Deep state: U.S. foreign policy product of permanent bureaucracy.

[JackRiddler]

Something of substance to read:

http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf

Michael J. Glennon* (2014), "National Security and Double Government," Harvard National Security Journal, Vol. 5:1.

ABSTRACT

National security policy in the United States has remained largely constant from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration. This continuity can be explained by the “double government” theory of 19th-century scholar of the English Constitution Walter Bagehot. As applied to the United States, Bagehot’s theory suggests that U.S. national security policy is defined by the network of executive officials who manage the departments and agencies responsible for protecting U.S. national security and who, responding to structural incentives embedded in the U.S. political system, operate largely removed from public view and from constitutional constraints. The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.

* Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.

[JackRiddler]

1. The "dignified" constitutional and the "efficient" security institutions

Writes Glennon:

... power in the United States lay initially in one set of institutions—the President, Congress, and the courts. These are America’s “dignified” institutions. Later, however, a second institution emerged to safeguard the nation’s security. This, America’s “efficient” institution (actually, as will be seen, more a network than an institution) consists of the several hundred executive officials who sit atop the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement departments and agencies that have as their mission the protection of America’s international and internal security. Large segments of the public continue to believe that America’s constitutionally established, dignified institutions are the locus of governmental power; by promoting that impression, both sets of institutions maintain public support. But when it comes to defining and protecting national security, the public’s impression is mistaken. America’s efficient institution makes most of the key decisions concerning national security, removed from public view and from the constitutional restrictions that check America’s dignified institutions. The United States has, in short, moved beyond a mere imperial presidency to a bifurcated system—a structure of double government—in which even the President now exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of U.S. national security policy. Whereas Britain’s dual institutions evolved towards a concealed republic, America’s have evolved in the opposite direction, toward greater centralization, less accountability, and emergent autocracy.

[JackRiddler]

2. Case in point: The Bush personnel under Obama.

Glennon quotes an author called Nasr, then comments:

When it came to drones there were four formidable
unanimous voices in the Situaton Room: the CIA, the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the
Pentagon, and the White House’s counterterrorism adviser,
John Brennan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates . . . was
fully supportive of more drone attacks. Together, Brennan,
Gates, and the others convinced Obama of both the urgency
of counterterrorism and the imperative of viewing
America’s engagement with the Middle East and South
Asia through that prism. Their bloc by and large
discouraged debate over the full implications of this
strategy in national security meetings.(392)

What Nasr does not mention is that, for significant periods, all four voices were hold-overs from the Bush Administration; two Bush Administration officials, Michael J. Morell and David Petraeus, headed the CIA from July , 2011 to March 8, 2013.(393) The Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, had served in the Bush Administration as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command and earlier as Director of the Joint Staff in the Office of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff 394) Brennan had been Bush’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Center 395) and Gates had served as Bush’s Secretary of Defense.(396)

Gates of course is a key player in the permanent National Security State since the 1960s and a long-time Bush mob veteran with deep involvement in the Iran-Contra crimes. With Baker (similar pedigree), he authored the Iraq report under Bush that called for a deescalation. Just to underline the national security state's essentially Machiavellian divide between what is said and what is done, when Gates replaced Rumsfeld after the 2006 election, he oversaw the bloody escalation, "the surge." He then oversaw the Afghanistan "surge" under Obama.

PS - unintended weird smileys being produced by punctuation.

[scarletwoman]

3. You can get rid of the smilies by leaving a space between the comma and the parentheses:

...Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, (394) Brennan had been Bush’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, (395) and Gates had served as Bush’s Secretary of Defense.(396)

Anyway, good stuff - thank you for posting.

[starroute]

4. It's certainly easy to blame faceless bureaucrats

But if you start asking cui bono, you might get a very different answer.

And if you look at the late 1940s, when the National Security Act was passed and the liberals were all falling over each other to sign up in support of the Cold War, you might get a few more clues as to the mono-party foreign policy we've had ever since.

[JackRiddler]

5. Well, they're not faceless.

[scarletwoman]

6. Kick - because we could certainly have more intelligent discussions if people understood this.

Too few DUers seem to understand the concept of the Deep State - yet there can be no true understanding of U.S. foreign policy and National Security policy without recognizing the role of the Deep State.

