“Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.”
― William Blum

 

This is a subject so vast, I could start virtually anywhere but I recently watched the Hulu mini-series, “The Looming Tower,” and Condoleeza Rice’s cavalier & dismissive attitude to Richard Clarke’s & John O’Neil’s repeated warnings about Usama bin Laden’s likely attack against the U.S. really got under my skin so I’ll start with her.

But first, a few words about the term “National Security.” I first became interested in politics when Reagan became president because although I didn’t know much about him, I knew he was a bald-faced liar & didn’t give a shit about the public. And as time passed, more & more I came across those two, magic words, “National Security.” It became clear that whenever the government had done something wrong or wanted to keep something hidden, all they had to do was utter those two words & that was that.

 

It was like the curtain the Wizard of Oz hid behind in “The Wizard of Oz.” It was like it was sacrosanct or something? Speaking of which, I had heard years ago that Condoleeza was a specialist on the Soviet Union so I just looked it up. Yeah, she earned her doctorate in international studies from the University of Denver & specialized in Eastern & Central Europe and the Soviet Union including military & security affairs.

 

Well, we all were aware of what a Mensa marvel George “Dubya” Bush is & he clearly knew how to pick a top-notch cabinet when he was president. Ms. Rice, like the C.I.A., weren’t even aware that the Soviet Union had imploded until they saw the videos on T.V. of the crowds tearing down the Berlin Wall.

Perhaps her “I didn’t have a clue kind of response” when she was grilled by one of the members on the 9/11 Commission, wasn’t an act? And who can forget her actions when she learned of the devastating damage done to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, she decided to go shopping for shoes & then went out to a play that night. So much for National Security & her responsibilities to the citizens of America. Of course, she was merely following her boss, Dubya’s lead as he felt it more important that he continue his vacation at his home in Crawford, Texas.

What’s more, for the month of August 2001, Dubya was vacationing in Crawford even though he received a PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) on August 6^th that terrorists might fly commercial airlines into buildings or cities. So much for “National Security” concerns by the Bush administration.

 

Moreover, isn’t it interesting to note Condoleeza & Dubya’s lackadaisical attitudes towards National Security before 9/11 and their alarm when they were manufacturing their case for the invasion of Iraq? Who can forget Rice’s dire warning,

 

 

“Condi Rice discusses Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capabilities with Wolf Blitzer on Jan 10th, 2003 and she infamously said: “there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

 

Bear in mind my friend that several members of Dubya’s cabinet, most notably, Dick Cheney, were members of P.N.A.C. (Project for the New American Century) and invading & occupying Iraq was high on their wish list. Don’t take my word for it, look it up for yourself. And this is why they went to such great lengths to manufacture their case for attacking Iraq just a few months after 9/11 even though Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with September 11^th.

Honest scholars & military experts all testified that it was absolutely absurd to claim that Saddam Hussein & bin Laden were working together. Usama bin Laden was a Muslim religious extremist & Saddam Hussein was a secularist who didn’t give a shit about the Islam religion.

The Bush cabal of crooks & liars all appeared on television at every chance to spread their fear & lies but as the years wore on & we became bogged-down in the Iraq quagmire, they changed their tunes & began claiming that they hadn’t said all those things designed to whip up fear in the U.S.

 

But in the big picture, the Bush criminal consortium succeeded because they had stirred-up such a hornet’s nest in the Middle East, it all became a self-fulfilling prophecy & the billions and trillions of dollars will never stop flowing into the Pentagon & the 1% who own the “Defense industries’” pockets. And this was all done in the name of “National Security.”

 

Furthermore, this can’t all be lain at the feet of the Republicans, nope, those champions of the working class, the darling Democrats have done their bit in defense of “National Security.” Enter our Black crusader on a white horse who got so many Americans as well as freedom loving people around the world so excited & hopeful for a more just world.

 

I too, fell for his lofty rhetoric, articulate speech, & intelligence and voted for him on his first go round but not his second. You may doubt me but in that brief space between winning the presidential election & his inauguration, I realized that he had conned us all because of the choices he made for his top, economic advisors & cabinet members.

Yep! Our buddy who promised us every time he gave a nationally televised speech that he was going to bring real change to America, was a fuckin’ liar. He picked Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, etc., the very foxes who had raided the hen house & helped drain the federal treasury. And he & his Attorney General, Eric Holder, never prosecuted a single one of the bank C.E.O.s, the hedge fund managers of Wall St., etc.

 

So, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that Obama also did his bit to support & expand the National Security complex and its horrific agenda. Moreover, Uncle Tom Obama was a Constitutional scholar & professor and knew full well that he was breaking Constitutional laws left & right.

 

He went after whistleblowers who warned us about the National Security apparatus that was being used to oppress us & control us, with a vengeance. In fact, he prosecuted more whistleblowers than all the other presidents combined since the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917.

 

In short, don’t prosecute the clearly criminal fat cats of Wall St. who not only tanked America’s economy but caused the near, total economic meltdown of the entire world’s economy. But go gung-ho after courageous Americans who were true patriots trying to wake us up to the Constitutionally illegal & immoral actions being done by “our” N.S.A., C.I.A., F.B.I., etc. agencies against us. Some champion of the people, eh? And for the record, I hated all the racist slurs & garbage hurled at Obama but I to this day, hate him for his betrayal & that’s why I called him an Uncle Tom.

 

As for Obama’s direct, criminal culpability in terms of fanning the flames on the “War on Terror,” his Drone warfare program was the most egregious and brazen example of his total abandonment of our Constitution which he & all other politicians, police, military, & other government officials swear to uphold & defend.

