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Who Do You Trust, US or Your Lying Eyes?

Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger

OSSInsigniaAs I write this I’ve just read a story in the New York Times about the U.S. threatening countries in South America to not grant asylum to Edward Snowden. In typical “Times” fashion these countries are characterized as “leftist” mavericks against the assumed U.S. hegemony in that vast continent. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/world/americas/us-is-pressing-latin-americans-to-reject-snowden.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&hp . The attitude of the story is that these countries by resisting our government’s pressure are acting in a petulant manner. This is typical of the mindset of many supposed journalists today who are unable to put in context the history behind the actions of certain players on the world stage. What it highlights for me is that there seems to be unprecedented pressure by our government to capture and punish Mr. Snowden for his “crimes”. With my admittedly jaundiced view of much of the history of my country in my lifetime, the attempt to take Snowden down for his “crimes” makes sense if you put into the context of American history with respect to foreign relations and how foreign relations has impacted the growing unconstitutional treatment of United States citizens at home and abroad. Since this is a huge topic deserving of many tomes and therefore doesn’t lend itself to the guest blog format, my piece will present my own impressionistic view of the interaction between foreign policy and the growth of the American Police State since World War II, which can be expanded, abetted or contradicted by you the reader.

For all practical purposes the Second World War began with the almost total loss of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. While it was known that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had actively been trying to aid Great Britain in its struggle against the Axis Powers in Europe, the American Congress was skeptical of foreign involvement and there was a large “isolationist” strain in the American people. The devastation of Pearl Harbor shocked the nation into realizing that it had to focus upon the rest of the world and awakened within the country a strong thirst for revenge. I say this not disparagingly since were I alive at the time, I would have been one with this national outrage and blood-lust.  The problem with arousing such a strong emotional call for action in any society is that in the frenzy to act, societal norms are often breached in the name of expediency. In the case of our country World War II planted the seeds of the Corporate/Military/Intelligence Complex (CMIC) that is reaching full flower today. What follows is my personal overview of this development since that embattled time and why this government has such a great need to crush Edward Snowden for his deeds.The winning of WWII can be equally credited to the rise of the U.S. Intelligence Establishment, as it was to the valiant efforts of our troops. In the years since WWII the veil of secrecy that surrounded these activities has been lifted and much is now known.  In July of 1941, FDR established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under William (Wild Bill) Donovan and thus began the start of a centralized United States Intelligence operation, 165 years after the beginning of our Revolution. This Wikipedia article is a rather simplistic overview, but provides some familiarity with the OSS and its morphing into the CIA after the end of WWII, the beginning of the “Cold War” with the USSR and the subsequent US Intelligence establishment.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services . The long history of nation’s intelligence apparatus has been intertwined with the ability to break the coded messages of other, nations known as Cryptography. The two breakthroughs in cryptography in WWII were breaking The Japanese Naval Codes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_naval_codes and the capture and deciphering of the German Enigma Code Machine by a joint Allied effort at the British Bletchley Park Facility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma . The possession of these two codes gave the U.S. and our Allies a significant strategic advantage. By understanding the maneuvering of Japan’s then dominant Pacific fleet, the damaged U.S. naval forces were able to avoid conflict with superior numbers and know where their attacks would be most effective. In the European Theater the Axis troop movements and the deployment of their naval forces were revealed to the highest levels of our military command and our Executive Branch.

With such vital information, the need for secrecy then became paramount. If either Japan or Germany became aware of the situation they could both change their codes and also mislead actions against their forces. For human beings secrets always have a way of becoming public, it is our nature. To keep these code breakthroughs secret extraordinary measures were understandably necessary. Sometime these measures included sacrificing our own troops and non-combatants to keep from revealing the knowledge of the code breakthrough. There is some evidence, for instance, that the railroads that brought Jews to the NAZI death camps weren’t bombed, because the advice to Roosevelt was that bombing the tracks would make the coding breakthrough apparent. Given the stakes that were involved in World War II, the rise of government secrecy seems understandable and ultimately made perfect sense, except if it was your life or the lives of loved ones being sacrificed. However, in human activity the Law of Unintended Consequences forever plays a role no matter how smart the idea. The secrecy involved in protecting the knowledge of the broken codes and of the development of atomic bombs, established the precedent that expediency in the face of danger gives great license to those charged with protecting us all.

