afghanistan in the 1980’s are currently appearing as major players in the “AfPak” war zone. Let’s focus on the example of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; public opinion in the countries which are part of NATO does not seem to be remotely aware of who he is. Could you remind us of who Mr. Hekmatyar is? Can you tell us to what extent he symbolizes the danger generated by U.S. foreign policies which – due to a lack of congressional oversight and public scrutiny – led to a major increase in the global drug trade (in this particular case, heroin)?

Peter Dale Scott: With few assets of its own in Afghanistan, the U.S. decided to conduct its anti-Soviet Operation Cyclone there through the resources of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). In turn Pakistan, fearful of authentic Afghan nationalists’ claims on its own border territories, directed the bulk of the U.S. and Saudi assistance to two extremists with little power base inside Afghanistan – Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar, a Ghilzai Pashtun from the non-Pashtun north, was first trained in violent resistance under Pakistani guidance; and is said to have been the only Afghan leader who explicitly recognized the Durand Line defining the Afghan-Pakistan border. Both Sayyaf and Hekmatyar compensated for their lack of indigenous support by cultivating and exporting opiates in the 1980s, again with ISI support. For the same reason both men worked with the foreign mujahideen – the antecedents of what is now called Al Qaeda – who flocked to Afghanistan in this period; and Hekmatyar in particular is said to have developed a close relationship with Osama bin Laden. This influx of Wahhabi and Deobandi fundamentalists weakened Afghanistan’s traditional Sufi-dominated version of Islam.

In the course of the anti-Soviet campaign Hekmatyar’s forces murdered supporters of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the chief threat to Hekmatyar’s ISI-backed plans to dominate post-Soviet Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal the CIA (against State Department advice) also used Hekmatyar as an instrument to block a government of national reconciliation, leading to a civil war in the 1990s which killed thousands of people. Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Hekmatyar has led his own faction fighting for U.S. withdrawal; but allegedly he is more open than the Taliban to joining a Karzai-led coalition government. Senior defense officials in Washington, such as Michael Vickers, still refer to Operation Cyclone as the “most successful covert action” in CIA history. It seems not to concern them that the CIA’s program helped generate and unleash Al Qaeda – the new post-Soviet rationale for defense budgets – and Afghanistan’s current role as the world’s major source for heroin and hashish.

VoltaireNet: In conclusion, given the disastrous financial, economic, political, social crisis and even the moral situation in the United States as in many parts of the world, are you still confident in the future? Do you see some encouraging signs towards a greater influence of what you call in your book the “Prevailable will of the people” in the political decision-making process - a process which is more oligarchic than ever?

Peter Dale Scott: It is said that we should view every crisis as an opportunity. Certainly America’s crisis, which is also the world’s, ought to be the occasion for far-reaching reforms of the market capitalist processes that have created such huge gaps between the very rich and the very poor. Unfortunately these processes have also made traditional politics and modes of mobilization even more ineffective than they were before.

I argue in The Road to 9/11 that major social change is possible when oppression leads to the formation of a united public opinion – or what I called a prevailable will of the people – to oppose it. I pointed to examples such as the civil rights movement in the American south, or the Polish movement Solidarity. Technological developments such as the Internet have made it easier than before for people to unite, both nationally and internationally. But technology has also refined instruments of top-down surveillance and repression, making successful activist mobilization more difficult than before. So the future is very uncertain; one can say only that the present global system is more unstable than it has been, and that some kind of showdown is likely to change it.

I do believe however that this is a very exciting time in which to live. Young people should continue as they have been to join the movements for social change, and to create new venues for global exchange. And above all, there is no excuse for despair.

VoltaireNet: Thank you very much, Professor Scott, for these enlightening answers. We rejoice over the release of the first translation in French of The Road to 9/11, one of your most important works, and we congratulate you for its appraisal by a French retired high-ranking general. We wish your critically-acclaimed latest effort, The American War Machine, the attention and respect it deserves from the general public.

[TonyGosling]

LS: Do you have any hope that the question what did actually happen on 9/11 will ever be seriously addressed in the future?

PDS: Well, if you mean addressed by the US government, perhaps not. But it is already seriously addressed by people who have devoted their lives to it. I don’t count myself in that movement but there are such people. I think they have made very significant discoveries, I think the amount … the fact that there was explosive materials has been pretty well established — in Building Seven and in both the towers. There was a government investigation of why the towers went down by – it’s called NIST – National Institute of Standards and Technology, and NIST was forced to revise its findings.

You know, they said that Building Seven came down in 5.3 seconds and the critics were saying that part of that time was free fall and they just simply said from the 5.3 seconds, that’s not free fall. So they asked for a clearer definition what they meant and they produced a graph, which showed that in fact, yes, for two or three seconds in the middle the building was in free fall. Well, if the building was in free fall it must have had some kind of explosions to clear away the path of the top of the building to descend: it’s as clear as that.

So I think we have made significant progress; we can talk about that as serious when you get the government to admit that. Well, you know, it is 2014 and there has not been a re-consideration of the Warren Commission but almost everybody in America knows that the Warren Commission was not the answer. So in public opinion, I think, there will be more and more serious investigation.

LS: But from the international community, that there is some pressure on the US to get clean – you don’t think that this will ever happen?

PDS: I am a former diplomat; I don’t think that is the way that governments talk to governments, no. And I am not sure they should. They have to deal with their narrow interests. What we need to see is people in the world exerting that kind of pressure, newspapers exerting that kind of pressure. And it is lucky that we have other countries that speak English besides the United States so that for example the British press have given a much better account of what Glenn Greenwald got from Edward Snowden and in general I think if an American wants to know what is happening in his country, he should read The Guardian in London, in England – and he can read it online – so he has no excuse not to.

