Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State

February 21, 2014
by Mike Lofgren

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.

— The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (1871)

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]

During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.

As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.

Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

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http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/

JR lawyered iran contra

The Smoking Gun: John Roberts "Lawyered" the Iran-Contra Scandal

Bob Fertik
Democrats.com
August 25, 2005

EXCERPT...

One file withheld, regarding the Iran-contra affair, was a draft memo from Roberts to his bosses with the heading "re: establishment of NHAO" -- referring to the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office.

The office was one of the ways the Reagan administration got around what were known as the Boland amendments, which prohibited U.S. intelligence agencies from spending money to overthrow the Sandinistas. The office was a way the administration could get funds to the contras for nonmilitary purposes, but once there the money was used for all sorts of things.

In other words, John Roberts "lawyered" the Iran-Contra Scandal - one of the worst scandals in American history.

Now we know why Karl Rove is scrubbing Roberts' files!!!

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http://www.democrats.com/roberts-iran-contra

Firewall: Inside the Iran-Contra Cover-up

By Robert Parry
1995

EXCERPT…

Those combined interests likely will lead to very few favorable reviews of a new book by a man who put himself in the way of that cover-up -- Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. In a remarkable new book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up, Walsh details his six-year battle to break through the "firewall" that White House officials built around President Reagan and Vice President Bush after the Iran-contra scandal exploded in November 1986.

For Walsh, a lifelong Republican who shared the foreign policy views of the Reagan administration, the Iran-contra experience was a life-changing one, as his investigation penetrated one wall of lies only to be confronted with another and another -- and not just lies from Oliver North and his cohorts but lies from nearly every senior administration official who spoke with investigators.

According to Firewall, the cover-up conspiracy took formal shape at a meeting of Reagan and his top advisers in the Situation Room at the White House on Nov. 24, 1986. The meeting's principal point of concern was how to handle the troublesome fact that Reagan had approved illegal arms sales to Iran in fall 1985, before any covert-action finding had been signed. The act was a clear felony -- a violation of the Arms Export Control Act -- and possibly an impeachable offense.

SNIP…

&quot White House chief of staff Don) Regan, who had heard McFarlane inform the president and who had heard the president admit to Shultz that he knew of the shipment of Hawk (anti-aircraft) missiles, said nothing. Shultz and (Defense Secretary Caspar) Weinberger, who had protested the shipment before it took place, said nothing. (Vice President George) Bush, who had been told of the shipment in advance by McFarlane, said nothing. Casey, who (had) requested that the president sign the retroactive finding to authorize the CIA-facilitated delivery, said nothing. (NSC adviser John) Poindexter, who had torn up the finding, said nothing. Meese asked whether anyone knew anything else that hadn't been revealed. No one spoke."

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story34.html

Roberts & the 'Apex of Presidential Power'

By Nat Parry
September 6, 2005

EXCERPT...

In the 1980s, Roberts also provided legal advice to the Reagan administration on how to pick its way around the legal obstacles erected by Congress to limit military and other assistance to the Nicaraguan contra rebels who were fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

SNIP…

Conflict of Interest

Regarding the Hamdan case, Roberts also saw no impropriety in his simultaneous interviewing with senior administration officials for a life-time job on the Supreme Court and his judging of a case in which Bush was a defendant.

On April 1, Roberts was interviewed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who had formulated many of the arguments for the “apex of presidential power,” including Bush’s right to override anti-torture laws.

Other interviews with Roberts were conducted by Vice President Dick Cheney; White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card; White House legal counsel Harriet Miers; Bush’s chief political strategist Karl Rove; and Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis Libby.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/090605.html

Roberts Gave GOP Advice in 2000 Recount

John G. Roberts, President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, played a role in the chaotic, 36-day period following the disputed 2000 presidential election.

by Gary Fineout and Mary Ellen Klas
Published on Thursday, July 21, 2005 by the Miami Herald

TALLAHASSEE -- U.S. Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts provided legal advice to Gov. Jeb Bush in the weeks following the November 2000 election as part of the effort to make sure the governor's brother won the disputed presidential vote.

Roberts, at the time a private attorney in Washington, D.C., came to Tallahassee to advise the state's Republican administration as it was trying to prevent a Democratic end-run that the GOP feared might give the election to Al Gore, sources told The Herald.

SNIP...

