Early in George Orwell's 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith looks out his window and sees a sign with the ruling Party's three main slogans:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
The last of these phrases is in fact true in a totalitarian society. The ignorance of the masses strengthens the rulers. And the willful ignorance of a majority of the ruled may strengthen them as well-- that is to say, they may derive comfort, profit, and even some measure of power by going along with the government's lies, in the face of widespread evidence that they are lies. Of course it greatly weakens and ultimately kills dissenters, constitutions, and the whole concept of a government under law. Ignorance implies deception, and in the deceptions practiced by our government, those concerning torture play a central role.
I have just discovered, as I was bound to given my major concerns, a scholar whose work is essential to an understanding of the role of deception as practiced by our government. Although I have not yet read Darius Rejali's most recent book, Torture and Democracy (it's on order from Amazon), I have read his article "Electricity: The Global History of a Torture Technology" and an interview with him by "Democracy Now" (http://academic.reed.edu/poli_sci/faculty/rejali/rejali/articles/History_of_ElectricTorture...; http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/12/torture_and_democracy_scholar_darius_rejali)
The first opens with a startling assertion: "We all remember how badly Rodney King was beaten by the L.A. police, but not how often he was shocked nor the voltage he received." Further on he asserts, "Southern police were armed with electric cattle prods in the 1950s and used these extensively in struggles with civil rights activists... but remarkably, none of the historical studies of the civil rights movement speak of these weapons." This is a devastating fact, and we can be grateful to Rejali for alerting us to how easy it is for people to overlook a form of inflicting pain which they cannot see. Rejali sums up what seems to be the essence of his theory of torture and democracy in the following passage:
"The spread of electric torture is part and parcel of the spread of democratization. In an age where globalization is linked to abuse and exploitation and democratization is touted as the province of all that's right, it is striking to see that electric torture is more linked to the latter than to authoritarian regimes. It arises and spreads as police forces reinvent themselves in the face of democratization and international human rights scrutiny and as well-to-do democratic consumers increasingly fear for their security."
In this he is absolutely right. Having written a scholarly book concerning a Nazi leader, I know that the prevalent notion that the CIA got its techniques of torture from the Nazis is false. The Nazis were quite crude in the methods of torture they used. They cannot hold a candle to the CIA's systematic development of PSYWAR, a form of mind control through torture which of course has a history which predates the CIA, and as Rejali says, involves mainly democracies or those governments which were for whatever reason concerned about public opinion. But the conclusion that Rejali draws (and I hope I'm not being unfair to him here-- I'll soon know), that torture is an inevitable concomitant of democracy, is false. What he cannot see is that history is an ongoing process. What we today call democracy is in fact just a transitional phase in the development of a very different society--one in which the masses may feel that they are in control but in which individual liberty and the concept of a government under law have been extinguished. This is not just a theory that I got from James Burnham: it is a fact: today, due to the adoption of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, protection for individual liberty exists only on paper and very soon will not exist at all.
Rejali also fails to see that the use of torture by our government may not just involve deception (through methods which leave no marks, such as electrical torture) but also further deception-- that indeed, its very purpose may be deception. Rejali's ignorance is indicated by the following comment: "We know the thing that works best for getting intelligence. We know that there are people out there who want to hurt us. And the thing that works best in getting intelligence is public cooperation. And when you torture, you not only just get bad intelligence, you undermine the willingness of... people who like America to come forward and help us... My favorite example of this... is July 21st, a bunch of guys got on buses in London with bombs, and they escaped. The British police got them all in ten days, and the break in the case came when the parents of Muktar Said Ibrahim, loyal British Muslims, turned in their son when they saw the security video. Would they have turned him in if they knew their son was going to be tortured? Obviously not." Leaving aside the obvious question of how they knew that their son was not going to be tortured, given that Britain is one of those transitional democracies which use exactly the kind of "sneaky" methods with which Rejali is concerned, he is dead wrong to think that the "people who want to hurt us" are someone outside the mainstream of our society-- Muslim extremists etc. However much some foreigners may hate America and other Western countries, they cannot possibly do the damage to us that the West's own governments, all of them following America's lead, are doing to both life and liberty-- they just don't have the means.
The people in our government who torture are not stupid. They know very well what they are doing. The methods used in the War on Terror are designed to do more than hide the fact that the government is torturing. They are designed to hide other facts as well. Their goal is not the investigation of truth, but the erection of falsehood: false confessions, and false identities. That is why no one of the thousands of detainees in U.S. custody has been or ever will be given a fair trial. They are being "worked over" to make them into exactly what the government wants them to be. Colin Ross, M.D., in his book The CIA Doctors, demonstrates persuasively that the CIA spent decades perfecting methods of producing "manchurian candidates": now it is working on producing phony terrorists. In that connection, the false confession of Ibn Al Shiekh al Libi, given under torture and later retracted by him, that Iraq was giving Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction, was not a failure but the CIA's greatest recent success. As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan says in his new book, What Happened Inside the White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, President Bush managed the furor over the question of WMDs in Iraq "in a way that guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option..." Top Bush aides "carefully orchestrated the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war..." It is hard to escape the conclusion that the false confession tortured out of Al-Libi was part of this campaign. By deceiving the American people about the connection between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda, it gave our government exactly what it wanted-- a war.
An equally persuasive illustration of the way our government uses deception, and one very appropriate in this election year, is the Detainee Treatment Amendment of 2005. This has often been called the "McCain Anti-Torture Amendment", but that is only a form of doublethink. Presidential candidate John McCain has not "flip-flopped" on the issue of torture-- he has always been in favor of it, and torture is exactly what his amendment was designed to facilitate. For one thing, although it constrains the military in its methods of interrogation, it places no such constraints upon the CIA. This is like saying, "We're going to go after organized crime, except for the Mafia." The CIA is the foremost torturing institution in American life, and the one which taught all the others (as well as many foreign dictatorships) how to do it. In an effort to close this loophole, Congress passed legislation to include the CIA in its strictures but McCain himself voted against this bill and recommended that President Bush veto it. He did so. Recently a similar bill went down to defeat and once again Congress was unable to muster the two-thirds majority necessary to override the presidential veto. The Detainee Treatment Act was also weakened by the Graham-Levin Amendment, which leaves detainees no legal recourse if they are tortured. Hearing McCain's fine words, that "torture is not US", and seeing his friend Lindsay Graham on the PBS docmentary "The Torture Question", his comments framed by photos of statues which evoke the sacrifice of American troops and everything noble and patriotic leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of those of us who know that these men are in fact contemptible hypocrites. That is no doubt why the DTA was ultimately accepted by the Administration-- in fact, its introduction was most likely part of a strategy agreed upon by the Administration, the CIA and Republican Senators, to provide a "fig leaf" for the torturing that they were determined to permit. Excuse me, Professor Rejali, but this is not "democracy"!