That is the sort of thing that may restore a degree of sanity to a world when … I have to say America is a wonderful country; I love living here. It has a government, which ultimately, I have to say, is behaving insanely. The invasion of Iraq was insane. There were any number of experts who said this would work out badly. And when they said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the evidence was discredited before and so discredited that they could not even use it the way they really had wanted to use it. Those kinds of pressure from public opinion are what we need to bring the American government back to sanity.

LS: And how do you judge upon the fact that there was no punishment for this lying about the Iraq war?

PDS: We could get into details about this. In my ‚American War Machine‘ I show how a private corporation conducted intelligence on whether he had weapons of mass destruction or not and they concluded that he did. SAIC was the name of the corporation. And then they decided afterwards, when it turned out that he hadn’t, we better find out how we could have been so wrong. And who do they charge to find out what went wrong? The same corporation, SAIC.

I’m sort of like Bishop Tutu in South Africa: I think we need truth and reconciliation; that is more important right now than to send people to jail. We need the truth so urgently I would be willing to forego putting people in prison if we could get the truth. Because if we got the truth, that would certainly force, for example, ending the state of emergency that still exists in this country – renewed by Obama without discussion every year (once a year it has to be renewed). Then congress would do what it is supposed to do – look at the state of emergency, look at continuity of government. The more the truth came out about these things, the more we would return to America as it used to be, which was very very far from an ideal condition but very very much better than what we have in America today.

LS: Are Wall Street interests at the very heart of the deep state?

PDS: Yes. In my book I … the initial notion of the deep state is the public institutions and then overshadowed by NSA, CIA, JSOC and the Pentagon – all these new secret institutions – and that is your first level of the deep state. But these agencies are powerful because they have connections outside the government; they don’t just report up to the President, but they are also – particularly the CIA, it is easy to document – is very rooted in Wall Street and was actually designed by Allen Dulles, when he was still a Wall Street lawyer, before he actually entered the CIA.

And the CIA is as powerful as it is because of its connections to Wall Street and – it used to be almost the same thing – its connections to big oil, because the big oil companies used to be based in New York and they were put together by, and they operated as a cartel that was defended successfully by Sullivan & Cromwell, which was a Wall Street law firm that — not accidentally — John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were senior members of.

Yes, the Wall Street is important; it was then, it is historically easy to show, in the 1950s and I do in my book. It is harder to show in the present but there are many indications I think … One thing is, the deep state, we should mention, is going more and more multinational as the corporations go multinational. Exxon is a multinational firm and there are some US firms, notably Blackwater, which is this kind of private army that turns up in various places. Germany I seeing, I believe in Germany your press has said that Blackwater or a subsidiary of Blackwater is operating in the Ukraine.

LS: Yes, that is true.

PDS: What we call an American corporation has now technically its headquarters in Qatar, in the Persian Gulf. So you cannot control it. How is Washington going to control a corporation whose headquarters are in the Persian Gulf? You are getting the apparatus of a supranational deep state and we are going to need to develop institutions on a supranational level that can deal with these new kinds of institutions, these businesses to stir up unrest because it is profitable.


http://www.larsschall.com/2014/06/20/lets-talk-about-the-american-deep -state/

[TonyGosling]

Why the Deep State always Wins
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/09/why-the-deep-state-always-wins/

The Zero-Sum Game of Perpetual War

by William A. Blunden / September 1st, 2014

Readers with a morbid sense of curiosity can visit a web site called NukeMap that allows visitors to witness the devastation caused by nuclear weapons of varying yields on a city of their choosing.1 Herman Kahn, who was an armchair theorist from RAND during the Cold War, insisted that nuclear war was winnable.2 But a few hours with NukeMap will disprove Kahn’s folly and the baleful smiley face that he tried to slap over human extinction.

Against this backdrop it’s no wonder that recent developments in the Ukraine have been known to cause night terrors. Your author can vouch for this. Last week there was an earthquake in the Bay Area and at the outset I woke up mistaking it for a shock wave from sub-megaton warhead hitting Silicon Valley.

One could posit that what’s happening in Eastern Europe offers a look-see into the nature of the groups that are calling the shots in the United States. Do they care that their destabilization program in Ukraine provokes a nuclear-armed country or enables neo-Nazis to assume vital positions in government?3 So far almost 2,600 civilians have been killed in the ongoing humanitarian crisis.4 While the corporate press does its best to create the impression of a “shining city upon a hill” which aims to “spread democracy” and conduct “humanitarian intervention,”5 a different sort of world power is clearly visible to those who look carefully.

The appalling savagery of radical groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) reflects the appalling savagery of American military incursions.6 Or perhaps the collective consciousness of the United States has already forgotten over 654,000 dead Iraqi civilians7 and the long trail of drone induced “bug-splats.”8 Ruthless men like Genghis Khan didn’t vanish into history books. Oh no, they’re still around. Some of them are right here in the good old U.S.A. It’s just that they’ve replaced scepters with hand-tailored suits and have traded thrones for seats on corporate boards.

Ignorance is Strength

Such men often go unnoticed because they tend to exercise power discreetly, standing behind a veil of propaganda.9 For instance Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll has called ExxonMobil an “invisible company” thanks to a disciplined and well-funded public relations division.10 This underscores the fact that the narratives put forth by the press are under the influence of an extensive subversion apparatus that CIA officer Frank Wisner referred to as the Mighty Wurlitzer.11 Powerful groups build consensus behind closed doors and then, as Chomsky and Herman explain, coax the rest of society along by manufacturing consent.12 Thus enabling what’s known as democratic elitism.

Despite all the filtering that occurs, readers will still, occasionally, get a glimpse of politicians dutifully lining up to kiss the boots of plutocrats.13 Political leaders like Barack Obama and George W. Bush are merely hired help, useful lightning rods who draw our attention away from the men working the levers of power in Washington D.C.

Pluralists contend that we, the voters, own these levers. Published research says otherwise.

Who Are Those Guys?

