“What’s going on in the intelligence community with this president is unprecedented,” Kucinich said. “They’re making every effort to upend him. Who knows what the truth is anymore?“
February 17, 2017 at 4:28 pm
Written by Carey Wedler - www.theantimedia.org
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So, even for a practical, supposedly, hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this,” Democratic lawmaker Charles Schumer said of President Trump in January amid the president’s rejection of CIA claims about Russian hacking.
According to journalist Glenn Greenwald and former lawmaker Dennis Kucinich, it appears Schumer was correct.
This week, Trump adviser Michael Flynn left the administration after leaks from the intelligence community revealed he had misled the public and the administration on conversations he had with a Russian diplomat. The Washington Post and New York Times both reported on the alleged transgressions.
Though Greenwald has argued the leaks were “wholly justified” in spite of the fact they violated criminal law, he also questioned the motives behind them.
“It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble,” he wrote. “Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.”
Greenwald asserted in an interview with Democracy Now, published on Thursday, that this boils down to a fight between the Deep State and the Trump administration.
According to an in-depth report by journalist Mike Lofgren:
“The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.”
As Greenwald explained during his interview:
“It’s agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world’s worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads.”
Notorious neoconservative and member of the now-defunct Project for New American Century, Bill Kristol — who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election — acknowledged the growing divide between the Deep State and the president, making it clear which side he fell on:
Greenwald believes this division is a result of the Deep State’s disapproval of Trump’s foreign policy and the fact that the intelligence community overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump because of her hawkish views. Greenwald noted that Mike Morell, acting CIA chief under Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and NSA under George W. Bush, openly spoke out against Trump during the presidential campaign.
Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria. In contrast, Trump dismissed America’s practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups.
“So, Trump’s agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted,” Greenwald argued. “Clinton’s was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they’ve been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him.”
As former congressman Dennis Kucinich noted in a recent interview with Fox News, the Deep State’s retaliations are not limited to Trump:
Kucinich TV interview
“[In] the closing months of the Obama administration, they put together a deal with Russia to create peace in Syria. A few days later, a military strike in Syria killed a hundred Syrian soldiers and that ended the agreement. What happened is inside the intelligence and the Pentagon there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made.”
Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of undermining Trump is dangerous. “Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving,” he said, likely alluding to a recent court ruling that nullified Trump’s travel ban.
He continued:
“But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity.”
He argues that mentality is “a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it,” highlighting that members of both prevailing political parties are praising the Deep State’s audacity in leaking details of Flynn’s conversations.
As he wrote in his article, “…it’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.”
He also points out the left’s hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable.
As traditional narratives continue to blur in the age of Trump, Kucinich summarized the current developments and resulting confusion:
“What’s going on in the intelligence community with this president is unprecedented,” he said. “They’re making every effort to upend him. Who knows what the truth is anymore?“
Regardless, the Trump administration is reportedly considering sending thousands of ground troops into Syria, meaning the Deep State could still find an ally in the president its members are currently working to undermine.
Article from: www.theantimedia.org
Boston Globe: Trump’s looming showdown with the ‘secret government’
Why programs such as mass surveillance, drone strikes, whistle-blower prosecutions, and unchecked war-making remained virtually unchanged from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. Will Trump fall in line too? A former legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee explains.
www.bostonglobe.com
All of Bush’s policies continued under Obama
by J. Wilson - 03/28/14
Go ahead and try to name a single one of Bush’s policies that didn’t continue under Obama. The first one that pops into your head is probably Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. That’s the military policy that barred openly gay soldiers from serving. You could use that policy as an example that but while it did end under Obama it wasn’t Bush’s policy. That policy was enacted by the Clinton administration and merely continued by Bush. So technically it doesn’t work here. Damn, if that one’s disqualified, now what policy are you going to pick? It’s going to be a lot harder to name one than you thought.