Nonetheless, McCain will in all likelihood be our next president, because ignorance-- or more specifically, willful ignorance-- is the strength of the masses in the new form of totalitarianism. But even before that, we may witness an attack upon Darius Rejali's homeland, Iran, and a consequent declaration of martial law in this country to forestall the inevitable protests. Those Americans who have faced the truth openly and spoken out about it will be rounded up and put in the concentration camps which are now being built by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, and all that will be left will be the willfully ignorant. The best argument against Rejali's thesis that torture and democracy go together is the regime under which he grew up, that of the Shah, a vicious dictatorship erected by the CIA over the ruins of the relatively democratic government of Mossadegh. Rejali says, "Nothing got more people on Khomeini's side than [SAVAK]'s torturing." But if he thinks that the advent of an extremist government in Teheran was a real blow to the American government, the sale of arms to that country during the Iran-Contra scandal should have taught him better. The fascists in our government need enemies just as much as they need client dictators. And to that end, Ahmadinejad-- like Saddam Hussein- fits the bill perfectly.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
THE MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT: AN IMPENDING NIGHTMARE
Recently I learned, through Truthout, of a case of a legal resident of the United States who is being held at a North Carolina military brig without being formally charged. I was already familiar with two other cases of dubious constitutionality, those of U.S. citizens Yaser Esam Hamdi and José Padilla. The latter's case disturbed me in particular because he was held for three years without formal charges and when he was finally indicted, the allegations which the government had originally used as an excuse to keep him in detention were dropped. I know very well that three years is sufficient time for our government, using PSYWAR techniques of torture developed by the CIA, to destroy an individual's personality to such an extent that he is no longer capable of defending himself in court. Thus I shared the view of Padilla's lawyer that the sentencing of Padilla to 17 years and four months in a federal prison for what was essentially a "thought crime" was a travesty of justice which "did more harm to the U.S. liberty than any terrorist ever could." (Wikipedia entry under "José Padilla") So naturally I was concerned when I read about Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, particularly because he is the first person not captured on a battlefield whose case involves the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the most dangerous and unconstitutional law ever passed in U.S. history.
According to the Truthout article, which was written by Matt Apuzzo of The Associated Press, Al Marri was originally arrested on charges of credit card fraud and given the constitutional rights that his status as a criminal suspect warranted. But then on June 23, 2003, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant and he lost those rights (but did not gain the protection of the Geneva Conventions as such a person normally would). He was transferred to a military brig, "the only [accused] enemy combatant held on U.S. soil." Like Padilla and other terrorist suspects, he has been tortured. The Justice Department has used the Military Commissions Act to ensure that if he is tried at all, Al-Marri will be tried by one of its notoriously unfair military commissions and not before a civilian court. Appuzo quotes a chilling exchange between Judge William B. Traxler of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Department lawyer Gregory Garre: Judge Traxler asked, "What you assert is the power of the military to seize a person in the United States, including an American citizen [emphasis mine], on suspicion of being an enemy combatant?" "Yes, your honor," replied Garre. It need not be pointed out that once this principle is established, it will mark the end of the American republic and our government of law. But is this just Garre's opinion?
President Bush pushed the Military Commissions Act through Congress, on the fifth anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, because even the administration's own placemen in the judiciary have questioned whether, in the absence of new congressional legislation, it alone has the power to declare someone an enemy combatant. The administration had to have congressional support, and a supine Congress complied, thus surrendering yet more of its own sovereignty. One only needs to read the text of the MCA to see that it gives the executive branch unlimited power to declare anyone an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" (i.e., one not accorded the protections of either the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions), including American citizens. It defines "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" as any person "who before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or Secretary of Defense." There is no exception made for citizens or legal residents of the United States, and the person does not have to have been captured on a battlefield. Nor are the criteria which would make him a UEC spelled out-- it might be something as trivial as the fact that he has contributed money to an organization which opposes administration policy. Clearly Matt Apuzzo is right when he says that the government "can now send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen, and hold him without charge, indefinitely." (http://www.truthout.org/article/us-residents-military-brigs-government-says-its-war?)
But surely, one will say, the government had good reason in each of these three cases. All three men are Islamic fundamentalists, and sympathize with the goals of Al Qaeda. Al Marri in fact entered the U.S. on September 10, 2001, the very day before the attacks. < That is exactly what is so disturbing about them. Even if they could not have been proven to have been involved in the events of 9/11, given the fact that they had flirted with terrorism, it would seem quite easy to convict them of something, and the government would have looked heroic for trying to do so. After all, terrorism has always been illegal, and it doesn't require special legislation to convict a person on that charge. Why then have these men not been tried in civilian court, or in Padilla's case, tried only after three years in a military brig? There can be only one reason. The government is "testing the waters". The whole point of the Military Commissions Act is to facilitate terrorism-- state terrorism-- not stop it. In giving the executive branch unlimited power, it is trashing the U.S. Constitution and saying in effect, as did Louis XIV, "L'état c'est moi." And have no doubt about it: its next victims are going to be ourselves.
According to the Truthout article, which was written by Matt Apuzzo of The Associated Press, Al Marri was originally arrested on charges of credit card fraud and given the constitutional rights that his status as a criminal suspect warranted. But then on June 23, 2003, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant and he lost those rights (but did not gain the protection of the Geneva Conventions as such a person normally would). He was transferred to a military brig, "the only [accused] enemy combatant held on U.S. soil." Like Padilla and other terrorist suspects, he has been tortured. The Justice Department has used the Military Commissions Act to ensure that if he is tried at all, Al-Marri will be tried by one of its notoriously unfair military commissions and not before a civilian court. Appuzo quotes a chilling exchange between Judge William B. Traxler of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Department lawyer Gregory Garre: Judge Traxler asked, "What you assert is the power of the military to seize a person in the United States, including an American citizen [emphasis mine], on suspicion of being an enemy combatant?" "Yes, your honor," replied Garre. It need not be pointed out that once this principle is established, it will mark the end of the American republic and our government of law. But is this just Garre's opinion?