Obama & his fellow club members declared themselves de facto judges, juries, & executioners of anyone, including American citizens, around the world.

“Senior officials in the administration of President Barack Obama variously described drone strikes as “precise,” “closely supervised,” “effective,” “indispensable,” and even the “only game in town” – but what they emphasized most of all is that the drone strikes they authorized were lawful.

In this context, though, “lawful” had a specialized meaning. Except at the highest level of abstraction, the law of the drone campaign had not been enacted by Congress or published in the US Code. No federal agency had issued regulations relating to drone strikes, and no federal court had adjudicated their legality. Obama administration officials insisted that drone strikes were lawful, but the “law” they invoked was their own. It was written by executive branch lawyers behind closed doors, withheld from the public and even from Congress, and shielded from judicial review.”  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/15/targeted-killing-secrecy-drone-memos-excerpt

 

Do you remember our so-called “Smart bombs” in the Persian Gulf War & other military “adventures,” and how supposedly accurate or precise they were in hitting targets? Yep! More Pentagon P.R. bullshit that was put out to convince the public that its tax dollars were being spent wisely. Many of these “smart bombs” were lucky if they landed within half a kilometer of their intended target.

 

Fast forward to Obama’s illegal & immoral Drone warfare program;

 

“Drone strikes conducted by the United States during a 5-month-long campaign in Afghanistan caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times, leaked intelligence documents suggest.

The apparent 10 percent success rate with regards to a specific span in America’s drone war is among the most damning revelations to surface so far as the result of a series of articles published by The Intercept on Thursday this week which rely on classified and confidential intelligence documents supplied by an unknown source.

“These docs illustrate what a video game, drained of all humanity, these drone assassinations have become,” founding editor Glenn Greenwald tweeted on Thursday.”  https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-people-killed-by-us-drone-strike

 

Step back for a minute and reflect on this. Probably tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed by drones, how would you feel if your family & friends were killed by bombs dropped from Drones? And no, I’m not trying to justify terrorist attacks against Americans but I am trying to open people’s minds a little to shed some light on this never-ending War on Terror that is so vague & ambiguous that there is no way to gauge its success or ending.

 

“Obama’s global drone assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in global terrorism, exhibits the same patterns. By most accounts, it is generating terrorists more rapidly than it is murdering those suspected of someday intending to harm us—an impressive contribution by a constitutional lawyer on the eight hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta, which established the basis for the principle of presumption of innocence that is the foundation of civilized law.”
― Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World?

 

 

And like our War on Drugs, it’ll go on ad infinitum wasting billions if not trillions of federal tax dollars. Moreover, the government leaders will continue to tell us, sorry, we don’t have any money for health, education, or welfare, we’re fighting terrorists & drug lords.

 

I’ll tell you my honest response the moment I heard of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I thought, the chickens have come home to roost. All the raping, pillaging, & plundering our military forces had been doing for several decades around the world had finally come back to us. Chalmers Johnson, a noted historian, wrote a trilogy about all this & his first book was titled, Blowback. Sooner or later, what we put out there comes back to haunt us.

The American embassies that were bombed in Africa prior to 9/11, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, etc. were all the fruits of our foreign policies or National Security measures committed around the globe. By-the-way, on that fateful morning of 9/11 when I heard the news, I had just arrived at work, a school where I was working with special education students, & I felt just like I did when I was in the fourth grade & heard that JFK had been assassinated, I felt numb & dumbstruck.

 

Moving along, we come to one of the most detestable people to ever walk upright, Donald Trump. His reign of error & terror in the White House not only made it okay in the sick minds of the American born & bred racists, pro-fascists, & pro-Nazis to commit heinous acts of terror in the U.S., he also revived these perverse feelings of hatred around the globe.

 

And Trump repeatedly proclaimed his love & admiration for dictators, especially Putin whom he had/has a serious man-crush on. But for the purpose of this essay, I’m going to focus on Trump’s deliberate sabotage of our medical establishment’s attempts to at least slow down the onset of the COVID pandemic in America. In my view, COVID was & still is a deadly serious threat to our National Security in a very literal way.

Exhibit number one, Trump, in his third grade childish mentality & behavior immediately set out to eliminate every last thing Obama had established no matter how beneficial it was to the American public.

 

“The Lancet launched the commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era in April 2017, tasking the group with chronicling the administration’s actions.

The commission’s analysis found that 461,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2018 if the United States’ death rate had been equivalent to those of the other G-7 nations.

The 49-page report also concludes that Trump’s “hostility” to environmental regulations (including the rollback of at least 84 separate environmental and workplace protections) significantly worsened pollution, resulting in more than 22,000 extra deaths in 2019 alone.

PROMOTED

According to the commission, Trump’s “appalling response” to the coronavirus pandemic, which included the politicization of masks and repudiation of science, “expedited the spread of Covid-19” in the U.S.

The Trump Administration’s cuts to global health programs and public health agencies greatly hindered the country’s response to the pandemic, the report states, “causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/11/trumps-policies-resulted-in-the-unnecessary-deaths

 

And note that this was from Forbes magazine, not exactly a “liberal rag,” should tell you something. The key point I want to make regarding the MAGA Moron & his criminally negligent mishandling of America’s COVID response was that Obama had established an office in the White House to handle serious health crises & the bumbling little boy, Trump, immediately disbanded it when he moved into the White House because of his childish jealousy of everything Obama.

 

Of course, the main reason Trump kept denying there even was a deadly virus spreading across the U.S. was because he was concerned about the “negative press” while he was in charge. Yeah, his petty vanity & fragile ego allowed/caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to die needlessly.