The War represented a watershed for the United States when it came to intelligence operations. Prior to that War, despite the foreign interventions of “Progressives” such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, our country was not a player in what for centuries was known as “The Great Game” in European Imperialist nations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game  An essential in playing the game was a sophisticated, centralized intelligence operation. In America our intelligence operations until WWII were scattered among the military branches and the FBI, with coordination being the exception, rather than the rule. As victory in WWII became a certainty, the highest levels in the U.S and British governments were already planning their strategy against the USSR in what would soon become the “Cold War”. That Joseph Stalin was a far left version of Adolph Hitler cannot be denied. Certainly Stalin had murdered at least as many, if not more people than did Hitler. The fact is that militarily it was the USSR that had broken the back of NAZI Germany at the great battles of attrition that were Stalingrad and Leningrad. In the pincer movement from the East, the USSR had gained hegemony in Eastern Europe stretching into Germany. With the tutelage of the British Intelligence establishment the OSS morphed into the CIA and the America intelligence effort rapidly expanded into a force unto itself. As the Cold War developed in the late 40’s, there was bi-partisan agreement that expediency must prevail over this “threat” against our country and its people. One of the two prime elements of this expediency was the over classification of what was to be “Top Secret” and thus withheld from most Americans and its politicians. This deprived of the opportunity to examine and possibly protest the actions of our government. The second element was that all manner of laws and constitutional barriers to certain governmental behaviors, were to be broken in the name of this expediency. Let me just illustrate a few:

  1. Administration of LSD to unknowing American Citizens to test its “Cold War” application.
  2. De-stabilization of governments around the world perceived as hostile to U.S. interests.
  3. Assassinations of foreign leaders perceive as being Communist.
  4. Infiltration of various American political movements and counter-intelligence manipulations.
  5. Spying by the CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI etcetera on American political leaders.
  6. Illegal wiretapping expanded into other extensive data collection in the Digital Age.

I’ve chosen six broad illustrations, each of which could be expanded exponentially, to show what has become of the use of “Top Secrecy” in our country and the actions taken against those who dare breach that secrecy. The secrecy is imposed in the name of saving America from the threat of overwhelming outside danger, yet conveniently it also benefits those who are breaching our Constitution in the name of protecting it. As Jack Nicholson famously exclaims in the movie “A Few Good Men”: “You can’t handle the truth!”  This sums up the attitude of those who would destroy the life of Edward Snowden. Interestingly, this 1992 movie dealt with the intelligence/military issues we deal with today and is set in Guantanamo Bay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_few_good_men .  Many of our readers here are well aware of all six of the illustrations above, but if needed I could provide evidence for all of these incursions upon our Constitution and go far beyond them, yet they are so obvious I don’t feel the need.

My point is that as the years have passed since WWII, the breeches of our Constitution have grown to unprecedented proportions and have worked to destroy the concept of government put forth by our country’s Founders. Indeed, George Washington cautioned this country to beware of foreign entanglements.  http://jonathanturley.org/2013/06/01/the-father-of-our-country/  . Entangled, however, we are and that entanglement is choking the freedom out of our country. Edward Snowden’s revelation of the extensive spying being done on all American citizens was merely releasing a secret long suspected. With the occurrence of 9/11, the unnecessary war on Iraq, the passage of the Patriot Act and finally the spreading of that meaningless meme “The War on Terror” to justify them, our Corporate/Military/Intelligence Complex (CMIC) has run amuck “saving” our Country, while shredding its Constitution.