President Bush pushed the Military Commissions Act through Congress, on the fifth anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, because even the administration's own placemen in the judiciary have questioned whether, in the absence of new congressional legislation, it alone has the power to declare someone an enemy combatant. The administration had to have congressional support, and a supine Congress complied, thus surrendering yet more of its own sovereignty. One only needs to read the text of the MCA to see that it gives the executive branch unlimited power to declare anyone an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" (i.e., one not accorded the protections of either the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions), including American citizens. It defines "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" as any person "who before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or Secretary of Defense." There is no exception made for citizens or legal residents of the United States, and the person does not have to have been captured on a battlefield. Nor are the criteria which would make him a UEC spelled out-- it might be something as trivial as the fact that he has contributed money to an organization which opposes administration policy. Clearly Matt Apuzzo is right when he says that the government "can now send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen, and hold him without charge, indefinitely." (http://www.truthout.org/article/us-residents-military-brigs-government-says-its-war?)
But surely, one will say, the government had good reason in each of these three cases. All three men are Islamic fundamentalists, and sympathize with the goals of Al Qaeda. Al Marri in fact entered the U.S. on September 10, 2001, the very day before the attacks. < That is exactly what is so disturbing about them. Even if they could not have been proven to have been involved in the events of 9/11, given the fact that they had flirted with terrorism, it would seem quite easy to convict them of something, and the government would have looked heroic for trying to do so. After all, terrorism has always been illegal, and it doesn't require special legislation to convict a person on that charge. Why then have these men not been tried in civilian court, or in Padilla's case, tried only after three years in a military brig? There can be only one reason. The government is "testing the waters". The whole point of the Military Commissions Act is to facilitate terrorism-- state terrorism-- not stop it. In giving the executive branch unlimited power, it is trashing the U.S. Constitution and saying in effect, as did Louis XIV, "L'état c'est moi." And have no doubt about it: its next victims are going to be ourselves.
Friday, May 16, 2008
GEORGE H.W.BUSH: PRIME SUSPECT IN THE CASE OF 9/11: A Review
There is one overwhelming problem with Joseph J. Trento's Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA. Trento is an investigative journalist and a good one, who has made excellent use of his acquaintances among the insiders. But after a number of well-written and fascinating chapters showing how the CIA has become increasingly privatized, tainted by its association with foreign dictators, and corrupted by its dealings in arms and drugs, he stops short of drawing the obvious conclusion. In his final chapter he says that today's CIA has become "at best irrelevant and at worst a joke" (p. 353). Try telling that to the poor wretches it is torturing in its prisons all over the world! His conclusion is contradicted by all the evidence he presents, for the CIA which emerges from his narrative is one that is having the most profound influence upon both American political life and the world at large. Why does Trento start out as such a critic of the CIA and end up its apologist? I think because he cannot face the implications of all the evidence he presents, which is that the CIA's goal has never been to assist the president by providing intelligence which could save American lives, but to maximize its own power. In that endeavor it has been supremely successful, trampling on human rights and civil liberties to an extent unparalleled in human history. Today it can apprehend anyone in any part of the world and send them to its gulag of concentration camps, beyond the reach of their families, lawyers and even the Red Cross, to be held indefinitely, tortured and possibly murdered. Neither Hitler nor Stalin enjoyed this kind of global reach.
Trento's focus upon George H.W. Bush is appropriate, for in the march toward totalitarianism which is now reaching its climax, the forty-first president of the United States played a pivotal role. One can indeed say that his presidency-- the first in which a former Director of the CIA held the office-- marks the "Rubicon moment" in American history, the moment when this country took a turn on to the toad to totalitarianism from which it is no longer possible to turn back. To be sure, the stage was set by the establishment of the CIA in 1947, with help of Bush's father Prescott Bush, who had made a fortune from doing business with the Nazis. But before the Bush presidency, it was possible for Americans to stand back and say, "Stop!" After all, the enemy which confronted us then was a real one, even if its power was grossly exaggerated by the Right. The American people had not yet fallen for the Big Lie. That no one took the initiative to rein in an ever more out-of-control CIA is the fault above all of a spineless and self-interested Congress. It is heartbreaking to read, in Trento's account, of how the Church Committee degenerated into a mere platform for Frank Church's presidential aspirations (pp. 60-61). For this was the moment, right after Watergate, when something could really have been done.
It was also the moment when Bush, who had been working for the CIA from his early days with Zapata Oil, was given control of the Agency by President Ford. Although he never went through Junior Officer Training, Bush does indeed, as Trento says, possess the character of a career intelligence officer (p. 13) This is why people have described him variously as "having no core" and "moderate": the face he presents to the world is but the facade of the classic intelligence operative who never reveals his true self-- if indeed he is even aware of it. Throughout his life, Bush fought for one thing above all: the furtherance of the interests of the CIA. In the face of timid congressional investigations-- investigations he openly opposed in principle-- he was easily able to strenghthen it and raise its morale although he only held the office of DCI for one year. And the re-invigorated CIA survived the reforming efforts directed at it by President Carter and his DCI, Stansfield Turner. When Reagan was elected, Bush played a key role in running the Iran-Contra affair. But in 1986, something vitally important happened to change the world in which the CIA operated. Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. Russia had long been a frustration to Cold Warriors because its massive nuclear arsenal made war directly against it impossible. The U.S. was confined to doing battle with Soviet proxies such as North Vietnam, and such wars could and did turn out to be debacles. With the advent of Gorbachev, it became impossible to whip up the kind of fear and hatred of the Soviet Union which could sustain the military-industrial complex. But Bush, who as Trento shows had a long and close relationship with the Saudi royal family, could see that there was another alternative which would work even better than anti-Communism. After he was elected president, he moved quickly to end a now useless Cold War and initiate a confrontation with the Muslim Middle East.