 

I thought we’re supposed to be a nation that prides itself on Law & Order? Isn’t there something called “criminally negligent behavior?” And in Trump’s case, he was “willfully negligent or ignorant.” You know, the old, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

Some may try to argue that Trump’s being completely out to lunch in regard to the spread of COVID in the U.S. isn’t technically a matter of National Security, my response to that is that the physical health & well-being of a country’s citizens is clearly one of the most obvious & basic aspects of a nation’s National Security. And to argue against this is a morally bankrupt argument. National Security isn’t just measured in deaths on foreign battlefields but also on the state of national health at home.

For example, consider the deleterious health effects that so many of our First Responders, Firemen, & Police suffered who so courageously worked to rescue the survivors & the victims of 9/11. As far as I’m concerned, their health should be considered a matter of National Security as well & once again, our government was/is criminally negligent in regards to their health & many of them have died, are suffering serious health issues, & are being ignored or pushed to the side after their noble sacrifice for their fellow citizens.

Lastly, here is just a partial list of some other serious threats to our National Security committed by Trump in the past, present, & into the future;

• a reign of terror against nonwhite migrants and refugees;
• embracing racial authoritarianism and white supremacy as de facto national policy;
• nurturing neofascism and other anti-democratic causes and beliefs;  
• attacking the country’s democratic institutions and the rule of law; launching a coup attempt and inciting an attack on the U.S. Capitol;
• chronic lying about matters large and small, in an effort to subvert the truth and empirical reality;
• creating a political personality cult;
• becoming a role model for antisocial behavior;
• encouraging right-wing terrorism and other political violence;
• largely abandoning the people of Puerto Rico after the Hurricane Maria disaster;
• engaging in acts of treason and collusion with a hostile foreign power;
• deploying a secret-police force that disappeared protesters off the streets;
• amplifying the power of Christian nationalists in their war against secular democracy and the Constitution;
• turning over even more public money to corporate plutocrats;
• engaging in democide against the American people by actively sabotaging and undermining pandemic relief efforts;
• degrading the civil and human rights of Black and brown people and other marginalized groups.</li>

 

This was taken from a Salon.com article titled; “Trump regime’s amazing list of crimes keeps getting longer — but we can’t afford to look away

By, Chauncey DeVega (a friend of mine said the link didn’t work for him so I’m posting it like this)

 

Biden is the last & our current president that I’m going to take to task regarding the United States’ state of “National Security.” For most of my adult life, I was proud to identify myself as a liberal, then a progressive but now, on the home stretch of my lifetime, I have formally left the Democratic party & now call myself an Independent.

 

I have just seen far too many examples of how the Democratic party has betrayed & abandoned the working class as well as the middle class in America. Of course they deny it to this very day but Bill Clinton was the final nail in the coffin of the democratic party as far as I’m concerned. And the de facto proof of this was his signing of NAFTA.

I have covered the issues regarding the Dems abandonment of the 99% whom they swore to support, protect, & represent, in other essays so I won’t go into it here. This was just a prelude to my critique of Biden in regards to our National Security for this article. The following is from an email I sent to a friend;

 

Wed, Jan 11 at 11:17 AM

The Real Joe Biden

 

• He didn’t cancel the portion of the Student Loan Debt through the Higher Education Act
• Obama picked him because although he’s a democrat, he votes Republican
• He has a really dirty voting record
• He went after Anita Hill so Clarence Thomas could sit on the Supreme Court
• He was one of the most fervent advocates of the wars in the Middle East
• He was an abject supporter of the apartheid state of Israel
• He fought school bussing with Strom Thurmond, an open segregationist & racist
• He sponsored the comprehensive Crime Control Act which eliminated parole for federal prisoners & limited the amount of time sentences that they had for good behavior
• He was behind the 1994  Omnibus Crime bill that he helped draft & massively expanded the death penalty for federal crimes from a couple to 51 doubling the nation’s prison population
• He militarized the police by pushing through the  1996 Anti-Terrorism and effective Death Penalty Act that gutted the Writ of Habeas Corpus
• He was one of the authors of the Patriot Act which allows the government with very little oversight to monitor all of our Communications; phone, phone, email, bank records, credit card reports & of course any activity on the Internet
• He was one of the architects of the destruction of Welfare & 70% of the original recipients on Welfare were children
• He has long called to cut Social Security
• He fought for NAFTA
• He backed the Illegal Immigration Reform & Immigrant Responsibility Act that eliminated the defenses for undocumented people & saw them far more easily deported
• He helped deregulate the Banking industry with the abolition of Glass-Steagall & that was a major contributor not only in the global financial crisis but in the collapse of nearly 500 banks in the U.S.
• He’s long been a tool of the Pharmaceutical Industry & the Insurance Industry which contributed heavily to his campaign
• No mainstream media publication is going to lay out who Joe Biden really is
• He used to be called Senator Credit Card because of all the credit card companies headquartered in Delaware

 

Again, like my criticisms against Trump, I don’t feel it’s too great a stretch to classify many, if not most of these actions by Biden as harmful to our National Security but there’s one issue that I didn’t mention & it represents a very “Clear & Present Danger,” to not only America’s well-being but to the very survival of our species, the War in Ukraine.

 

A little background is necessary here. Bear in mind that I’m in no way excusing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but I am trying to shed some light on this deadly serious situation.

“NATO has not stopped expanding since the fall of the Soviet Union, growing from 17 countries in 1990 to 30 today, several of which were once part of the Soviet-led Warsaw pact.”