So just who are the “deciders”? American philosopher John Dewey answered this question in one crisp sentence:14

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.

A number of sociologists have arrived at the same basic conclusion. For example, back in the 1950s a professor at Columbia named C. Wright Mills described national policy decisions as being forged by a small group of power elite who were bound together by shared class interests. The work of contemporary sociologists like G. William Domhoff15 and Peter Phillips16 further substantiate the conclusions of Mills.

It’s alleged that when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in office he told labor activists “I agree with you, now go out and make me do it.” Which, if true, is a reminder that most politicians could care less about genuine social justice and are far more concerned about doing whatever it takes to stay in office.

A natural corollary of this is that lawmakers respond to those groups which are capable of rewarding and punishing them. This is in line with the Investment Theory of Party Competition, a model devised by political scientist Thomas Ferguson. Ferguson’s theory describes the political process as being dominated by corporate interests which coalesce into factions and compete to guide policy. A couple of researchers, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, have published a paper that offers quantitative validation of Ferguson’s model concluding that:17

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Note the mention of “organized groups” in the previous excerpt. Although political mobilization is typically associated with unions and social movements, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson explain in their book Winner Take All Politics that corporations have used similar collective strategies to coordinate their efforts and instrument policy changes. The media likes to portray political contests as one individual versus another (as American culture is rooted in the myth of rugged individualism) but it’s more accurate to view political struggle as a form of conflict between organizations. A billionaire like George Soros isn’t just a lone citizen, he represents a small army of people.

Let’s take a look at some of these corporate sets.

Corporate Emperors: The Banks

The late Michael Ruppert once stated that “The CIA is Wall Street. Wall Street is the CIA.”18 There’s definitely something to this as the figures responsible for creating the CIA, men like Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, were heavily linked to Wall Street.19 This is only logical as the global nature of espionage during World War II required people who were steeped in the nuances of international law and trade. Both Allen and John Foster were partners in Sullivan and Cromwell, a Wall Street law firm that remains one of the most profitable legal practices in the world.

Is it any surprise that both subcultures ─spies and bankers─ exhibit indications of being above the law? For example, the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper perjured himself on camera with little or no fallout.20 The Director of the CIA outright lied about monitoring the Senate Intelligence Committee and in return received the full backing of POTUS.21

Spies by virtue of their work break laws in other countries on a regular basis. Some intelligence officers become rather adept at it. It would be naïve to think that agencies like the CIA, answering only to the President and shielded by official secrecy, might be tempted to take shortcuts with the legal system here in the United States. Journalist Gary Webb, who investigated the CIA’s connection to drug smuggling, arrived at this conclusion. He committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Twice.22

Likewise Bank of America was recently fined over $16 billion for mortgage fraud and the company’s stock price jumped 4 percent.23 The CEO of JPMorgan presided over various scams that resulted in $20 billion worth of fines and, for his trouble, he was awarded a 74 percent raise.24 No one outside of a few sacrificial lambs like Bernie Madoff is serving jail time. Hunter S. Thompson disciple Matt Taibbi points out the obvious: rule of law has broken down:25

In the case of a company like HSBC, which admitted to laundering $850 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels, somebody has to go to jail in that case. If you’re going to put people in jail for having a joint in their pocket or for slinging dime bags on the corner in a city street, you cannot let people who laundered $800 million for the worst drug offenders in the world walk.

In addition to their role in the origins of U.S. intelligence, large financial institutions maintain a special position in the power structure because they’re the primary architects of the West’s economic model, driven by an ideological vision of open markets and accessible resources. As custodians of the world’s reserve currency they work diligently to realize this vision. Bankers have demonstrated the ability to shape history and spur military engagement.26 When push comes to shove, as we saw during the 2008 financial crisis, they can hold entire economies hostage.27

This isn’t necessarily surprising given the amount of assets that they have at their disposal. For instance, Richard Fisher of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank has reported that 12 American megabanks control something on the order of 70% of the American banking industry’s assets.28 Or consider the investment management company BlackRock which holds over $3 trillion in assets.29 This figure is on par with the 2013 U.S. Federal Budget.

Corporate Emperors: Other Sectors

Rivaling the banks are the fossil fuel companies. For example oil monolith ExxonMobil, a corporate descendant of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, brings in annual revenue on the order of half a trillion dollars.30 Thus making ExxonMobil roughly as big as the economy of Poland.

Over the past two decades the company has spent more than $200 million lobbying on the D.C. beltway.31 Modern society runs on oil and this translates into a mountain of money and a comparable level of influence. Like the bankers,32 the executives of the fossil fuel industry have the resources to reward those politicians who attend to their needs.33

Finally there’s the defense industry and its hi-tech offshoots. This is a sector of the economy that has held sway since the end of World War II, when Charles Wilson, then the president of General Electric, promoted the idea of a permanent war economy.34 Not only does the defense industry arm and equip the most powerful military on the planet, whose budget for 2014 is over $500 billion, but it also dominates the international arms market.35 In 2012 the New York Times reported that United States weapons exports were more than 75% of the global market.36

Defense companies in the United States sell heavy weaponry to repressive governments in Saudi Arabia,37 Egypt,38 and Israel.39 Business is thriving, enough so that taken in aggregate defense contractors like Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon form a prevalent lobbying force in Washington.

Think of it this way. These are businesses that manufacture the weapons which can level cities. Defense companies are intimately connected to people who wield such weapons both in the government and in the mercenary outfits of the private sector. The defense industry embodies the primeval archetype of unencumbered raw violence, the tip of the imperial spear, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about as he left office. No one crosses these executives, not even allegedly progressive political candidates who promise “change.”

An Elite Backdoor: The Deep State

How is it that influential corporate factions, with no constitutional authority whatsoever, are able to exercise state power? Congressional staff member Mike Lofgren claims that the corporate elite go through a Deep State.40 An extension of the visible state that resides below the surface of the body politic.