When I read about the First Gulf War in Trento's book, I could not help but think of my own perception of that war as it was occurring. For it was abundantly clear to me even then that far from being a surprise to the United States, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a set-up. After all, the Iraqi dictator had gone to Bush's ambassador to Iraq to sound her out on the possible reaction of the U.S. to such an invasion, and she had given him the green light. And Bush himself was obviously egging him on with comments such as "He's going to get his ass kicked," language unworthy of America's chief executive which was bound to be given the most offensive interpretations in the Arab world (it may even have carried overtones of homosexual rape). Saddam Hussein's response could not have been better suited to the interests of a president whose ratings were falling and a military-industrial complex which was trembling at the prospect of peace breaking out. And most telling of all was something I heard from a policy analyst on what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour: he said that Americans should expect terrorist attacks on their own soil. This scared the hell out of me, not because I thought that there was any prospect of such attacks occurring, but because I knew then that the Big Lie was being born, and that its purpose could only be to deprive us of our civil liberties. The first war against Iraq ended without any such incidents, but then, it takes a long time to get such things rolling, and maybe Bush was having trouble convincing his friend Osama bin Laden to take the rap. Besides, he had a son who was very likely to run for president in his turn. What better legacy to pass on to him than 9/11? This is where Trento really falls down. If the attacks were really a surprise to the CIA, how can one explain the complaisance of the Secret Service in not whisking Bush Jr. to safety as soon as they learned of the collapse of the Twin Towers? In fact, 9/11 was the CIA's greatest success. For it now had the American people right where it wanted them: in such an hysteria of fear and hatred that they would finally give the intelligence establishment what it had wanted all along-- total power.
It is time for Americans to realize that they are being manipulated. Take for instance such a small thing as the constantly rising cost of stamps. The revenue of course goes to finance America's now endless wars. But we are being told that it is the cost of fuel-- why? To put Americans in a mood of resentment against the Middle East in general and Iran in particular, in the hope that that country will retaliate against U.S sanctions by closing the Straits of Hormuz and in so doing justify an attack on it. Such an attack may well involve the use of weapons of mass destruction. Those Americans who do not believe that it is worth killing Iranian children just so that one can drive to one's corner grocery store when one could easily walk are already on the list compiled through NSA/AT&T spying and will be arrested as Unlawful Enemy Combatants and sent to the concentration camps which are now being built for that purpose by Kellogg, Brown and Root under the Military Commissions Act. The CIA gulag is growing. Trento's title, "Prelude to Terror", is a good one, but the terror about to be unleashed on our society is the product of our own government.
Trento's focus upon George H.W. Bush is appropriate, for in the march toward totalitarianism which is now reaching its climax, the forty-first president of the United States played a pivotal role. One can indeed say that his presidency-- the first in which a former Director of the CIA held the office-- marks the "Rubicon moment" in American history, the moment when this country took a turn on to the toad to totalitarianism from which it is no longer possible to turn back. To be sure, the stage was set by the establishment of the CIA in 1947, with help of Bush's father Prescott Bush, who had made a fortune from doing business with the Nazis. But before the Bush presidency, it was possible for Americans to stand back and say, "Stop!" After all, the enemy which confronted us then was a real one, even if its power was grossly exaggerated by the Right. The American people had not yet fallen for the Big Lie. That no one took the initiative to rein in an ever more out-of-control CIA is the fault above all of a spineless and self-interested Congress. It is heartbreaking to read, in Trento's account, of how the Church Committee degenerated into a mere platform for Frank Church's presidential aspirations (pp. 60-61). For this was the moment, right after Watergate, when something could really have been done.
It was also the moment when Bush, who had been working for the CIA from his early days with Zapata Oil, was given control of the Agency by President Ford. Although he never went through Junior Officer Training, Bush does indeed, as Trento says, possess the character of a career intelligence officer (p. 13) This is why people have described him variously as "having no core" and "moderate": the face he presents to the world is but the facade of the classic intelligence operative who never reveals his true self-- if indeed he is even aware of it. Throughout his life, Bush fought for one thing above all: the furtherance of the interests of the CIA. In the face of timid congressional investigations-- investigations he openly opposed in principle-- he was easily able to strenghthen it and raise its morale although he only held the office of DCI for one year. And the re-invigorated CIA survived the reforming efforts directed at it by President Carter and his DCI, Stansfield Turner. When Reagan was elected, Bush played a key role in running the Iran-Contra affair. But in 1986, something vitally important happened to change the world in which the CIA operated. Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. Russia had long been a frustration to Cold Warriors because its massive nuclear arsenal made war directly against it impossible. The U.S. was confined to doing battle with Soviet proxies such as North Vietnam, and such wars could and did turn out to be debacles. With the advent of Gorbachev, it became impossible to whip up the kind of fear and hatred of the Soviet Union which could sustain the military-industrial complex. But Bush, who as Trento shows had a long and close relationship with the Saudi royal family, could see that there was another alternative which would work even better than anti-Communism. After he was elected president, he moved quickly to end a now useless Cold War and initiate a confrontation with the Muslim Middle East.
When I read about the First Gulf War in Trento's book, I could not help but think of my own perception of that war as it was occurring. For it was abundantly clear to me even then that far from being a surprise to the United States, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a set-up. After all, the Iraqi dictator had gone to Bush's ambassador to Iraq to sound her out on the possible reaction of the U.S. to such an invasion, and she had given him the green light. And Bush himself was obviously egging him on with comments such as "He's going to get his ass kicked," language unworthy of America's chief executive which was bound to be given the most offensive interpretations in the Arab world (it may even have carried overtones of homosexual rape). Saddam Hussein's response could not have been better suited to the interests of a president whose ratings were falling and a military-industrial complex which was trembling at the prospect of peace breaking out. And most telling of all was something I heard from a policy analyst on what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour: he said that Americans should expect terrorist attacks on their own soil. This scared the hell out of me, not because I thought that there was any prospect of such attacks occurring, but because I knew then that the Big Lie was being born, and that its purpose could only be to deprive us of our civil liberties. The first war against Iraq ended without any such incidents, but then, it takes a long time to get such things rolling, and maybe Bush was having trouble convincing his friend Osama bin Laden to take the rap. Besides, he had a son who was very likely to run for president in his turn. What better legacy to pass on to him than 9/11? This is where Trento really falls down. If the attacks were really a surprise to the CIA, how can one explain the complaisance of the Secret Service in not whisking Bush Jr. to safety as soon as they learned of the collapse of the Twin Towers? In fact, 9/11 was the CIA's greatest success. For it now had the American people right where it wanted them: in such an hysteria of fear and hatred that they would finally give the intelligence establishment what it had wanted all along-- total power.