 

Think about this fact for a moment & try to forget briefly the propaganda we’ve been fed all our lives about Russia’s aggression. Look at a current map of the world & the location as well as the number of nations under Russia’s control & compare them to the number & locations of all the nations under America’s “Sphere of Influence.” You might also care to check out Chalmers Johnson’s credentials & his list of U.S. military bases around the globe. Now try to put yourself in Russia’s shoes for a few minutes & answer how you’d feel? Would it be mere paranoia on their part to fear being encircled by the U.S., the world’s mightiest military force with a military budget equal to the next 20 or more nations in descending order of military might, weaponry, number of troops, etc., combined.

 

Noam Chomsky has pointed out that we, NATO, promised we wouldn’t move a single inch eastwards toward Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed & now, we’re on their border. Reminds me of those hundreds, if not thousands of treaties we made with America’s indigenous tribes, and how we broke nearly every single one of them.

 

Biden is now in charge of U.S Foreign Policy & that means, our National Security. And he’s in effect, playing a game of chicken with Putin because Russia has God knows how many nuclear bombs but I’m sure they don’t have as many as we do. Instead of trying to negotiate & cool the tensions between Russia, Ukraine, & the U.S., our government keeps throwing fuel on the fire with the billions of dollars’ worth of military weaponry.

The last time the U.S. played this game with Russia was during the Cuban Missile Crisis & as Chomsky and many other scholars have pointed out, we came perilously close to WWIII and no nation wins when Armageddon is unleashed.

 

I began this essay by talking about the excellent series, “The Looming Tower,” and I was reviewing the series, scene by scene, looking for examples to support my main argument in this essay, “National Security” is basically one, huge farce or charade because the bastards running the show in Washington D.C. flat-out don’t give a fuck about our well-being as a nation or as individual citizens.

 

While taking notes on the series the other day, when commercials came on, I was reading quotes by William Blum who Chomsky as well as other scholars agree, was the greatest scholar when it came to the long & ignominious history of the C.I.A.

 

And all of a sudden, it felt like I’d been struck by lightning or experienced an epiphany. Here’s the specific quote by Blum that struck me but there are several more corroborating quotes if you’d like to read them for yourself. (Go to quotes by William Blum at Goodreads)

 

“The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There is a lengthy and infamous history of Washington’s support for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. At this moment, Luis Posada Carriles remains protected by the US government, though he masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airplane that killed 73 people. He’s but one of hundreds of anti-Castro terrorists who’ve been given haven in the United States over the years. The United States has also provided close support to terrorists, or fought on the same side as Islamic jihadists, in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Libya, and Syria, including those with known connections to al-Qaeda, to further foreign policy goals more important than fighting terrorism.”
― William Blum, America’s Deadliest Export

 

In a nutshell, as I kept being struck by the gross incompetence, the deliberate withholding of critically important information about Al Qaeda cells within the U.S. from the F.B.I. by the C.I.A. especially given all the serious warnings by John O’ Neil & Richard Clarke about the likelihood of an attack by Al Qaeda within the U.S. & the possibility of those attacks coming in the form of commercial airliners being flown into buildings, again & again I couldn’t believe their deliberate noncooperation & dismissal of so many critical facts & bits of intelligence.

 

I was numb & dumbstruck like on the morning of 9/11 when bin Laden unleashed his tsunami of terror against us. The C.I.A., the F.B.I., & especially the White House’s lack of concern didn’t add up or make any sense but when I read Blum’s quote, it hit me. And no, I’m not one of those Alex Jones conspiracy morons like Trump, 9/11 simply reflected the decades old willful ignorance & myopic focus on only one thing i.e. whatever evidence that pointed to Russia’s threat to America & capitalism was all they were concerned with.

 

Of course, 9/11 was a godsend to the Masters of the Universe because now they had carte blanche for ad infinitum to after terrorists & that’d mean the Pentagon budget would never dry up. So, after the horrific attacks on September 11^th, the warmongers simply added Islamic terrorists to the ever present Russian threat & all was well. Naturally, they didn’t tell the American public that 9/11 happened because they were asleep at the wheel & basically didn’t give a fuck & already had their sights set on Iraq.

A day or two after 9/11, Condoleeza Rice said to Richard Clarke, “Rumsfeld wants the attacks linked to Iraq.” Note that Donald Rumsfeld was a member of P.N.A.C. (Project for the New American Century) Note that before we invaded Iraq, many critics were accusing the Bush administration of simply invading Iraq to take control of their oil fields. They denied this accusation of course. Note that we, America, built our largest embassy in the world in Iraq & it’s still there and so are several thousand U.S. soldiers. Gee, I wonder if they’re guarding the oil fields?

 

Here’s one last nugget for you in the form of another quote by Bill Blum;

 

“The Empire would love to rip Ukraine from Moscow’s bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia’s border. Kiev’s membership of the European Union would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neoconservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family; but perhaps no price is too great to pay to for being part of glorious Europe and the West!”
― William Blum, America’s Deadliest Export

 

So, go back to your video games, zombie movies, smart phones, etc. and sleep well. As Gore Vidal so aptly put it, we live in The United States of Amnesia! And speaking of amnesia, does anyone remember that little incident called COINTELPRO?

 

It was an elaborate government program that was created to spy on peace & anti-war groups and organizations in the 1960s & 70s. You see, my imaginary reader, George  Orwell, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn & many others have warned us over the years that our government fears our own citizens far more than it does terrorists. And coincidentally, right after the attacks on 9/11, our government just happened to have this 300 page, detailed “Act,” lying around & it rammed it through Congress in the middle of the night with no one even having the time to read it before signing-off on it. Conspiracy? No, fact!

 

Here’s another gem of wisdom from “The Master of Those Who Know,” Noam Chomsky.

