Michael Glennon
4.0 out of 5 stars World Class on One Half of the Challenge, Misses the Other Half Entirely, February 25, 2015
If Mort Halperin, who wrote the original book with the memorable “Rule 1” (Lie to the President if you can get away with it), Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy is kind enough to praise this book, I will over-look the hype (it is NOT the “first”). This is an important book and very helpful to a deep study of the deep state, but it is also severely deficient to the point of mis-leading the public away from the 42 billionaires that own the government; away from the religious and ideologicial treason that skews government policy; and away from the lack of intelligence with integrity that we have a right to expect from our “intelligence” community. It also soft shoes the elite pedophile protective network within the FBI, and the drug-running money-laundering side show at CIA as well as the totally out of control Pentagon elements willing to murder US citizens including military officers to keep their boat afloat — the deep deep state. [I revere the FBI, CIA, and DoD as institutions — my point is that we don't do serious counterintelligence in the USA, all of those organizations have layers of corruption going back to their founders, each layer recruiting and promoting its successors, all far outside the ken of this book.]
On the half of the problem that is within our government, where William Binney has summed it up nicely — the bureaucrats live to keep the problems alive and the money moving, this book is now the new gold standard, and Bravo Zulu for that. It does, not, unfortunately, point the way toward how we might restore the US Constitution, Article 1 particularly, and re-establish integrity across the three branches of government, each subverted by religious, ideological, and financial treason not adequately addressed by this book — hence the reduction to four stars.
The index is most helpful in confirming what I consider a form of “slight of hand.” This is a book that has the best of intentions and stellar scholarship in its focus on one narrow aspect of why US foreign policy is criminally insane, but it obscures, with stunning nonchalance, the deeper pathologies of how the US Government is managed of, by, and for the 1%; with two specific foreign countries — Israel and Saudi Arabia — having catastrophically pernicious influence on our policies and how we spend the taxpayer dollar.
The author's focus on NSA surveillance is a compelling contribution. I was among those who tried to tell Mike Hayden he was in violation of the Constitution, and I know Bamford and Binney and Drake and admire them all — Snowden leaves me confused — at first I thought he was a first class Chinese op now I wonder if he is a White House sanctioned CIA slam on NSA's going one blackmail op too far — but I embrace Snowden's outcomes as useful. NSA and CIA and USDI are out of control. I applaud the author's focus on excessive secrecy — I testified on this point to the Moynihan Commission both publicly and privately in the Senator's office. The bottom line, however, is that none of this would persist if we had an honest Executive, an honest Legislature, and an honest Judiciary.
In my view, the Executive was neutralized when John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a mix of LBJ and Hoover and private sector interests along with Israel (Rabin was in Dallas as was George Bush Senior, at the time a CIA proprietary officer — CIA Office of Technical Services probably provided the Secret Service credential that allowed Hunt and the others to escape). The question we have to ask is this: is CIA, immortalized by Col Fletcher Prouty The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World truly corrupt as an institution, or does it have elements, as I have written elsewhere (“Seven CIA's”) that are directly responsive to Wall Street, to the Nazi Hydra, and to the Mafia as well as the Catholic Church, Saudi Arabia, and Zionist Israel? If the FBI were a serious organization, I would not have to be asking this question.
Congress was neutralized by Newt Gingrich when he destroyed Speaker Jim Wright, a story told in The Ambition and the Power: The Fall of Jim Wright: A True Story of Washington. That was when Article 1 was dumped and the two-party tyranny took over, turning all “Members” into foot-soldiers for party voting sold to the highest bidder — as of last week, 42 specifically identified billionaires led by the Koch brothers. We no longer have a government, we have hired hands doing the bidding of a very small class of very wealthy individuals, and the public is so blinded by lazy academics, pontificating think tank pundits, and down-right corrupt media personalities, that we can reasonably consider — as Princton recently concluded — that democracy does not exist in the USA today.
The Judiciary was finally neutralized at the Supreme Court level by Justice Powell and the US Chamber of Commerce after a 25 year campaign culminating in CIITZEN's UNITED.
I note the author's appreciation for Amy Zegart's work — we are indeed in a fix big or don't fix at all situation — but he is missing the larger point: the out of control bureaucracy is not the problem, the problem is the out of touch citizenry. Absent Electoral Reform and the restoration of integrity to our electoral process and our government, we will continue to be a criminal state not because the bureaucrats want it that way — millions of good people trapped in a bad system — but because the 1% both at home and abroad want it that way. We have been captured. Washington is not in friendly hands and it is in constant betrayal of the public trust with the active and persistent approval of many of the author's key membership institutions, the Council on Foreign Relations among them.
Here are a few other books to balance this one.
The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (War and Peace Library)
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II–Updated Through 2003
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
Washington is not the heart, soul, or brain of the Republic — it is at best the arms and legs, the base of the tentacles with global reach. Most troubling to me is that this excellent book feeds the cultural disposition to blame the bureaucrats rather than Goldman Sachs, George Soros, the Koch Brothers, and others whose greed outside the government is vastly more responsible for the sorry state of affairs than any irresponsible spend-thrift bureaucrat.
Best wishes to all,
Robert David STEELE Vivas
OPEN POWER: Electoral Reform Act of 2015 – Open Source Activists' Toolkit