It is time for Americans to realize that they are being manipulated. Take for instance such a small thing as the constantly rising cost of stamps. The revenue of course goes to finance America's now endless wars. But we are being told that it is the cost of fuel-- why? To put Americans in a mood of resentment against the Middle East in general and Iran in particular, in the hope that that country will retaliate against U.S sanctions by closing the Straits of Hormuz and in so doing justify an attack on it. Such an attack may well involve the use of weapons of mass destruction. Those Americans who do not believe that it is worth killing Iranian children just so that one can drive to one's corner grocery store when one could easily walk are already on the list compiled through NSA/AT&T spying and will be arrested as Unlawful Enemy Combatants and sent to the concentration camps which are now being built for that purpose by Kellogg, Brown and Root under the Military Commissions Act. The CIA gulag is growing. Trento's title, "Prelude to Terror", is a good one, but the terror about to be unleashed on our society is the product of our own government.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
THE HIDDEN FACES (A Poem)
When I was recently re-reading some of the writing I had done in the early nineteen-seventies, when my political philosophy first began to take shape, I came across this poem. It was written on December 28, 1973, in the midst of the Watergate crisis, and clearly shows the influence of Burnham and Orwell. Soon after I wrote it, I was to enter a period of escapism, first studying history in college, and then writing about it. By the time I came out of my ivory tower and began to take a serious look at the world around me once again, in 1990, I found that another scandal of far more serious proportions than Watergate (Iran-Contra) had taken place, the direction of the ship of state had become clear and more sinister than ever, and at least one of the "faceless ones" had emerged from obscurity, into the Oval Office... but more about that in my next blog.
The world
is swirling around me--
momentous events are occurring--
battles being fought,
battles that will change
the shape of the world
for the next thousand years.
Many voices I hear
from familiar names and faces
scratching and clawing--
calling each other names.
Panting after the sceptre,
they fight like hounds--
They lie,
and connive
And rend the world in pursuit of their game.
This ship is off course,
wildly careening,
and where is the ship's captain?
In the cabin, playing a life-or-death
game of poker with the mates--
they rock the ship with their angry cries.
And yet, the ship still moves.
And I sit
Here in my living room
amid worried voices
and wonder silently,
who does run this ship?
Who mans the controls
while our captain plays his deadly game?
Our ship moves crookedly,
swerving and swaying--
but it moves.
Whose hand is on the steering wheel?
Whose mind runs the machinery
that keeps the ship
from halting in mid-ocean?
There must be many minds--
and how silent they all are.
They do not play in our captain's card game,
but keep their minds on their machines.
They do not stop to sling mud
For if they did, all that machinery
would grind to a halt.
Who are these men?
Where lies the power?
I feel a vast network about me,
an impenetrable system of steel and concrete.
And yet,
I cannot identify the minds
that are behind it all.
Frustration I feel--
no one knows, no one knows.
We, the people of the nation
are being led down a road
that is not of our own making--
destination unknown.
Confused are we, and helpless
For we cannot fight a power
whose face we cannot see.
Who shall win the card game?
Or does it really matter?
While the players tear at each other's throats,
The men in the control room
(who never entered the game)
quietly smile.
An iron fence
is closing about my heart.
Across the city,
the clank of hammers upon steel
mourn the passing of a world,
And I greatly fear what will become of us.
The world
is swirling around me--
momentous events are occurring--
battles being fought,
battles that will change
the shape of the world
for the next thousand years.
Many voices I hear
from familiar names and faces
scratching and clawing--
calling each other names.
Panting after the sceptre,
they fight like hounds--
They lie,
and connive
And rend the world in pursuit of their game.
This ship is off course,
wildly careening,
and where is the ship's captain?
In the cabin, playing a life-or-death
game of poker with the mates--
they rock the ship with their angry cries.
And yet, the ship still moves.
And I sit
Here in my living room
amid worried voices
and wonder silently,
who does run this ship?
Who mans the controls
while our captain plays his deadly game?
Our ship moves crookedly,
swerving and swaying--
but it moves.
Whose hand is on the steering wheel?
Whose mind runs the machinery
that keeps the ship
from halting in mid-ocean?
There must be many minds--
and how silent they all are.
They do not play in our captain's card game,
but keep their minds on their machines.
They do not stop to sling mud
For if they did, all that machinery
would grind to a halt.
Who are these men?
Where lies the power?
I feel a vast network about me,
an impenetrable system of steel and concrete.
And yet,
I cannot identify the minds
that are behind it all.
Frustration I feel--
no one knows, no one knows.
We, the people of the nation
are being led down a road
that is not of our own making--
destination unknown.
Confused are we, and helpless
For we cannot fight a power
whose face we cannot see.
Who shall win the card game?
Or does it really matter?
While the players tear at each other's throats,
The men in the control room
(who never entered the game)
quietly smile.
An iron fence
is closing about my heart.
Across the city,
the clank of hammers upon steel
mourn the passing of a world,
And I greatly fear what will become of us.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
THE BELL TELEPHONE HOUR: Burnham's The Managerial Revolution
Beginning in the early nineteen-seventies I was greatly influenced by the writings of three men: George Orwell, whom as everyone knows was the author of 1984; James Burnham, author of the book which inspired that novel, The Managerial Revolution, and Karl Wittfogel, who wrote Oriental Despotism. These men had three things in common: all were originally Marxists, all ultimately became more conservative (or at least, in Orwell's case, anti-Stalinist), and all taught that the future held not a worker's paradise but a state controlled by governmental bureaucrats and industrial managers, despotic in form. Since Orwell, whose book I have been reading and re-reading since I was in high school, was British and died in 1950, I had long assumed that Burnham (whom I knew only indirectly, from Orwell's commentary upon him) was British and died before I began to think about politics (I knew that Wittfogel was a naturalized American citizen of German descent). So it was with surprise that, when I was recently attempting to re-discover my own intellectual roots, I learned that Burnham, a native-born American, had survived until 1987, and indeed inspired a number of right-wing thinkers (for instance Samuel Francis, whom I find too offensively racist to be worth arguing with). As I am myself of the opposite political persuasion, it seemed worthwhile to read Burnham's book and find out why his theories, as conveyed by Orwell, had so influenced me and why the implications I had drawn from them were so different. To be sure, there were similarities. When I first discovered the "managerial revolution", which might better be called the "bureaucratic revolution", I too was afraid that Communism would triumph and impose a bureaucratic despotism upon us. But perhaps because I have never been a Marxist, and saw no necessary connection between power and the ownership or even control of property, I also glimpsed warning signs within our own society and government, which have become all the more obvious since the collapse of Communism and particularly, after the events of September 11, 2001. Wittfogel, with his emphasis upon the deleterious effects of large-scale irrigation systems upon non-Western societies, had led me to view modern technology as a threat to liberty in every country of the world. What was it about Burnham's theories which ultimately led me to look toward Washington D.C. and not foreign nations as the center of the new bureaucratic despotism? And who exactly are the new managers?