 

Actually, the phrase “national security” is barely used until the 1930s. And there’s a reason. By then, the United States was beginning to become global. Before that the United States had been mostly a regional power – Britain was the biggest global power. After the Second World War, national security is everywhere, because we basically owned the world, so our security is threatened everywhere. Not just on our borders, but everywhere – so you have to have a thousand military bases around the world for “defense.”

Noam Chomsky

 

Bonus Gift

“Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.”
― Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World?

 

In like fashion, the Bush Administration rammed through The Patriot Act to justify its destruction of our Bill of Rights & the U.S. Constitution as the Nixon administration had done with its COINTELPRO program claiming it was necessary for our National Security.

 

My guess is that you’re probably beginning to wonder if I haven’t fallen into that dark pool of conspiracy thinking that Trump, Alex Jones, & other charlatans have engulfed the feeble-minded in. Nonetheless, it’s critically important that we bear in mind that not all conspiracy theories are merely theories. The infamous “Red Car Conspiracy” regarding L.A.’s public transportation system, the Plot to Overthrow FDR by several business tycoons of the time (see Smedley F. Butler), etc. Unfortunately today, we have been inundated by so many absurd conspiracy theories that the real or actual conspiracies suffer because of it. So, I will try to refrain from wandering into that quagmire but keep this passage from Orwell’s classic, 1984 in mind if you will in the context of The Patriot Act and its relation to the events leading up to 9/11 & the consequences of that horrific day.

 

“The war, therefore if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that the hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word “war,” therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that is exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This–although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense–is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.”
― George Orwell, 1984

 

What this passage says to me is that Chomsky, William Blum, & countless others are right, our government, like most other governments around the globe fear most is an enlightened public. Why? Because if the public truly understood the dark game being played against them, we’d rise up & take back what is rightfully ours. We wouldn’t have cocksuckers like Jeff Bezos so obscenely wealthy while his employees are forced to piss in bottles at their work stations & make barely enough to pay their basic bills.

Let’s return to The Looming Tower, as I watched it, I couldn’t get over the deliberate sabotaging & undermining of the F.B.I.’s agents by the C.I.A.’s agents especially the handful at the top of the C.I.A.’s administration. But upon reflection, I began to understand why it had happened. If you’ve ever worked in a large bureaucracy, it won’t come as that great a surprise.

 

For example, when I first got into the education profession, I was so naïve that I actually believed that administrators & teachers worked together for the benefit of the students. What a rude awakening I had. I soon learned that the administrators didn’t want to hear about our problems with students, they wanted us to handle all problems & leave them to their paper-pushing & higher salaries.

 

This relates to the subject at hand in that within each of the “intelligence agencies,” involved in this television series, the F.B.I. & the C.I.A., there are many divisions, departments, & so on. And not only do they often not cooperate with other intelligence agencies, they often don’t cooperate with other departments within their own agency. Makes you feel all warm & cozy doesn’t it when you reflect on the fact that they’re supposedly the ones protecting us in the name of “National Security,” against the terrorists?

 

Reminds me of a book I read decades ago called, Helter Skelter, & was about the Manson murders. Because of petty rivalry between the L.A. Police Dept. & the L.A. Sheriff’s Dept., one of them actually had Charles Manson in custody but didn’t know that he was wanted for the heinous murders & let him go.

 

Another deadly factor in the pathetic lack of cooperation between our “intelligence agencies” is the often petty minds & spirits of their leaders i.e. they want not only the glory of being the agency to solve the case that means fancy badges, ribbons, trophies, etc. but also results in more money or larger budgets for their agency or at least their dept. within the agency.

 

Here’s another piece of bitter fruit from this poison tree, look up the mind-boggling story of Sibel Edmonds, https://truthout.org/articles/classified-life-sibel-edmonds-story/ she was hired as a translator by the F.B.I. after the events of 9/11. She speaks Farsi, Turkish, & Azerbaijani. Her story also reflects just how fuckin’ absurd the bureaucracies of our “intelligence agencies” are.

 

Perhaps one of the most critical things to keep in mind while thinking/reflecting on this whole, colossal fuck-up is that the Bush administration used their tragic failures due to their incompetence & complete lack of concern about Al Qaeda warnings to call for not only massive budget increases but also the restrictions contained in our Constitution & Bill of Rights to be de facto nullified or voided.

 

I sincerely believe that 9/11 could’ve been avoided if the Bush administration wasn’t obsessed with finding excuses to invade Iraq. And for the record, we have 17 distinct “intelligence agencies,” in our government.

Why Does the United States Have 17 Different Intelligence Agencies?

We have built over thirty building complexes for top-secret intelligence work since 2001—and our security state just keeps growing. 

By Tom Engelhardt

August 4, 2014

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the US government: the executive, Congress and the judiciary. That’s bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it’s just not so.

During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the US government has evolved. It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach. Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power. Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington. Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.

All of this is or should be obvious, but remains surprisingly unacknowledged in our American world. The rise of the Fourth Branch began at a moment of mobilization for a global conflict, World War II. It gained heft and staying power in the Cold War of the second half of the twentieth century, when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, provided the excuse for expansion of every sort.

Its officials bided their time in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when “terrorism” had yet to claim the landscape and enemies were in short supply. In the post-9/11 era, in a phony “wartime” atmosphere, fed by trillions of taxpayer dollars, and under the banner of American “safety,” it has grown to unparalleled size and power. So much so that it sparked a building boom in and around the national capital (as well as elsewhere in the country). In their 2010 Washington Post series “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin offered this thumbnail summary of the extent of that boom for the US Intelligence Community: “In Washington and the surrounding area,” they wrote, “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 US Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.” And in 2014, the expansion is ongoing.