To continue to hold the power to run amok, the CMIC must maintain the faith in their cause with the American people. People like Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and now Edward Snowden must be crushed to maintain the illusion that these Constitutional violations are all being done in our best interests. They needed to be punished to serve as a lesson to others who would have the temerity to expose the truth to America and to the World at large. Daniel Ellsberg suffered difficulty after the revelations of the Pentagon Papers, but overcame them because the America of his time was different than America today. Manning is in Jail, Assange is trapped at an Embassy in London and Snowden is trapped in a Moscow airport. To my mind, these men performed heroic services in the spirit of informing us about the truth of our Government’s misdeeds and should not be considered as espionage agents. The eventual outcome of their lives is yet to play out, but the real traitors to America are those that want to crush them via prosecution in the supposed interests of

“national security”. That the prosecutors may honestly believe in the justness of their cause in hiding the truth of their actions from the public, does not make them less culpable or guilty. An oath of loyalty to our Constitution was sworn by all of our “protectors” and they have violated that oath, on a bi-partisan basis, for many years. Coincidentally, their actions have coincided with most of them achieving a good deal of success, but then the ability to self justify is a common trait in all of us humans. So the question does devolve to who do you trust? I personally don’t trust the government, as run by the CMIC, to uphold our Constitution and I don’t believe they are protecting us from anything by destroying our Constitution.

Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger

83 thoughts on “Who Do You Trust, US or Your Lying Eyes?”

  2. Looks like the spam filter ate my last posting.

    In any event I’m sorry to hear you are in the hospital Juliet N, hope you’re better and home soon.

  3. Juliet N., Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that. Get well soon.
    ________________

    The latest revelation from Snowden’s cache of information shows the intimate level of cooperation between the government and Microsoft:

    “The documents show that:
    • Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
    • The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
    • The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
    • Microsoft also worked with the FBI’s Data Intercept Unit to “understand” potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
    • In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
    • Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a “team sport”.” continues

    http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

    Also, collecting at the source, the fiber-optic collection scheme:

    “Agreements with private companies protect U.S. access to cables’ data for surveillance”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/agreements-with-private-companies-protect-us-access-to-cables-data-for-surveillance/2013/07/06/aa5d017a-df77-11e2-b2d4-ea6d8f477a01_story.html

  4. You had me, except for Manning. Nice article. I’m in the hospital, on Dilaudid, so I’ll leave the debate to people not under the influence. 🙂

  5. “Nepolitano’s nominations comes after a secretive process”. I guess that really says it all. Even universities now believe that secrecy is important and crucial to their existence. Nepolitano was a certifiable disaster as head of the Department of Constitutional Destruction, oh I mean Homeland Security. Now she is going to run a university, isn’t that special.

  6. Cultural Capture : Blatant academic control fraud : more “secret” process!

    ]latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uc-president-20130712,0,83979.story
    latimes.com
    Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security chief, to head University of California.

    By Larry Gordon

    7:00 AM PDT, July 12, 2013

    “Janet Napolitano, the U.S. secretary of Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, is being named as the next president of the University of California system, in an unusual choice that brings a national-level politician to a position usually held by an academic,

    Napolitano’s nomination by a committee of UC regents came after a secretive process that insiders said focused on her early as a high-profile, although untraditional, candidate who has led large public agencies…”

  7. The diabolical Henry Kissinger once famously quipped, ‘A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security’

    But compare that to a tried and true American: Mark Twain’s adage that “…you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”

  9. Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War… )
    by Jeremy Kuzmarov (Jun 30, 2012)

    This title posted is also exiled under: Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    But a preview and table of contents (remarkable & insightful in itself) along with samples from the first few pages are all generously provided on Amazon.com.

    Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War… )
    by Jeremy Kuzmarov (Jun 30, 2012)

  11. Mike Spindell: Timely and profoundly vital to our current realities: another great posting …Your the Man!

    The general trend for the demise of the Constitution (I argue) is from Foreign Policy and secret operations that are practiced over seas and gradually become the norm for Intelligence Operations in Countries where the American Constitution does not have impact on rogue behaviors (all done in the name of American National Security Interests. After a time these methods are considered normal and whether they are rigging elections to control succession, instigating chaos and undermining true democratic processes that are not in the “perceived” interests (from the powers that be..), regime changes or surveillance techniques, it is eventually brought back (especially after a generational duration that literally “acculturate” these measures as “essential” tactics for ‘freedom’ etc.),…they are brought into play insidiously to our domestic American society. The process can include gradual ‘De-criminalization’ by incremental measures through justifications that rationalize legitimation and actual legislation induced through political and regulatory capture.
    All the ‘rest’…is history. Bruce