Burnham takes as his starting-point World War II, in the midst of which his book was written (though before the U.S. officially entered it). This is appropriate, as we shall see. He asserts that the war is only the external manifestation of a social revolution. Although that social revolution will replace capitalist society, which is generally characterized by parliamentary democracy and individualism, it will not usher in a socialist utopia. His dismissal of Soviet Russia as a genuine socialist society is all the more persuasive in that the process of movement away from the socialist ideal was later to be repeated in China and other Communist countries. His attempt to prove that socialism is not the only alternative to capitalism and that when capitalism is defeated it will be by another force entirely is persuasive except in one particular, for there is one passage in which, as we now know, he is demonstrably wrong. He says, "Experience has shown that there is not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment... Even total war, the most drastic conceivable 'solution', could not end mass unemployment in England and France, nor will it do so in this country." (p. 6). In fact, of course, it did-- and this has vastly more relevance to his theory of the bureaucratic revolution than he himself realizes.
For as he says elsewhere, advances in military technology have rendered obsolete one central tenet of socialist belief-- that the mass citizen armies which characterize capitalist society will ultimately turn their weapons against their oppressors. That is because "victory is today seen to depend upon complicated mechanical [sic--'electronic' would be more accurate] devices-- airplanes, tanks and bombers." (pp. 52-53) Burnham comes so close, yet fails to grasp, that the ultimate vehicle for the furtherance of his new managerial class would be the National Security State, with its continual readiness for and actual participation in unending warfare, which makes it more dangerous than any government which has ever existed. In this he may be excessively constrained by his own Marxist background. For he fails to see that in today's world, power is determined not by ownership or control of the means of production, but by the possession of knowledge, information--especially concerning all advanced technology which has any military application-- and in that fact lies the key to identifying the rulers of the new bureaucratic despotism.
Burnham's prediction that state ownership of all the means of production would replace private ownership (p. 72) has also proven false, but this does not mean that there is no truth in his theories-- actually he himself often confuses corporate ownership with state ownership, as if he did not realize that the former is still, after all, private. The important point is that in Burnham's theory, the managerial revolution is bringing about a situation in which political power is the determinant of economic power-- that is to say, if the advent of capitalism represented what Robert Heilbroner has called "the making of economic society", the advent of the managerial revolution represents its end. This is stated unequivocally by Burnham, who thus unintentionally undercuts the Marxist basis of his analysis: in the new managerial society, "The most powerful will also be the wealthiest." (p.94) Of course private corporations linger on, conveying to leftists the impression that they are fighting capitalism and to rightists the impression that they are defending it. But they have changed significantly in character, because technology has become more complex. As Burnham asserts,
"It is unnecessary to stress that the most important branches of modern industry are highly complex in technical organization. The tools, machines, and procedures involved are the results of highly developed scientific and technical operations. The division of labor is minute and myriad; and the turning out of the final product is possible only through the technical co-ordination of a vast number of separate tasks... A century ago, there were scarcely any trained chemists, physicists, biochemists, or even engineers functioning directly in industry, a fact which is plainly witnessed by the almost complete lack of educational facilities for training such industrial scientists and engineers. The comparatively primitive techniques of those days did not require such persons; today few branches of industry could operate without their services." (pp. 78-9)
These specialists require a new kind of management, which usually cannot be accomplished by the actual owners:
"This task of direction and coordination is itself a highly specialized function. Often it requires acquaintance with the physical sciences (or the psychological and social sciences, since human beings are not the least among the instruments of production) and with engineering." (p. 80)
Thus has the "management-controlled corporation" been born: quoting Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Burnham says:
"By 'management-controlled', as they explained, they meant that the managments [executives-- we would today call them CEOs] of these companies, though owning only minor percentages of the shares of their corporations, were in actuality self-perpetuating, in control of the policies and the boards of directors of the companies and able to manipulate them at will, through proxies, majority votes of the nominal owners, the shareholders. The American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation is the classic example of 'management-controlled'. (p. 88)
This assertion is bound to raise eyebrows among any aware defender of civil liberties today. It also raises the question, what is the relationship of the managers of these corporations to the managers of the state? And this is where Burnham makes his truly historic contribution, a contribution which Orwell was to illustrate so devastatingly in 1984. Discussing the location of sovereignty in modern society, Burnham says:
"Sovereignty has shifted from parliament to the administrative bureaus... How plainly is reflected in the enormous growth of the 'executive branch' of government... in comparison with the other two branches. Indeed, most of the important laws passed by Congress in recent years have been laws to give up some of its sovereign powers to one or another agency outside its control." (pp. 147-8)
Or, one might better say, to the non-elected part of the executive branch. In this connection, one must not take use of the term "bureaucrat" to imply plodding inefficiency. Bureaucrats in a democracy are plodding and inefficient because they have to follow the law and comply with directives passed down to them from democratically-elected officials. Having written a biography of Albert Speer, I know that bureaucrats in a totalitarian society can be exceptionally dynamic and efficient. So can bureaucrats who belong to what Bill Moyers called "the secret government" in our society-- that portion of the executive branch which refuses to subordinate itself to the rule of law or to democratically-elected leaders.
One such bureaucracy, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA, was brought into being by the National Security Act of 1947. It was signed into law by President Harry Truman, who later-- as if to confirm Burnham-- lamented that it had grown from a mere intelligence-gathering tool of the president to an "operational and at times policy-making arm of the government." Subordinate to it is the National Security Agency (NSA), which was created in 1952 and operates under the Department of Defense. Both agencies are supposed to deal primarily with foreign threats, but both have come to exercise excessive control over American citizens. Being essentially similar, the corporate managerial elite often cooperates with such government bureaucracies. That this is true can be seen from a case which recently came to public attention and which concerns the "classic example" of a management-controlled corporation, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).