In this century, a full-scale second “Defense Department,” the Department of Homeland Security, was created. Around it has grown up a mini-version of the military-industrial complex, with the usual set of consultants, K Street lobbyists, political contributions and power relations: just the sort of edifice that President Eisenhower warned Americans about in his famed farewell address in 1961. In the meantime, the original military-industrial complex has only gained strength and influence.

Increasingly, post-9/11, under the rubric of “privatization,” though it should more accurately have been called “corporatization,” the Pentagon took a series of crony companies off to war with it. In the process, it gave “capitalist war” a more literal meaning, thanks to its wholesale financial support of, and the shrugging off of previously military tasks onto, a series of warrior corporations.

Meanwhile, the seventeen members of the US Intelligence Community—yes, there are seventeen major intelligence outfits in the national security state—have been growing, some at prodigious rates. A number of them have undergone their own versions of corporatization, outsourcing many of their operations to private contractors in staggering numbers, so that we now have “capitalist intelligence” as well. With the fears from 9/11 injected into society and the wind of terrorism at their backs, the Intelligence Community has had a remarkably free hand to develop surveillance systems that are now essentially “watching” everyone—including, it seems, other branches of the government.

Think of Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who went over to the corporate side of the developing national security economy, as the first blowback figure from and on the world of “capitalist intelligence.” Thanks to him, we have an insider’s view of the magnitude of the ambitions and operations of the National Security Agency. The scope of that agency’s surveillance operations and the range of global and domestic communications it now collects have proven breathtaking—with more information on its reach still coming out. And keep in mind that it’s only one agency.

We know as well that the secret world has developed its own secret body of law and its own secret judiciary, largely on the principle of legalizing whatever it wanted to do. As The New York Times’s Eric Lichtblau has reported, it even has its own Supreme Court equivalent in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And about all this, the other branches of government know only limited amounts and American citizens know next to nothing.

From the Pentagon to the Department of Homeland Security to the labyrinthine world of intelligence, the rise to power of the national security state has been a spectacle of our time. Whenever news of its secret operations begins to ooze out, threatening to unnerve the public, the White House and Congress discuss “reforms” which will, at best, modestly impede the expansive powers of that state within a state. Generally speaking, its powers and prerogatives remain beyond constraint by that third branch of government, the non-secret judiciary. It is deferred to with remarkable frequency by the executive branch and, with the rarest of exceptions, it has been supported handsomely with much obeisance and few doubts by Congress.

And also keep in mind that, of the four branches of government, only two of them—an activist Supreme Court and the national security state—seem capable of functioning in a genuine policymaking capacity at the moment.

“Misleading” Congress

In that light, let’s turn to a set of intertwined events in Washington that have largely been dealt with in the media as your typical tempest in a teapot, a catfight among the vested and powerful. I’m talking about the various charges and countercharges, anger, outrage and irritation, as well as news of acts of seeming illegality now swirling around a 6,300-page CIA “torture report” produced but not yet made public by the Senate Intelligence Committee. This ongoing controversy reveals a great deal about the nature of the checks and balances on the Fourth Branch of government in 2014.

One of the duties of Congress is to keep an eye on the functioning of the government using its powers of investigation and oversight. In the case of the CIA’s program of Bush-era rendition, black sites (offshore prisons) and “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a k a torture), the Senate Intelligence Committee launched an investigation in March 2009 into what exactly occurred when suspects in the war on terror were taken to those offshore prisons and brutally interrogated. “Millions” of CIA documents, handed over by the Agency, were analyzed by Intelligence Committee staffers at a “secure” CIA location in Northern Virginia.

Among them was a partial copy of a document known as the “Internal Panetta Review,” evidently a report for the previous CIA director on what the Senate committee might find among those documents being handed over to its investigators. It reportedly reached some fairly strong conclusions of its own about the nature of the CIA’s interrogation overreach in those years. According to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee head, this document was among the mass of documentation the CIA turned over—whether purposely, inadvertently or thanks to a whistleblower no one knows. (The CIA, on the other hand, claimed, until recently, that committee staffers had essentially stolen it from its computer system.)

The Agency or its private contractors (intelligence capitalism strikes again!) reportedly worked in various ways to obstruct the committee’s investigation, including by secretly removing previously released documents from the committee’s “secure” computer system. Nonetheless, its report was completed in December 2012 and passed on to the White House “for comment”—and then the fun began.

Though relatively few details about its specific contents have leaked out, word has it that it will prove devastating. It will supposedly show, among other things, that those “enhanced interrogation techniques” the CIA used were significantly more brutal than what was described to congressional overseers; that they went well beyond what the “torture memo” lawyers of the Bush administration had laid out (which, mind you, was brutal enough); that no plots were broken up thanks to torture; and that top figures in the Agency, assumedly under oath, “misled” Congress (a polite word for “lied to,” a potential criminal offense that goes by the name of perjury). Senators knowledgeable on the contents of the report have repeatedly insisted that when it goes public, Americans will be shocked by its contents.

Let’s keep in mind as well that committee head Feinstein was previously known as one of the most loyal and powerful supporters of the national security state and the CIA. Until recently, she has, in fact, essentially been the senator from the national security state. She and her colleagues, themselves shocked by what they had learned, understandably wanted their report declassified and released to the American people with all due speed. It naturally had to be vetted to ensure that it contained no names of active agents and the like. But two and a half years later, after endless reviews and a process of vetting by the CIA and the White House that gives the word “glacial” a bad name, it has yet to be released (though there are regular reports that this will—or will not—happen soon).