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, seized on Roberts' participation in the 2000 recount and suggested it should be grounds for rejecting his nomination. Wexler suggested the nomination ``threw salt on the wounds of the thousands of Floridians whose voting rights were disenfranchised during the 2000 election.

''Judge Roberts worked to ensure that George Bush would become president -- regardless of what the courts might decide,'' Wexler said, relying on news accounts that suggested Roberts gave the governor advice on how the state Legislature could name Bush the winner. ``And now he is being rewarded for that partisan service by being appointed to the nation's highest court.''

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0721-07.htm

The Lost Opportunity of Iran-Contra

Special Report: A quarter century ago with the breaking of the Iran-Contra scandal, the United States had a chance to step back from its march toward Empire and to demand accountability for White House crimes. But instead a powerful cover-up prevailed, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews
December 1, 2011

EXCERPT...

Walsh finally relented and agreed to shut down his investigation, meaning that one of the key lessons derived from Iran-Contra was that a determined cover-up of a national security scandal, backed by a powerful media apparatus and aggressive political allies, can work.

In the early 1990s when I interviewed the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s longtime Democratic chief counsel Spencer Oliver, he put Iran-Contra in exactly that historical place, as the polar opposite of Watergate when Richard Nixon’s abuses of power had real consequences, including Nixon’s forced resignation and prison terms for many of his subordinates.

“What [the Republicans] learned from Watergate,” Oliver said, “was not ‘don’t do it,’ but ‘cover it up more effectively.’ They have learned that they have to frustrate congressional oversight and press scrutiny in a way that will avoid another major scandal.”

The consequences of the failed Iran-Contra investigations have been long-lasting and profound. Not only did George H.W. Bush manage to get elected president in 1988 under the false claim that he had been “out of the loop” on the scandal, but the failure to hold him accountable in 1993 opened the door to the White House eight years later for his son, George W. Bush.

George W. Bush’s imperial presidency (and its costly “war on terror”) would have been virtually unthinkable if the full truth had been known about George H.W. Bush regarding Iran-Contra. Nor would it have been likely that the Republicans could have succeeded in elevating Ronald Reagan to his present iconic status.

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http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/01/the-lost-opportunity-of-iran-contra/

Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection

by Edwin Black
Sunday, November 9, 2003

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race.

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

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http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/www.sfgate.com/index.html

FBI Agent: The CIA Could Have Stopped 9/11

BY JEFF STEIN
Newsweek 6/19/15 AT 6:07 AM

EXCERPT...

Rossini says he is “deeply concerned” by how the agency continues to suppress information related to contacts between the CIA and Saudi Arabia, particularly when the spy agency is declassifying other portions of documents to show that it did everything possible to thwart the September 11, 2001 plot.

“There would have not been a 9/11 if Doug's CIR (Central Intelligence Report) on al-Mihdhar was sent,” he told Newsweek in an email. “Period. End of story.

“The total lack of accountability, nor a desire to drill down on the truth as to why Doug's memo was not sent,” he added, “is the reason why the 28 pages pertaining to the Saudis have been blocked” from release.

In 2005, Tenet, the CIA director at the time of the attacks, angrily refuted the judgment of then-CIA Inspector General John Helgerson who said Tenet did not do enough to stop the Al-Qaeda plot.

"Your report challenges my professionalism, diligence and skill in leading the men and women of U.S. intelligence in countering terrorism," Tenet wrote to Helgerson in another heavily redacted document released June 12. "I did everything I could to inform, warn and motivate action to prevent harm. Your report does not fairly or accurately portray my actions, or the heroic work of the men and women of the Intelligence Community."

Rossini claims still-classified documents would “show a pattern of financial assistance, and moreover, the CIA's role to try and recruit al-Mihdhar.” He says he was “convinced” of that and that “there is no other explanation" for the CIA refusing to release further information.

A former CIA field operative who worked at the CTC in 2001 told Newsweek earlier this year that Rossini’s theory had merit. “I find that kind of hard to believe, that [al-Mihdhar] would be a valid source,” says the former operative, who spent 25 years handling spies in some of the world’s most dangerous places, including the Middle East. “But then again, the folks that were making a lot of calls at the time there were junior analysts, who had zero general experience and absolutely zero on-the-ground operational experience or any kind of operational training.”

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http://www.newsweek.com/saudi-arabia-911-cia-344693