In 2006, a man named Mark Klein, who had worked as a technician for AT&T for some 22 years, made public is discovery of the collusion of that corporation with the NSA. A special room had been installed in the corporation's San Francisco office, which the regular work force were not allowed to enter. Klein's technical specialty enabled him to discover that AT&T was electronically "splitting off" records of the activities conducted by private individuals on the internet-- whether e-mails, websearches or whatever-- and sending them to the NSA. According to Klein, "This potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens." Klein took the information to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, an organization which aims at the impossible goal of protecting the privacy of internet users, which eagerly took up the cause. EEF filed a class action suit against AT&T , and various branches of the ACLU also did so. When U.S District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the government could not use the state secrets privilege to block the lawsuit, the government appealed. The Senate passed an act which grants immunity to phone companies which assist in electronic surveillance, while the House passed one denying them such immunity. That such a divided Congress will be able to muster the votes necessary to overrule the inevitable presidential veto is unlikely, and in any case, intelligence agencies pay no attention to any law.
Meanwhile, the man who was in charge of the program, a despotic bureaucrat of Orwellian character, was making progress in his career. General Michael Hayden was director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005. During that time, he developed a strategy to increase the government's use of private industry for domestic surveillance. The first case which came to the public's attention involved warrantless wiretapping of phone calls made to parties outside the United States. The NSA's computer-based system searched for "tagged words" which might reveal the presence of a terrorist plot. Naturally this was bound to affect innocent citizens as well. As one television commentator complained, "Why should I be targeted by the government just because I have told someone overseas that my friend is writing her dissertation on jihad?" But the abuse represented by the warrantless wiretapping of telephone calls is dwarfed by the internet surveillance discovered by Klein. For in the first instance, however unconstitutional the method, there was at least a legitimate concern that someone might be in the process of conspiring to commit a violent act. The internet surveillance, by contrast, seems to aim at discovering the political opinions of people and targeting them on that basis. The mere fact that someone belongs or contributes to an organization which opposes government policy, such as the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights or EFF, can make him or her an object of interest to intelligence agencies. A blog such as this one and the ones which have preceded it on this blogspot undoubtedly make me an object of interest to them. But political opinions, as opposed to illegal actions, are none of the government's business. For his work in compiling lists of dissidents which will undoubtedly be used to nip in the bud any organized movement against future governmental outrages, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction or the declaration of martial law, General Hayden was made Director of the CIA, America's premier intelligence agency and chief promoter of lawlessness and terrorism throughout the world.
All this tends to support the Burnham thesis in its essentials. There is a profound difference between what we used to call capitalism and what the power which a corporation like AT&T represents today. For in contrast to the past, when private enterprise often found itself in opposition to government and in that respect may have exercised a salutary brake upon it (as government in turn exercised a salutary brake upon the rapacious greed of entrepreneurs), now management-run corporations work hand-in-hand with their bureaucratic counterparts. How any leftist today can think that the force he is opposing is capitalism, or any right-winger think that he is defending freedom, is beyond me. For it is clear that an alliance has been forged between the corporate managerial elite and governement bureacracies which is opposed both to traditional capitalism and political liberty. And of all the government agencies which pose a threat to liberty, the most dangerous are the intelligence agencies. We must not forget that the CIA is responsible for overthrowing democratically-elected governments and supporting dictatorships around the world. It is impossible not to think that the repressive methods it has been perfecting-- including torture-- will not be turned upon the Americans whose names have been complied through the NSA-AT&T collusion. When one contemplates this, it seems very appropriate that the CIA-run PHOENIX program in Vietnam called electrical torture "the Bell Telephone Hour".
Burnham takes as his starting-point World War II, in the midst of which his book was written (though before the U.S. officially entered it). This is appropriate, as we shall see. He asserts that the war is only the external manifestation of a social revolution. Although that social revolution will replace capitalist society, which is generally characterized by parliamentary democracy and individualism, it will not usher in a socialist utopia. His dismissal of Soviet Russia as a genuine socialist society is all the more persuasive in that the process of movement away from the socialist ideal was later to be repeated in China and other Communist countries. His attempt to prove that socialism is not the only alternative to capitalism and that when capitalism is defeated it will be by another force entirely is persuasive except in one particular, for there is one passage in which, as we now know, he is demonstrably wrong. He says, "Experience has shown that there is not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment... Even total war, the most drastic conceivable 'solution', could not end mass unemployment in England and France, nor will it do so in this country." (p. 6). In fact, of course, it did-- and this has vastly more relevance to his theory of the bureaucratic revolution than he himself realizes.
For as he says elsewhere, advances in military technology have rendered obsolete one central tenet of socialist belief-- that the mass citizen armies which characterize capitalist society will ultimately turn their weapons against their oppressors. That is because "victory is today seen to depend upon complicated mechanical [sic--'electronic' would be more accurate] devices-- airplanes, tanks and bombers." (pp. 52-53) Burnham comes so close, yet fails to grasp, that the ultimate vehicle for the furtherance of his new managerial class would be the National Security State, with its continual readiness for and actual participation in unending warfare, which makes it more dangerous than any government which has ever existed. In this he may be excessively constrained by his own Marxist background. For he fails to see that in today's world, power is determined not by ownership or control of the means of production, but by the possession of knowledge, information--especially concerning all advanced technology which has any military application-- and in that fact lies the key to identifying the rulers of the new bureaucratic despotism.