[Jefferson23]

7. Full Show: The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight February 21, 2014

Everyone knows about the military-industrial complex, which, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned had the potential to “endanger our liberties or democratic process” but have you heard of the “Deep State?”

Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.

Lofgren says the Deep State’s heart lies in Washington, DC, but its tentacles reach out to Wall Street, which Lofgren describes as “the ultimate backstop to the whole operation,” Silicon Valley and over 400,000 contractors, private citizens who have top-secret security clearances. Like any other bureaucracy, it’s groupthink that drives the Deep State.

http://billmoyers.com/episode/the-deep-state-hiding-in-plain-sight/

[JackRiddler]

8. Exactly this: it's in plain sight.

Its power, even its continued existence relies on denial and ideological propriety. Collectively we prefer not to see it. Also, conformity and fear of ridicule for speaking of the "unknown known."

[Jefferson23]

9. I think so, yes. It does not help that we have a smoke and mirrors view of events via a corporate

msm, either.

[JackRiddler]

10. Patriotism also doesn't help...

That's a big one, and it has its liberal as well as traditional guises.

[Jefferson23]

11. Yes, it does and it is concerning and I am having a hard time

understanding who and or what this percentage of Americans believe they
are supporting.

[Comrade Grumpy]

12. It's not all about Obama. Occupants of the White House come and go; the deep state endures.

[JackRiddler]

14. It's also not really "deep"

I mean, it's a set of structures and private interests more permanent than administrations, but these are mostly in the open, just relatively taboo and elite. More ignored or denied than hidden. And it's complicated. So you have
- a national security bureaucracy consisting of military and civilian secret agencies who are in it for organizational interests first of all (justify missions, expand budgets, maintain total dominance militarily, maintain total surveillance on everyone, etc.)
- a power elite at the think tanks, corporations, universities and investment houses who have geopolitical religion, with some of the cast rotating in and out of public office (the Rubins, Bakers, Gates, etc.)
- unspoken consensus policies that are nevertheless known (it's not really about "terrorism" but geopolitics, resources and profits),
- literally hidden policies (let's have a relatively small crew overthrow the Ukrainian government for sport, it will be so cool!)
and
- a general realm for action by private actors and informal networks that in part do whatever the fuck they like (parapolitics: one group launders some drug money over here, another does an arms deal over there, a third supports some crazy fanatic homophobic religious nonsense in Uganda, etc. etc.)
- a lot of foreign interests and agencies tied in at various nodes in the above, sometimes at odds with each other (UK, NATO countries, Israel, Saudi, Pakistan, etc. etc.)

To an extent it's a self-service emporium for corruption, plunder and domination.

[FarCenter]

13. This is why the US went for the brass ring of global domination after the end of the Cold War

It is also why Islamic terrorism was brought to the fore as a focus of national foreign and defense policy.

It is why we must have political and military conflict with Russia and China in the future.

Without a first class enemy, we might devolve into a second class country.

[JackRiddler]

17. Woe to the "first class" country in that case.

[FarCenter]

18. But woe to the sole superpower as well

Britain before WW I and II

France before the Napoleonic Wars

Austria before the Thirty Years War

The enemies of those states suffered tremendously, but in the end the superpowers were also brought down. Waiting for the next Defenestration of Prague, Storming of the Bastille, or Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

[JackRiddler]

15. morning bump

[JackRiddler]

16. Here is how Mike Lofgren structures it:

Insider: There's a Shadow Govt. Running the Country, and It's Not Up for Re-Election
BillMoyers.com [1] / By Mike Lofgren [2]

http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/dc-insider-theres-shadow-govt-running-country-and-its-not-re-election

... SNIP ...

My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can it be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2] [12]

SNIP

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis [13] called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. .... A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the ten thousandth time. Your life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s eleven in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of take-out pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet they simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is [14]classified [14]?” No wonder few people are whistleblowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistleblowing often provokes: unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, it is easy to grow immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Justice Department. We also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions, and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

SNIP

As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called private enterprise is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America [16],” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State, and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top secret clearances — a number greater than that of top secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper [17], is a former executive of Booz Allen, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell [18], is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings

Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following [19]: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” This from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial [20] for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a government salaryman. [3] [21]

This is a very long, detailed and richly observed article with a lot of emotional and sociological insight.