During this time, the CIA seemed to go to Def Con 2 and decided to turn its spying skills on the committee and its staffers. Claiming that those staffers had gotten the Panetta Internal Review by “hacking” the CIA’s computers, it essentially hacked the committee’s computers and searched them. In the meantime, its acting general counsel, Robert Eatinger, who had been the chief lawyer for the counterterrorism unit out of which the CIA interrogation programs were run, and who was mentioned 1,600 times in the Senate report, filed (to quote Feinstein) a “crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff—the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.” (Back in 2005, Eatinger had also been one of two lawyers responsible for not stopping the destruction of CIA videotapes of the brutal interrogations of terror suspects in its secret prisons.)

In addition, according to Feinstein, CIA Director John Brennan met with her, lied to her and essentially tried to intimidate her by telling her “that the CIA had searched a ‘walled-off committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications’ and that he was going to ‘order further forensic evidence of the committee network to learn more about activities of the committee’s oversight staff.’” In other words, the overseen were spying upon and now out to get the overseers. And more than that, based on a single incident in which one of its greatest supporters in Congress stepped over the line, the Agency was specifically out to get the senator from the national security state.

There was a clear message here: oversight or not, don’t tread on us.

By the way, since the CIA is the injuring, not the injured, party, there is no reason to take seriously the self-interested words of its officials, past or present, on any of this, or any account they offer of events or charges they make. We’re talking, after all, about an outfit responsible for the initial brutal acts of interrogation, for false descriptions of them, for lying to Congress about them, for destroying evidence of the worst of what it had done, for spying on a Senate committee and its computer system and for somehow obtaining “legally protected email and other unspecified communications between whistleblower officials and lawmakers this spring relating to the Agency and the committee’s report.” In addition, according to a recent front-page story in The New York Times, its former director from the Bush years, George Tenet, has been actively plotting “a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report” with the present director and various past Agency officials. (And keep in mind that “roughly 200 people under [Tenet’s] leadership [who] had at some point participated in the interrogation program” are still working at the Agency.)

The Age of Impunity in Washington

In December 2012, the report began to wend its way through a “review and declassification” process, which has yet to end. Once again, the CIA stepped in. The Senate was eager to declassify the report’s findings, conclusions and its 600-page executive summary. The CIA, which had already done its damnedest to block the Senate investigation process, now ensured that the vetting would be interminable.

As a start, the White House vested the CIA as the lead agency in the review and vetting process, which meant that it was to be allowed to slow things to a crawl, stop them entirely or alternatively remove crucial and damning material from the report via redaction. If you want a gauge of just how powerful the various outfits that make up the Fourth Branch have become in Washington (and what limits on them still remain), look no further.

Fourteen years into the twenty-first century, we’re so used to this sort of thing that we seldom think about what it means to let the CIA—accused of a variety of crimes—be the agency to decide what exactly can be known by the public, in conjunction with a deferential White House. The Agency’s present director, it should be noted, has been a close confidant and friend of the president and was for years his key counterterrorism adviser. To get a sense of what all this really means, you need perhaps to imagine that, in 2004, the 9/11 Commission was forced to turn its report over to Osama bin Laden for vetting and redaction before releasing it to the public. Extreme as that may sound, the CIA is no less a self-interested party. And this interminable process has yet to end, although the White House is supposed to release something, possibly heavily redacted, as early as this coming week or perhaps in the dog days of August.

Keep in mind again that we’re still only talking about the overwhelming sense of power of one of the seventeen agencies that make up the Intelligence Community, which itself is but part of the far vaster national security state. Just one. Think of this, nonetheless, as a kind of litmus test for the shifting state of power relations in the new Washington. Or think of it this way: on the basis of a single negative Senate report about its past operations, the CIA was willing to go after one of the national security state’s most fervent congressional supporters. It attempted to intimidate her, tried to bring charges against her staffers, and so drove her “reluctantly” and in a kind of desperation to the Senate floor, where she offered a remarkable denunciation of the agency she had long supported. In its wake, last week, the CIA director dramatically backed off somewhat, perhaps sensing that there was a bridge too far even in Washington in 2014. Amid Senate calls for his resignation, he offered an “apology” for the extreme actions of lower level Agency employees. (But don’t hold your breath waiting for real reform at the CIA.)

In her Senate speech, Feinstein accused the Agency of potentially breaching both the law and the Constitution. “I have grave concerns,” she said, “that the CIA’s search [of the committee’s computer system] may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.… Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

In the process, she anatomized an agency covering its tail and its trail, unwilling to admit to error of any sort or volunteer crucial information, while it attempted to block or even dismantle the oversight power of Congress. Her sobering speech should be read by every American, especially as it comes not from a critic but a perennial supporter of the Fourth Branch.

In retrospect, this “incident” may be seen as a critical moment in the still-unsettled evolution of governing power in America. Feinstein’s speech was covered briefly as a kind of kerfuffle in Washington and then largely dropped for other, more important stories. In the meantime, the so-called vetting process on the Senate report continued for yet more months in the White House and in Langley, Virginia, as if nothing whatsoever had occurred; the White House refused to act or commit itself on the subject; and the Justice Department refused to press charges of any sort. While a few senators threatened to invoke Senate Resolution 400—a forty-year-old unused power of that body to declassify information on its own—it was something of an idle threat. (A majority of the Senate would have to agree to vote against the CIA and the White House to put it into effect, which is unlikely indeed.)

Whatever happens with the report itself and despite the recent CIA apology, don’t expect the Senate to bring perjury charges against former CIA leaders for any lies to Congress. (It didn’t do so, after all, in the earlier case of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.) And don’t expect prosecutions of significant figures from a Justice Department that, in the Obama years, refused to prosecute even those in the CIA responsible for the deaths of prisoners.