The derin devlet, or “deep state”, was a term coined in Turkey to describe a shadow government that existed as an outgrowth of covert operations launched during World War II. It consisted of government officials, spies, and organized crime elements.41 The Turkish Deep State served as a means to quash countervailing power centers that threatened the established secular order.

The ongoing instability in Egypt has also revealed the presence of a deep state in that country.42 Powerful interests anchored in the nation’s military and security services have aggressively attacked anyone and anything that represents a threat, as a court ruling which sentenced hundreds of people to execution for the death of a single police officer demonstrates.43

Like Turkey and Egypt, Ukraine also has a deep state. The New York Times describes it as being choreographed by a league of oligarchs:44

The ultra-wealthy industrialists wield such power in Ukraine that they form what amounts to a shadow government, with empires of steel and coal, telecoms and media, and armies of workers.

It’s interesting that although the New York Times openly refers to oligarchs in Ukraine in its headlines, the editors are far more demure in terms of how they refer to the ruling class here in the United States.

The American Deep State, or what Colonel Fletcher Prouty called the Secret Team, is a structural layer of political intermediaries: non-governmental organizations (e.g. National Endowment for Democracy, Ford Foundation), lobbyists (e.g. Chamber of Commerce, AIPAC), media outlets (e.g. Time Warner, News Corp), dark money pits (e.g. Freedom Partners, NRA), and private sector contractors (e.g. Booz Allen, SAIC) that interface with official government organs (CIA, Department of Defense).45 This layer establishes a series of informal, often secret, back channels and revolving doors through which profound sources of wealth and power outside of government can purchase influence.

As in Turkey, Egypt, and Ukraine, the American Deep State is a fundamentally anti-democratic apparatus that caters to the agenda of heavily entrenched elites. CIA Officer John Stockwell explains what ties the Deep State together:46

The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy – a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system. Corporate leaders fight amongst themselves like people in any human endeavor. They raid and hostilely take over each other’s companies. Losers have been known to commit suicide. However, they firmly believe in the capitalist system.

War is Peace

Looking back at the past two decades, U.S. intervention in the Middle East has failed to “spread democracy” or win the “war on terror.” It has only succeeded in creating more instability, more conflict, and more enemies.47 After spending $25 billion to equip and train Iraqi security forces,48 our military ends up bombing its own equipment49 to fend off CIA-armed jihadist forces50 in anticipation of providing even more military aid to the Kurds.51

One thing is certain: the Middle East is awash with armaments supplied by the United States.

There are those who would argue that this incongruous state of affairs is intentional, that stated claims about WMDs and nurturing democracy are a mere pretext for a more ominous stratagem. More than a decade ago John Stockwell presciently pointed out an unsettling logic, an instance of Hegelian Dialectic where the ruling class creates its own enemies to feed off of the ensuing carnage:52

Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. If the world were peaceful, we would never put up with this kind of ruinous expenditure on arms at the cost of our own lives. This is where the thousands of CIA destabilizations begin to make a macabre kind of economic sense. They function to kill people who never were our enemies-that’s not the problem-but to leave behind, for each one of the dead, perhaps five loved ones who are now traumatically conditioned to violence and hostility toward the United States. This insures that the world will continue to be a violent place, populates with contras and Cuban exiles and armies in Southeast Asia, justifying the endless, profitable production of arms to ‘defend’ ourselves in such a violent world.

The defense industry thrives from regional conflicts like this, a constant stream of flash points in America’s self-perpetuating campaign to eradicate terrorism. The cost for the U.S. military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan reaches into trillions of dollars and much of that funding ends up covering military expenses.53 About a year ago, back when President Obama announced he was thinking about bombing the Assad regime, Raytheon’s stock jumped.54

And the defense executives aren’t alone, the fossil fuel industry also extracts its pound of flesh.55 It’s the failed state model for neocolonialism.56 Non-nuclear countries that have been ravaged by war are more susceptible to opening their doors and yielding nationalized resources on behalf of corporate pressure. Before the United States invaded Iraq its oil wells weren’t accessible to outside firms. After the invasion Western oil interests like Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil have all gained entry to one of the world’s largest sources of oil.57 In March of 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iraq’s oil output was at its highest point in more than 30 years.58

Slavery is Freedom

As perennial conflict abroad is leveraged as a tool of empire, at home it leads to repression. The late Chalmers Johnson, who studied this phenomenon as a professor at UC San Diego, characterized this with the adage “Either give up your empire, or live under it.”

With the public exposure of the NSA’s global surveillance apparatus there are intimations that this process is already underway. In 2005 there were revelations of warrantless wiretapping under President George W. Bush,59 a story that the New York Times sat on for months.60 Then a slew of NSA whistleblowers like Russell Tice,61 Thomas Drake62 and William Binney63 publicly came forward with allegations that the NSA’s monitoring programs were unconstitutional. And in May of 2013 the other shoe dropped when a Booz Allen contractor named Ed Snowden handed over a large set of classified documents64 to journalists in Hong Kong.

The purpose of the NSA’s panopticon is to further the interests of the corporate elite. In an open letter to Brazil Ed Snowden clearly states as much:65

These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.

Yet it’s important to keep in mind that the origins of the emerging police state can be traced much farther back.66 For example, in the late 1960s the Department of Defense conceived Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, code named Operation Garden Plot, which included “plans to undercut riots and demonstrations” using “information gathered through political espionage and informants.”67

In 1971 an instructor for the U.S. Army, a man named Christopher Pyle, revealed that the military had been tracking civilian political activists and demonstrations for several years. A few years later in 1974 Seymour Hersh, writing for the New York Times, exposed a CIA program called CHAOS (aka MCHAOS) which targeted antiwar activists in the United States.68

Though the trend of militarization is hard to dismiss,69 how exactly does military action overseas incite civilian persecution within our borders? George Orwell in his timeless book 1984 provides a succinct explanation:

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

American society cannot endure perpetual war and maintain a healthy middle class. Especially when plutocrats70 and executives71 do everything in their power to avoid72 paying taxes.73 The decree of maximizing profit requires them to extract value from the commons and then fail to offer anything in return, to the tune of trillions of dollars a year. Hence the burden of supporting an endless series of bloody military campaigns falls on the rest of us.