He also gets into Silicon Valley's role, though not Hollywood's, but in his view, "the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in and around the Beltway. The Deep State’s physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncements that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the twenty-first century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like [29] control [30] on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure."

One thing missing in Lofgren's excellent telling is consideration of the Spook Internationale. The Deep State, this is also a web of alliances around the world (and the alliances and relationships of the Top Secret America corporate contractors) with GCHQ/MI6, Mossad, ISI, Saudi Mukhabarat, all the vassal agencies in the satellite states like Colombia, the love-hate agencies like Germany. It is also assets held through the offshore archipelago, alliances with money launderers and drug kingpins, BCCI-type banks. It is of course proxy armies as well as controlled enemy fronts (every "al Qaeda" franchise is necessarily suspect). It is through agencies like USAID and the Office of Transition management the networks of informants and NGOs in antagonist states like Ukraine (before the coup), etc. etc. etc.

Such structures can be incredibly stable for decades and then fall apart very suddenly.

.

[JackRiddler]

19. Feeling bumpy again

[JackRiddler]

20. Office of Transition Initiatives

From http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/the-office-of-transition-initiatives-and-the-subversion-of-societies/print

Weekend Edition May 2-4, 2014

Understanding the US Policy of Diplomacy, Development, and Defense

The Office of Transition Initiatives and the Subversion of Societies

by HORACE C. CAMPBELL

Introduction

On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order establishing the United States Peace Corps with the objective of ‘helping’ underdeveloped nations struggling for economic growth and social progress. This order appealed to many of America’s young and brightest. Thousands of American youths flocked to serve a number of societies in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. These young people assisted in the building of sewer and water systems, constructed schools, helped in agricultural methods, and health initiatives among many things. The Peace Corps appealed to young idealistic Americans looking to change the world. Many had been brought into the Civil Rights struggles of that era. But, as with all things, capital and the opportunity for profit making was sure to follow. In those days, transnational corporations such as International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) and the seven sisters of oil dominated the planning for manipulation, today, these forces are called capital equity firms and are more tenacious in seeking to manipulate idealistic youths.

Since the end of the Cold War, the imperial centers have been working hard to control the thinking and actions of youths who want real social change. The buzz words of ‘Sustainable Development,’ ‘Humanitarian Assistance’ and ‘Good Governance’ had been mobilized to sustain the ideation plane of the neo-liberal order. ‘Nation Building,’ ‘Peacekeeping,’ ‘Transitions and Reconstruction Operations’ represents the new template for the Wall Street, Military and Information complex. This ‘mission’ of US capitalism has now been refined into the promoting of good governance internationally. US capitalists organized in ‘capital equity’ groups now work through ‘development’ NGO’s . These fronts for capital equity have replaced the idea that humanitarian organizations should be neutral, independent, and impartial in providing assistance to the exploited.

In this paper we will outline how contractors are central to the new ‘militaristic humanitarianism. The implementing agencies of the capital equity forces require cooperation between the State Department, USAID and the Department of Defense in the form of Development, Diplomacy and Defense. Recent information on the role of the top ‘development’ contractors for the USAID in a program of the Office for Transition Initiatives in planning for regime change in Cuba and Venezuela should assist Third World societies in evaluating the ‘development’ projects submitted to their societies by international development agencies, especially those from the United States and Britain. These exposures of the numerous SWIFT (Support Which Implements Fast Transitions) subcontractors of the Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI) place the British Department of International Development (DIFID) on the list of reliable ‘subcontractors’ for the US corporate and military interests. The subversion of the USAID/OTI may take different forms as in twitter accounts in Cuba, recovery initiative in Haiti, ‘democratic transition ‘ in Libya or ’yes youth can’ Kenya, but the ultimate objective is to advance US corporate interests.

Read more http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/the-office-of-transition-initiatives-and-the-subversion-of-societies/print