  12. http://www.amazon.com/Policing-Americas-Empire-Surveillance-Perspectives/dp/0299234142/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373696742&sr=1-1&keywords=Policing+Americas+Empire

    Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (New Perspectives in Se Asian Studies)
    by Alfred W. McCoy (Paperback)
    Publication Date: October 15, 2009

    Be sure to See the Editorial review (Word Press has not let me post it)

  13. http://www.amazon.com/Policing-Americas-Empire-Surveillance-Perspectives/dp/0299234142/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373696742&sr=1-1&keywords=Policing+Americas+Empire

    See :
    Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (New Perspectives in Se Asian Studies)
    by Alfred W. McCoy (Paperback)
    Publication Date: October 15, 2009

    Editorial review [excerpt]

    At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day.

    But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War.

    “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago

  14. http://www.amazon.com/Policing-Americas-Empire-Surveillance-Perspectives/dp/0299234142/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373696742&sr=1-1&keywords=Policing+Americas+Empire

    See :
    Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (New Perspectives in Se Asian Studies)
    by Alfred W. McCoy (Paperback)

    Editorial review [excerpt]
    Book Description
    Publication Date: October 15, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0299234142 | ISBN-13: 978-0299234140 | Edition: 1
    At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day.
    But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War.

    “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago

    “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within…”

  15. Mike Spindell: Timely and profoundly vital to our current realities: another great posting …Your the Man!

    The general trend for the demise of the Constitution (I argue) is from Foreign Policy and secret operations that are practiced over seas and gradually become the norm for Intelligence Operations in Countries where the American Constitution does not have impact on rogue behaviors (all done in the name of American National Security Interests. After a time these methods are considered normal and whether they are rigging elections to control succession, instigating chaos and undermining true democratic processes that are not in the “perceived” interests (from the powers that be..), regime changes or surveillance techniques, it is eventually brought back (especially after a generational duration that literally “acculturate” these measures as “essential” tactics for ‘freedom’ etc.),…they are brought into play insidiously to our domestic American society. The process can include gradual ‘De-criminalization’ by incremental measures through justifications that rationalize legitimation and actual legislation induced through political and regulatory capture.
    All the ‘rest’…is history. Bruce
    =============================================

    See :
    Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (New Perspectives in Se Asian Studies)
    by Alfred W. McCoy (Paperback)
    Editorial review [excerpt]
    Book Description
    Publication Date: October 15, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0299234142 | ISBN-13: 978-0299234140 | Edition: 1
    At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day.
    But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War.

    “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago

    “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within…”

  17. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/17278-from-philippines-to-nsa-111-years-of-the-us-surveillance-state
    > From the Philippines to the NSA: 111 Years of the US Surveillance State
    > Saturday, 29 June 2013

    [EXCERPT]

    “The surveillance state has expanded massively over the last decade, its capacity for monitoring and storing information made vastly more invasive and powerful by new technology. Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, an author and guest on Bill Moyers and Company, points out the irony of this latest assault on our privacy and our rights. “The surveillance state,” he told Moyers, “doesn’t really do much in terms of giving us lots of security. But what it does do, is it destroys the notion of privacy… The way things are supposed to work is we’re supposed to know everything that the government does with rare exception, that’s why it’s called the public sector. And they’re supposed to know almost nothing about us… This has been completely reversed, so that we know almost nothing about what the government does. It operates behind this impenetrable wall of secrecy, while they know everything about what we’re doing, with whom we’re speaking and communicating, what we’re reading.”

    In the government’s desire to maintain secrecy, the Obama administration has invoked the Espionage Act of 1917 to silence whistleblowers and prevent leaks to the press. Five people were prosecuted in 2010, all for leaks to the press, and more recently cablegate whistleblower Private Bradley Manning.