So while the public eye is distracted with military shock and awe overseas the middle class fails to grasp its inevitable decline. A captive state strips away civil liberties, divests in social programs, infrastructure, education, and anything else that might help normal people cope as wages stagnate and jobs go offshore. Resources that could be devoted to sustaining and growing the middle class are diverted to the extractive Deep State. The masters of mankind, as Adam Smith referred to them in The Wealth of Nations, witness record profits.74

Denouement

By the end of World War II the United States had replaced Britain as global hegemon. Over the course of the Cold War the one countervailing world power that represented an alternative ideology, the Soviet Union, dissolved. Since German unification NATO has gradually expanded into former Soviet territory (Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, etc.) despite explicit verbal guarantees to Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not.75 And now the plutocrats standing behind Victoria Nuland want Ukraine. Never mind that Ukraine is a border country which Russian leadership views as vital to their national security.

In 2006 journalist John Pilger spoke with Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a CIA officer who supervised agency operations in Latin America back in the 1980s. Pilger queried Clarridge as to what gave the CIA the right to overthrow foreign governments, Clarridge responded: 76

Like it or lump it, we’ll do what we like. So just get used to it, world.

There you have it. When they want something they take it. Native Americans can attest to the veracity of this statement. This, dear readers, is the mindset of the ruling class, the true face of empire. Blind ambitious of this sort has always existed. Only now the CIA is up against an adversary that is just as skilled and just as heavily armed (a scenario, by the way, which past U.S. leaders have studiously avoided). Late at night in some far corner of the Pentagon the ghost of Herman Kahn chuckles.
NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein []
Louis Menand, “Fat Man: Herman Kahn and the nuclear age,” New Yorker, June 27, 2005 []
Jim Naureckas, “Denying the Far-Right Role in the Ukrainian Revolution,” FAIR, March 7, 2014 []
“Ukraine Crisis Escalates as Russian Forces Cross Border, NATO Moves to Expand in Region,” Democracy Now! August 29, 2014 []
“Glenn Greenwald on Iraq: Is U.S. “Humanitarianism” Only Summoned to Control Oil-Rich Areas?” Democracy Now!, August 13, 2014 []
Garry Leech, “The Beheading of James Foley,” Counterpunch, August 22-24, 2014 []
Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey, Lancet, Volume 368, Issue 9545, pp. 1421-1428, October 21, 2006 []
Get the Data: Drone Wars []
Psywar, Directed by Scott Noble, Metanoia Films, 2010 []
“ExxonMobil’s Dirty Secrets, from Indonesia to Nigeria to Washington: Steve Coll on ‘Private Empire’,” Democracy Now!, May 7, 2012 []
Wilford, Hugh, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, Harvard University Press, 2008. []
Excerpts from Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky interviewed by various interviewers []
David Firestone, “The Line to Kiss Sheldon Adelson’s Boots,” New York Times, March 31, 2014 []
Robert Brett Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, Cornell University Press, 1991, page 440. []
G. William Domhoff, “C. Wright Mills, Power Structure Research, and the Failures of Mainstream Political Science,” New Political Science 29 (2007), pp. 97-114 []
Peter Phillips, “Inside Bohemian Grove,” Counterpunch, August 13, 2003 []
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, Fall 2014 []
Michael Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, New Society Publishers, 2004, Chapter 3. []
Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, Times Books, 2013. []
Glenn Kessler, “James Clapper’s ‘least untruthful’ statement to the Senate,” Washington Post, June 12, 2013 []
Mark Mazzetti, “Obama Expresses Confidence in CIA Director,” New York Times, August 1, 2014 []
Sam Stanton, “Reporter’s suicide confirmed by coroner,” Sacramento Bee, December 15, 2004 []
Peter Eavis and Michael Corkery, “Bank of America’s $16 Billion Mortgage Settlement Less Painful Than It Looks,” New York Times, August 21, 2014 []
James Stewart, “Accounting for Dimon’s Big Jump in Pay,” New York Times, January 31, 2014 []
“Who Goes to Jail? Matt Taibbi on American Injustice Gap from Wall Street to Main Street,” Democracy Now! April 15, 2014 []
Nomi Prins, All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nation Books, 2014 []
Michael Kirk, “Inside the Meltdown,” FRONTLINE, February 17, 2009 []
Richard W. Fisher, Ending ‘Too Big to Fail’: A Proposal for Reform Before It’s Too Late (With Reference to Patrick Henry, Complexity and Reality), Dallas Federal Reserve, January 16, 2013 []
Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro, “The Global 1%: Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class,” Project Censored, August 22, 2012 []
United States Securities and Exchange Commission []
Top Spenders 1998-2014, OpenSecrets.org []
David Corn, “Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs Problem,” Mother Jones, June 4, 2014 []
Matea Gold, “Koch-backed political network, built to shield donors, raised $400 million in 2012 elections,” Washington Post, January 5, 2014 []
Doug Henwood, “NBC: The GE Broadcasting Co.,” FAIR, November 1, 1989 []
Department of Defence – White House []
Thom Shanker, “U.S. Arms Sales Make Up Most of Global Market,” New York Times, August 26, 2012 []
Thom Shanker, “U.S. Arms Deal With Israel and 2 Arab Nations Is Near,” New York Times, April 18, 2013 []
Steve Kenny, “Egypt: U.S. to Deliver Helicopters,” New York Times, April 23, 2014 []
Jeremy Sharp, “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel,” Congressional Research Service, April 11, 2014 []
Mike Lofgren, “Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State,” Bill Moyers and Company, February 21, 2014 []
Dexter Filkins, “The Deep State,” New Yorker, March 12, 2012 []
Sarah Childress, “The Deep State: How Egypt’s Shadow State Won Out,” FRONTLINE, September 17, 2013 []
David D. Kirkpatrick, “Hundreds of Egyptians Sentenced to Death in Killing of a Police Officer,” New York Times, March 24, 2014 []
Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine Turns to Its Oligarchs for Political Help,” New York Times, March 2, 2014 []
Overworld Underworld Deep State ≡ State []
John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order, South End Press, 1999, page 59. []
Patrick Cockburn, “Why Washington’s War on Terror Failed,” Counterpunch, August 21, 2014 []
Eric Schmitt and Michael Gordon, “The Iraqi Army Was Crumbling Long Before Its Collapse, U.S. Officials Say,” New York Times, June 12, 2014 []
Jason Fields, “COLUMN-In Iraq, U.S. is spending millions to blow up captured American war machines,” Reuters, August 19, 2014 []
C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.,” New York Times, March 24, 2013 []
Helene Cooper and Alissa Rubin, “Pentagon Says Airstrikes Have Slowed but Not Stopped Sunni Militants,” New York Times, August 11, 2014 []
John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order, South End Press, 1999, page 93. []
Neta Crawford, “U.S. Costs of Wars Through 2014: $4.4 Trillion and Counting,” Boston University, June 25, 2014 []
John Bennett, “Analysts: Spurred by Syria Talk, Raytheon’s Stock Price to Remain High,” Defense News, August 28, 2013 []
Antonia Juhasz, “Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil,” CNN, April 15, 2013 []
Gilbert Mercier, “Engineering Failed States: The Strategy of Global Corporate Imperialism,” News Junkie Post, February 18, 2014 []
Dahr Jamail, “Western oil firms remain as US exits Iraq,” Al Jazeera, January 7, 2012 []
Sarah Kent, “Iraq’s Oil Output Surges to Highest Level in Over 30 Years,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2014 []
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times, December 16, 2005 []
Michael Kirk & Mike Wiser, “United States of Secrets (Part One): The Program,” Frontline, May 13, 2014 []
“EXCLUSIVE: National Security Agency Whistleblower Warns Domestic Spying Program Is Sign the U.S. is Decaying Into a ‘Police State’,” []
Jane Mayer, “The Secret Sharer,” New Yorker, May 23, 2011 []
“Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance,” Democracy Now! April 20, 2012 []
Revelations | Courage Snowden – Edward Snowden []
Mike Masnick, “Ed Snowden Sends Open Letter To Brazil… Which The Press Blatantly Misrepresents,” Tech Dirt, December 17, 2013 []
“Chris Pyle, Whistleblower on Domestic Spying in 70s, Says Be Wary of Attacks on NSA’s Critics,” Democracy Now! June 13, 2013 []
Frank Morales, “U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War At Home,” Covert Action Quarterly, #69 Spring/Summer 2000 []
Seymour Hersh, “Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” New York Times, December 22, 1974 []
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David de Jong and Robert LaFranco, “The Super-Rich’s Offshore Tax Avoidance Strategies,” Businessweek, May 2, 2013 []
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Tim Dickinson, “The Biggest Tax Scam Ever,” Rolling Stone, August 27, 2014 []
Zachary Mider, “Tax Dodge Used by Bain Escapes Scrutiny on Inversions,” Bloomberg, August 25, 2014 []
Robin Sidel and Saabira Chaudhuri, “U.S. Bank Profits Near Record Levels,” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2014 []
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Bill Blunden is an independent investigator whose current areas of inquiry include information security, anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. He is the author of several books, including The Rootkit Arsenal and Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-Industrial Complex. He is the lead investigator at Below Gotham Labs. Read other articles by William A..