Obama continued Bush’s tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, No Child Left Behind, the bailouts, Medicare expansion, Guantanamo Bay, NSA, Homeland Security, the Patriot Act and drones. Not a single one of those changed when Obama took office and only the Iraq war has been ended since. Every other one has been continued until this very day. Those were all original Bush administration policies, and in fact there’s hundreds more. The list goes on and on but those are some of the most substantial ones that many Democrats had opposed during Bush’s presidency. And nearly all of Bush’s policies continued under Obama up to the present.
They opposed it during his presidency, but as soon as Obama was elected that opposition dried up. Even though most of those were only law for a few years and could have been changed if Obama really wanted to. The Democrats gave up on that Hope and Change talk in January ’09 after seeing Obama’s lack of will to follow through. He had a Democrat controlled House and Senate so he could’ve passed whatever bills he wanted to. But he didn’t want to do that. He chose not to repeal or replace anything Bush had done. The Democrats wanted the power that Bush had accumulated just as much as he did originally. Once the government gets power they’re very unlikely to ever give it up.
That’s why it’s so important not to give the government anymore power. If you vote for a Republican or Democrat that’s all they’re going to do. They’ll take more power, and take away more liberty. They’ll continue all the policies of their predecessors at our expense.
Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change
A former legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says we are afflicted with "double government."
www.bostonglobe.com
Obama's lost army
www.newrepublic.com
Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon
ISTOCK/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LESLEY BECKER/GLOBE STAFF
By Jordan Michael Smith OCTOBER 19, 2014
THE VOTERS WHO put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.
Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.
Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.
View Story
How voters fell out of love with their own parties
Today we hate the other side more than we root for our own team. Why the end of rah-rah politics is bad for democracy.
The Pirate Party’s push for direct democracy
Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.
How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.
IDEAS: Where does the term “double government” come from?
GLENNON:It comes from Walter Bagehot’s famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over the birth of the Economist magazine—they still have a column named after him. Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British government worked. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. There are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which people erroneously believed ran the government. But he suggested that there was in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient institutions,” that actually set governmental policy. And those were the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet.
IDEAS: What evidence exists for saying America has a double government?
GLENNON:I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case? I initially wrote it based on my own experience and personal knowledge and conversations with dozens of individuals in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies of our government, as well as, of course, officeholders on Capitol Hill and in the courts. And the documented evidence in the book is substantial—there are 800 footnotes in the book.
IDEAS: Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials?
GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision....Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.
The presidency itself is not a top-down institution, as many people in the public believe, headed by a president who gives orders and causes the bureaucracy to click its heels and salute. National security policy actually bubbles up from within the bureaucracy. Many of the more controversial policies, from the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors to the NSA surveillance program, originated within the bureaucracy. John Kerry was not exaggerating when he said that some of those programs are “on autopilot.”
IDEAS: Isn’t this just another way of saying that big bureaucracies are difficult to change?
GLENNON: It’s much more serious than that. These particular bureaucracies don’t set truck widths or determine railroad freight rates. They make nerve-center security decisions that in a democracy can be irreversible, that can close down the marketplace of ideas, and can result in some very dire consequences.
IDEAS: Couldn’t Obama’s national-security decisions just result from the difference in vantage point between being a campaigner and being the commander-in-chief, responsible for 320 million lives?
GLENNON: There is an element of what you described. There is not only one explanation or one cause for the amazing continuity of American national security policy. But obviously there is something else going on when policy after policy after policy all continue virtually the same way that they were in the George W. Bush administration.
IDEAS: This isn’t how we’re taught to think of the American political system.
GLENNON: I think the American people are deluded, as Bagehot explained about the British population, that the institutions that provide the public face actually set American national security policy. They believe that when they vote for a president or member of Congress or succeed in bringing a case before the courts, that policy is going to change. Now, there are many counter-examples in which these branches do affect policy, as Bagehot predicted there would be. But the larger picture is still true—policy by and large in the national security realm is made by the concealed institutions.
IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem?
GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.
Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing writer at Salon and The Christian Science Monitor.
Democrats and Republicans; two different roads to the same authoritarian police state! Libertarians and Greens? THE FAST LANE!
ReplyDeleteWow, this is an outdated article! We NEED a "double government" to actually run the country while the Trump administration screws everything up!
ReplyDelete