    The Espionage Act of 1917, based on the Defense Secrets Act of 1911 — which was in turn based on the British Official Secrets Act — prohibited any interference with military operations or recruitment and, in a particularly vague provision, any perceived support of America’s enemies during wartime. The Espionage Act has been amended repeatedly and challenged in the courts but, with the open-ended War on Terror, remains a useful tool to silence dissent.

    As ominous as these developments are, the techniques for keeping tabs on American citizens and suppressing dissent have a long and unsavory history that predates the National Security Act of 1947 by some fifty years. The actions of the administration of Woodrow Wilson in 1917 represent the most obvious and egregious antecedent.

    In order to stir up support for a very unpopular war, Wilson created the Creel Commission of Public Information, a propaganda machine that turned indifferent Americans into anti-German zealots practically overnight. The Creel Commission’s legal counterpart, the Espionage Act — and the even more draconian Sedition Act — granted the government sweeping powers to suppress and prosecute anyone voicing even the smallest criticism of the war effort. The Justice Department sponsored the American Protective League; by June 1917, units in 600 American towns and cities counted nearly 100,000 members.”

  18. I agree with much of what you said, but I have to disagree on some things. Manning is a far different case than Snowden since Manning simply dumped millions of damaging items that had nothing to do with illegal activities and breached legitimate secrets. So I am far less forgiving of Manning. If he had stuck to the release of the videos of the war crimes, I would be joining you in protest at his prosecution, but his overreaching cost him my support.

    The historical record should be corrected since it was basically the British who roped in the US and OSS into their project for attacking the Soviet Union after WWII. If you read the book MI-6 it has all the nasty details of how MI-6 sent sabotuers and supported fascists in Eastern Europe immediately after the shooting stopped. They started a HOT war against the Soviet occupation forces while Stalin had looked forward to a peaceful co-existence. By 1948, it had become clear that the hot war was on and the Soviets consolidated their dictatorship over Eastern Europe by imposing communist regimes totally controlled by Moscow. At the time of Churchill Iron Curtain speech in 1946, there were NOT communist regimes in Eastern Europe but coalition ones. Czechoslovakia was still a free country at that time too. The others had communists in the government, but not totally dominated by them. Yugoslavia had total freedom of action since they had baiscally fought off the Nazis with some help from the Red Army and Churchill.

    FDR was very much opposed to the British retaking their colonies after WWII and of course was even MORE opposed to the French doing the same. After FDR died, Truman was thrown into the situation and had none of FDRs opposition against retaking the colonies. Anti-communism was then used as the excuse to support colonial rule against the natives.

    I think that there are some reasonable things that can and should be done and kept secret. They do infringe on some parts of our rights, but one has to live in the real world and balance these things. I know that it is bad to say trust me for any political powerful figure, but that has to be done at some point on some things. So I cannot join in a wholesale condemnation of everything that has been done. I think it is quite reasonable to monitor overseas traffic of aliens and no violation of the Constitution. Does the Constitution protect the rights of foreign govenments to be free from US spying on them in the US? I don’t think so. So while I think that much of the so called security state can and should be pared back, this should be done by Congress and our elected representatives since THEY are charged with our security after all.

  19. Great subject Mike. As I get ready to hit the hay, I couldn’t help but dwell on your article. The Top Secret classification bugaboo hits home with me because my Dad’s last mission was a top secret one and it was so classified for almost 50 years and there is some evidence that some of it is still classified more than 62 years later. The top secret classification is so overused it is pathetic and comical, except to the families that suffer not knowing what happened to their loved ones. I recommend reading Flyboys by James Bradley for an example of families prevented from the truth for 50 years because the truth was very ugly. The MIC must be dismantled, but without money being removed from the political system, I doubt that the MIC will be reduced or weakened in the near future. With the onset of the NSA and the immense volume of data it can steal from us, the future looks dim.

  20. “I personally don’t trust the government, as run by the CMIC, to uphold our Constitution and I don’t believe they are protecting us from anything by destroying our Constitution.”

    I would throw in the following too:
    1. Senate & Congress. (Federal and State.)
    2. Supreme Court.
    3. Police.
    and many many more… (oops….))

Comments are closed.