[TonyGosling]

Obama administration expands elite military unit’s powers to hunt foreign fighters globally
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Dan Lamothe November 25
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/11/25/obama-adm inistration-expands-elite-military-units-powers-to-hunt-foreign-fighte rs-globally/


U.S. Special Operations forces travel through the village of Fatisah in the northern Syrian province of Raqqa on May 25, 2016. (Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images)

The Obama administration is giving the elite Joint Special Operations Command — the organization that helped kill Osama bin Laden in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs — expanded power to track, plan and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe, a move driven by concerns of a dispersed terrorist threat as Islamic State militants are driven from strongholds in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials said.

The missions could occur well beyond the battlefields of places like Iraq, Syria and Libya where Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has carried out clandestine operations in the past. When finalized, it will elevate JSOC from being a highly-valued strike tool used by regional military commands to leading a new multiagency intelligence and action force. Known as the “Counter-External Operations Task Force,” the group will be designed to take JSOC’s targeting model — honed over the last 15 years of conflict — and export it globally to go after terrorist networks plotting attacks against the West.

The creation of a new JSOC entity this late in the Obama’s tenure is the “codification” of best practices in targeting terrorists outside of conventional conflict zones, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss administration deliberations. It is unclear, however, if the administration of President-elect Donald Trump will keep this and other structures set up by Obama. They include guidelines for counterterrorism operations such as approval by several agencies before a drone strike and “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed. This series of presidential orders is known as the “playbook.”

[CIA drone strikes will get pass in counterterrorism ‘playbook’]

The new JSOC task force could also offer intelligence, strike recommendations and advice to the militaries and security forces of traditional Western allies, or conduct joint operations, officials said. In other parts of the world, with weak or no governments, JSOC could act unilaterally.

The global focus is reminiscent of when U.S. forces first went after al-Qaeda in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. As approaching U.S. troops forced militants to flee their safe havens in Afghanistan and scatter across the globe, the United States followed in pursuit, using CIA assets to grab suspected al-Qaeda operatives in dozens of countries, sometimes capturing and imprisoning them under murky legal authorities and using interrogation techniques widely seen as torture.