The fact is that, for the Fourth Branch, this remains the age of impunity. Hidden in a veil of secrecy, bolstered by secret law and secret courts, surrounded by its chosen corporations and politicians, its power to define policy and act as it sees fit in the name of American safety is visibly on the rise. No matter what setbacks it experiences along the way, its urge to expand and control seems, at the moment, beyond staunching. In the context of the Senate’s torture report, the question at hand remains: Who rules Washington?

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/fourth-branch-us-government/

 

I decided to include the full article because not only is it relevant, this website is another of the many sites who allow you only a few “free” visits & then charge you. I’m on Social Security & can’t afford to pay for the information that should rightfully belong to all of us for free but those corporate cockroaches never stop trying to suck us dry.

 

Another thing that struck me as odd about this series was the fact that Michael Hayden, the head of the NSA was shown in a couple of scenes but never said anything? I think there may have been one, brief mention of the NSA in the entire ten episodes of the series.

 

But when it came to documentaries, etc. about Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the illegal activities of the NSA, Hayden had a whole lot to say. For those of you who aren’t an old fart like me, the NSA is a very interesting subject all its own. Not that long ago, our government wouldn’t even acknowledge that it existed. In fact, it became somewhat of an insider’s joke & the NSA was dubbed, “No Such Agency,” exists. Another tidbit is that I read a book back in the 1970s, maybe the early 80s, & I believe it was by Senator Frank Church of Idaho & he said, “The NSA makes the CIA look like the Mickey Mouse Club.”

 

By-the-way, there’s no way to even find out what the budget of the CIA or the NSA is. They’re like black holes that the government just keeps on throwing billions & trillions of dollars into but hey, sorry American public, we just can’t afford to help you with your health care, improving our educational system, or the general welfare of our citizens. So sad, too bad! But you’d better keep paying your taxes or we’ll get you. Of course the 1% don’t have to pay any taxes because they’re the “job creators.” Except those jobs just happen to be in poor countries where the people are forced to work for maybe a dollar or two a day, just enough for a bowl of rice.

 

In conclusion, you may be tempted to dismiss me as just another cynical old man but that’d be a cop-out & disingenuous. Yes, I have perhaps obsessively studied politics, our society & culture for well over 40 years & have definitely become more pessimistic with time. Less idealistic & less optimistic but something keeps pushing me forward in the hope & dream of a far more equitable & just world.

 

I’ve also received some very encouraging feedback over the years, especially from my hero, Noam Chomsky. He has urged me to keep on fighting and so I shall. Moreover, I’ve also been working on what I call a Social/Political Fantasy for many years & I believe that it helps me keep my spirits up when the negativity of the ugly realities of American foreign & domestic policies weigh me down. I have written nearly 7,000 pages on my magnum opus of Love and Peace & it is great fun some times.

Coming full circle on this essay, I started by telling you about my epiphany & I think that’s a good place to end this piece on. If you’ll take the time to read those few pages of quotes by William Blum that I mentioned, it’ll be clear & help make sense of the chaos, incompetence, & willful ignorance that resulted in that day that shook America & much of the world.

 

When the U.S. emerged from WWII relatively unscathed, the self-appointed “Masters of the Universe,” in the corridors of power in Washington D.C. & on Wall St. came together & devised their grand strategy for a Pax Americana but first, they needed to bring the rest of the nations to their knees.

 

“We should not forget Adam Smith’s perspicuous observation that the “masters of mankind”—in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England—never cease to pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.”
― Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World?

 

— Rob DeLoss, January 25, 2023

 

I wish you Peace and Perseverance!

Addendum

I often find myself wanting to add more to a piece because while my conscious mind tells me I’ve finished the piece, my subconscious is still working on it  24/7.

 

In  a recent essay that I wrote, I pointed out that in the great, Rob Reiner film, Shock and Awe, there was a pivotal scene in which the editor of the Knight-Ridder News Agency, the only news agency in America that refused to jump on the Iraq War bandwagon, the editor met clandestinely with a source in the government.

 

… the snippet of information that absolutely blew my mind came from an intelligence analyst who met clandestinely with the editor of Knight-Ridder, John Walcott, and when asked about why the Bush administration had let Osama bin Laden slip away at Tora Bora, he replied, “if they kill or capture bin Laden, the support for the war goes right down the shitter.”

 

Now of course doubters could claim, how credible is this source but this is the conundrum that is inherent in the relationships between all reporters & their sources i.e. if a reporter reveals their sources, they will never be trusted again & may very well miss out on critical information necessary to break the big stories.

 

I believe that I read that John Walcott purposely avoided top level sources because they often compromise their integrity because they know that if they reveal information a little too close to the powers that be at the top of the food chain so-to-speak, it’d be career suicide. So Walcott & his reporters aimed more for mid-level sources who didn’t risk quite as much.

 

The critically important point to be made here is that if Walcott’s source was honest & correct, this exposed the very core of the warmongers & war profiteers true motives as to why we invaded Afghanistan. They knew the American public’s war fever was at a pitch & screamed for revenge. They couldn’t wait around while they created their fictional case as to why we should invade Iraq.

So, by invading Afghanistan & pretending to be hunting down Usama bin Laden, that would give them time to prepare for their true agenda, the oil fields of Iraq. Of course, we most likely will never know the full truth about these two deadly wars but I have tried to avoid the simplistic, conspiracy theories that immoral morons like Trump & Alex Jones throw out in order to cause divisiveness. In the end, it’s up to us individually to inform ourselves as best we can & decide for ourselves what the truth is.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/29/osama-bin-laden-senate-report

https://youtu.be/gd5feEA3XfI