Burnham's prediction that state ownership of all the means of production would replace private ownership (p. 72) has also proven false, but this does not mean that there is no truth in his theories-- actually he himself often confuses corporate ownership with state ownership, as if he did not realize that the former is still, after all, private. The important point is that in Burnham's theory, the managerial revolution is bringing about a situation in which political power is the determinant of economic power-- that is to say, if the advent of capitalism represented what Robert Heilbroner has called "the making of economic society", the advent of the managerial revolution represents its end. This is stated unequivocally by Burnham, who thus unintentionally undercuts the Marxist basis of his analysis: in the new managerial society, "The most powerful will also be the wealthiest." (p.94) Of course private corporations linger on, conveying to leftists the impression that they are fighting capitalism and to rightists the impression that they are defending it. But they have changed significantly in character, because technology has become more complex. As Burnham asserts,
"It is unnecessary to stress that the most important branches of modern industry are highly complex in technical organization. The tools, machines, and procedures involved are the results of highly developed scientific and technical operations. The division of labor is minute and myriad; and the turning out of the final product is possible only through the technical co-ordination of a vast number of separate tasks... A century ago, there were scarcely any trained chemists, physicists, biochemists, or even engineers functioning directly in industry, a fact which is plainly witnessed by the almost complete lack of educational facilities for training such industrial scientists and engineers. The comparatively primitive techniques of those days did not require such persons; today few branches of industry could operate without their services." (pp. 78-9)
These specialists require a new kind of management, which usually cannot be accomplished by the actual owners:
"This task of direction and coordination is itself a highly specialized function. Often it requires acquaintance with the physical sciences (or the psychological and social sciences, since human beings are not the least among the instruments of production) and with engineering." (p. 80)
Thus has the "management-controlled corporation" been born: quoting Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Burnham says:
"By 'management-controlled', as they explained, they meant that the managments [executives-- we would today call them CEOs] of these companies, though owning only minor percentages of the shares of their corporations, were in actuality self-perpetuating, in control of the policies and the boards of directors of the companies and able to manipulate them at will, through proxies, majority votes of the nominal owners, the shareholders. The American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation is the classic example of 'management-controlled'. (p. 88)
This assertion is bound to raise eyebrows among any aware defender of civil liberties today. It also raises the question, what is the relationship of the managers of these corporations to the managers of the state? And this is where Burnham makes his truly historic contribution, a contribution which Orwell was to illustrate so devastatingly in 1984. Discussing the location of sovereignty in modern society, Burnham says:
"Sovereignty has shifted from parliament to the administrative bureaus... How plainly is reflected in the enormous growth of the 'executive branch' of government... in comparison with the other two branches. Indeed, most of the important laws passed by Congress in recent years have been laws to give up some of its sovereign powers to one or another agency outside its control." (pp. 147-8)
Or, one might better say, to the non-elected part of the executive branch. In this connection, one must not take use of the term "bureaucrat" to imply plodding inefficiency. Bureaucrats in a democracy are plodding and inefficient because they have to follow the law and comply with directives passed down to them from democratically-elected officials. Having written a biography of Albert Speer, I know that bureaucrats in a totalitarian society can be exceptionally dynamic and efficient. So can bureaucrats who belong to what Bill Moyers called "the secret government" in our society-- that portion of the executive branch which refuses to subordinate itself to the rule of law or to democratically-elected leaders.
One such bureaucracy, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA, was brought into being by the National Security Act of 1947. It was signed into law by President Harry Truman, who later-- as if to confirm Burnham-- lamented that it had grown from a mere intelligence-gathering tool of the president to an "operational and at times policy-making arm of the government." Subordinate to it is the National Security Agency (NSA), which was created in 1952 and operates under the Department of Defense. Both agencies are supposed to deal primarily with foreign threats, but both have come to exercise excessive control over American citizens. Being essentially similar, the corporate managerial elite often cooperates with such government bureaucracies. That this is true can be seen from a case which recently came to public attention and which concerns the "classic example" of a management-controlled corporation, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).
In 2006, a man named Mark Klein, who had worked as a technician for AT&T for some 22 years, made public is discovery of the collusion of that corporation with the NSA. A special room had been installed in the corporation's San Francisco office, which the regular work force were not allowed to enter. Klein's technical specialty enabled him to discover that AT&T was electronically "splitting off" records of the activities conducted by private individuals on the internet-- whether e-mails, websearches or whatever-- and sending them to the NSA. According to Klein, "This potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens." Klein took the information to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, an organization which aims at the impossible goal of protecting the privacy of internet users, which eagerly took up the cause. EEF filed a class action suit against AT&T , and various branches of the ACLU also did so. When U.S District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the government could not use the state secrets privilege to block the lawsuit, the government appealed. The Senate passed an act which grants immunity to phone companies which assist in electronic surveillance, while the House passed one denying them such immunity. That such a divided Congress will be able to muster the votes necessary to overrule the inevitable presidential veto is unlikely, and in any case, intelligence agencies pay no attention to any law.
Meanwhile, the man who was in charge of the program, a despotic bureaucrat of Orwellian character, was making progress in his career. General Michael Hayden was director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005. During that time, he developed a strategy to increase the government's use of private industry for domestic surveillance. The first case which came to the public's attention involved warrantless wiretapping of phone calls made to parties outside the United States. The NSA's computer-based system searched for "tagged words" which might reveal the presence of a terrorist plot. Naturally this was bound to affect innocent citizens as well. As one television commentator complained, "Why should I be targeted by the government just because I have told someone overseas that my friend is writing her dissertation on jihad?" But the abuse represented by the warrantless wiretapping of telephone calls is dwarfed by the internet surveillance discovered by Klein. For in the first instance, however unconstitutional the method, there was at least a legitimate concern that someone might be in the process of conspiring to commit a violent act. The internet surveillance, by contrast, seems to aim at discovering the political opinions of people and targeting them on that basis. The mere fact that someone belongs or contributes to an organization which opposes government policy, such as the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights or EFF, can make him or her an object of interest to intelligence agencies. A blog such as this one and the ones which have preceded it on this blogspot undoubtedly make me an object of interest to them. But political opinions, as opposed to illegal actions, are none of the government's business. For his work in compiling lists of dissidents which will undoubtedly be used to nip in the bud any organized movement against future governmental outrages, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction or the declaration of martial law, General Hayden was made Director of the CIA, America's premier intelligence agency and chief promoter of lawlessness and terrorism throughout the world.
All this tends to support the Burnham thesis in its essentials. There is a profound difference between what we used to call capitalism and what the power which a corporation like AT&T represents today. For in contrast to the past, when private enterprise often found itself in opposition to government and in that respect may have exercised a salutary brake upon it (as government in turn exercised a salutary brake upon the rapacious greed of entrepreneurs), now management-run corporations work hand-in-hand with their bureaucratic counterparts. How any leftist today can think that the force he is opposing is capitalism, or any right-winger think that he is defending freedom, is beyond me. For it is clear that an alliance has been forged between the corporate managerial elite and governement bureacracies which is opposed both to traditional capitalism and political liberty. And of all the government agencies which pose a threat to liberty, the most dangerous are the intelligence agencies. We must not forget that the CIA is responsible for overthrowing democratically-elected governments and supporting dictatorships around the world. It is impossible not to think that the repressive methods it has been perfecting-- including torture-- will not be turned upon the Americans whose names have been complied through the NSA-AT&T collusion. When one contemplates this, it seems very appropriate that the CIA-run PHOENIX program in Vietnam called electrical torture "the Bell Telephone Hour".
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