Some in the Pentagon hope to see the new task force working in tandem with the CIA, elevating a sometimes distant relationship to one of constant coordination to track and go after suspected terrorists outside of traditional war zones.

[A breakdown of some of the gear U.S. Special Operations forces are using in Syria]

In recent years the agency’s involvement in global paramilitary operations has waned — with fewer strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, and its armed drones in Syria transferred to the Pentagon. It’s still unclear how much the CIA may be willing to cooperate with JSOC and more broadly with the Pentagon following the White House’s decision.

The agency, with its broad contacts overseas, espionage networks and long experience in covert operations still has much greater reach than JSOC.

The CIA declined to comment.

The new JSOC task force will report to the Pentagon through the U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, according to U.S. military officials, creating a hybrid command system that can sidestep regional commanders–with their coordination–for the sake of speed.

In the past, units such as the Army’s Delta Force — which is part of SOCOM and its subordinate command JSOC — were usually deployed under those regional commanders, known as geographic combatant commands. The new task force, however, will alter that process by turning SOCOM’s chief, Army Gen. Raymond “Tony” Thomas, into a decision-maker when it comes to going after threats under the task force’s purview. While Thomas will help guide certain decisions, the operations will ultimately have to be approved by the White House and the Pentagon.

The task force will essentially turn Thomas into the leading authority when it comes to sending Special Operations units after threats.

“Now [Thomas] can request whatever he wants and … unless there’s some other higher competing priority, the combatant commanders have to cough it up,” said a former senior defense official.

Turning SOCOM into a command with a global reach has been on the table for the last 15 years. In 2001, Air Force Gen. Charles Holland, then SOCOM’s commander, was hesitant to create a command structure that would effectively put SOCOM on the same level as the geographic combatant commanders. He believed it would cause too much friction with regional commanders. Instead, he decided that only in rare instances would SOCOM actually direct Special Operations forces.

[Obama outlines plans to expand U.S. Special Operations forces in Syria]

It remains to be seen if the new organization will generate tensions between Special Operations Command and the generals in charge of U.S. forces in places such as the Middle East or Europe. In his March congressional confirmation testimony, Thomas suggested that assigning more authorities to SOCOM would allow for “synchronized operations” against nonstate threats that span geographic boundaries. But regional commanders, all four star generals, guard their turf carefully.

Officials hope the task force, known throughout the Pentagon as “Ex-Ops,” will be a clearinghouse for intelligence coordinating and targeting against groups or individuals attempting to plot attacks in places like the United States and Europe.

According to officials familiar with plans for the task force, it will initially draw on an existing multinational intelligence operation in the Middle East that tracks foreign fighters, called Gallant Phoenix, and one of JSOC’s intelligence centers in Northern Virginia.

While in the past the smaller task forces, such as Gallant Phoenix, were staffed by representatives from different intelligence agencies, the new task force aims to have decision-makers present, ensuring that the targeting process happens in one place and quickly.

“Layers have been stripped away for the purposes of stopping external networks,” said a defense official. “There has never been an ex-ops command team that works trans-regionally to stop attacks.”

The defense official said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies will support JSOC personnel as they synthesize information and offer recommendations on how to handle specific threats.

Over the past decade JSOC has also built strong relations with police agencies in Germany, Britain, France and Turkey, as they have moved to combat the flow of foreign fighters returning to their home countries.

The number of participating intelligence agencies, both internationally and U.S.-based within the task force is in flux, the official added, as intelligence-sharing laws and internal friction have kept some on the periphery of the organization.

[U.S. Special Operations forces begin new role alongside Turkish troops in Syria]

JSOC — rarely mentioned by name by U.S. officials due to the clandestine nature of its work — was cited specifically by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter last month in Paris after he and Thomas met with defense ministers involved in the fight against the Islamic State. The command “has been put in the lead” of countering the Islamic State’s external operations outside conflict zones, Carter said, surprising some defense officials in Washington.

A senior administration official, asked to comment on the plan, issued a statement that did not use JSOC’s name, but acknowledged the role Special Operations forces play in tracking foreign fighters away from the battlefield.

“These forces on the ground, operating in close concert with our partners, have gathered critical intelligence off the battlefield, and have shared that information with our coalition partners and allies,” the statement said. “This information is helping us ramp up actions against [Islamic State] leaders and operatives planning attacks, track foreign fighters returning to their home countries and improve law enforcement actions aimed at interdicting potential plotters.”

Adam Entous, Greg Miller, Dana Priest and Wesley Morgan contributed to this report.

[outsider]

'HIGH RANKING CIA AGENT BLOWS WHISTLE ON THE DEEP STATE AND SHADOW GOVERNMENT':
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/high-ranking-cia-agent-blows-whistle-on -the-deep-state-and-shadow-government_092017

'A CIA whistleblower, Kevin Shipp, has emerged from the wolves den to expose the deep state and the shadow government which he calls two entirely separate entities.
'A CIA whistleblower, Kevin Shipp, has emerged from the wolves den to expose the deep state and the shadow government which he calls two entirely separate entities.
“The shadow government controls the deep state and manipulates our elected government behind the scenes,” Shipp warned in a recent talk at a Geoengineeringwatch.org conference.
Shipp had a series of slides explaining how the deep state and shadow government functions as well as the horrific crimes they are committing against U.S. citizens.
Some of the revelations the former CIA anti-terrorism counter intelligence officer revealed included that “Google Earth was set up through the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and InQtel.” Indeed he is correct, the CIA and NGA owned the company Google acquired, Keyhole Inc., paying an undisclosed sum for the company to turn its tech into what we now know as Google Earth. Another curious investor in Keyhole Inc. was none other than the venture capital firm In-Q-Tel run by the CIA according to a press release at the time.
Shipp also disclosed that the agency known as the Joint Special Ops Command (JSOC) is the “president’s secret army” which he can use for secret assassinations, overturning governments and things the American people don’t know about.
FBI warrantless searches violate the Fourth Amendment with national security letters, which Shipp noted enables them to walk into your employer’s office and demand all your financial records and if he or she says anything about them being there they can put your supervisor in jail or drop a case against themselves using the “State’s Secret Privilege law.”
“The top of the shadow government is the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency,” Shipp said.
Shipp expressed that the CIA was created through the Council on Foreign relations with no congressional approval, and historically the CFR is also tied into the mainstream media (MSM.) He elaborated that the CIA was the “central node” of the shadow government and controlled all of other 16 intelligence agencies despite the existence of the DNI. The agency also controls defense and intelligence contractors, can manipulate the president and political decisions, has the power to start wars, torture, initiate coups, and commit false flag attacks he said.
As Shipp stated, the CIA was created through executive order by then President Harry Truman by the signing of the National Security Act of 1947.
According to Shipp, the deep state is comprised of the military industrial complex, intelligence contractors, defense contractors, MIC lobbyist, Wall St (offshore accounts), Federal Reserve, IMF/World Bank, Treasury, Foreign lobbyists, and Central Banks.
In the shocking, explosive presentation, Shipp went on to express that there are “over 10,000 secret sites in the U.S.” that formed after 9/11. There are “1,291 secret government agencies, 1,931 large private corporations and over 4,800,000 Americans that he knows of who have a secrecy clearance, and 854,000 who have Top Secret clearance, explaining they signed their lives away bound by an agreement.
He also detailed how Congress is owned by the Military Industrial Complex through the Congressional Armed Services Committee (48 senior members of Congress) giving those members money in return for a vote on the spending bill for the military and intelligence budget.
He even touched on what he called the “secret intelligence industrial complex,” which he called the center of the shadow government including the CIA, NSA, NRO, and NGA.
Shipp further stated that around the “secret intelligence industrial complex” you have the big five conglomerate of intelligence contractors – Leidos Holdings, CSRA, CACI, SAIC, and Booz Allen Hamilton. He noted that the work they do is “top secret and unreported.”
The whistleblower remarked that these intelligence contractors are accountable to no one including Congress, echoing the words of Senator Daniel Inouye when he himself blew the whistle on the shadow government during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987.
At the time Inouye expressed that the “shadow government had its own funding mechanism, shadowy Navy, and Air Force freedom to pursue its own goals free from all checks and balances and free from the law itself.”
Shipp further added that the shadow government and elected government were in the midst of a visible cold war....'

[outsider]

'The Merchant of Menace':
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48020.htm

'..So given the fact that “pump-priming” of the economy by the state was widely accepted in the 1950s and 1960s as essential, what happened after that to reverse that thinking, and produce today’s dogma of economic austerity in almost every field of government activity — barring the military and so-called “security” services?

A major contributory factor was a gradual coming-together of what at the time was a small minority of academic opinion – those on the far right of the political spectrum. In the early 1950s James Buchanan was a young economics graduate from Chicago University. He’d been tutored by Frank Knight, the only American-born economist invited to establish the Mount Pelerin Society, along with the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. The society is an organisation of right-wing economists and other academics funded by the super-rich.

In 1956 Buchanan approached Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr., president of the University of Virginia, with a proposal to create a brand new school of economics. The two men clearly had similar views of how the Keynesian world was evolving, and they didn’t like it. Buchanan’s plan was warmly welcomed. They would establish the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy. Buchanan’s naturally conspiratorial nature was revealed in that name for his new school: he noted privately in his précis to the president that the venture “needed an innocuous name that would not draw attention to its members’ ‘extreme views… no matter how relevant they might be to the real purpose of the program”.3

He would later write that in such an era: “Our purpose was indeed subversive.”4

Buchanan appears to have applied one particularly constant principle to the way his school operated: secrecy; for MacLean records several instances of him saying so.

Years after he had established himself inside the inner circle of powerful conspirators who had started to transform the very way academics working in politics and economics actually thought, he hosted his own clandestine retreats with specially invited guests. At one such gathering he recorded that: “The key thing moving forward”, he stressed, was that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential.”5

[K]ey to his plan was the creation of a small Founders Group of about ten; these men would generate what he called the Blue Book to reach another two hundred people through their own personal contacts. The centerpiece of the operation would be a Society of Fellows that would include political leaders and possible donors, along with scholars…. Remaining were such strategic questions as ‘How is respectability to be established and maintained? How much hypocrisy is necessary? How much internal criticism is to be allowed?’ The key thing moving forward was to maintain secrecy, with outsiders kept in the dark.6

Obtaining funding from a variety of wealthy donors, such as the Scaife Foundation and Charles Koch, people who well understood the value of securing academic validation for their enterprises, Buchanan’s schools sent hundreds of right wing economists out into the world for half a century. Buchanan never saw himself as an economic scientist, but rather a social philosopher, someone who was determined to “put right” the perverted thinking that believed the super-rich should pay their way. Buchanan’s economists would find work at major corporations as well as other universities who found that a good way to attract funding from the super-rich was to employ these people to ensure the Buchanan gospel could be spread even further. And so the cancer spread.

Fixing the scales of justice

James Buchanan was clearly a highly effective strategist. He understood the vital institutional changes that needed to happen before his vision of a world directly ruled by the super-rich could be securely established. Simply changing politicians through the electoral process would not be enough, and “he told his allies that no ‘mere changing of the political guard will suffice,’ that ‘the problems of our times require attention to the rules rather than the rulers.’ The project must aim toward the practical ‘removal of the sacrosanct status assigned to majority rule’.”7.....'

A good article on how the Economic System was radically changed to fully support the rich.