I skimmed through all of it.
To review some thoughts from my favorite RI thread on this
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... =8&t=28897The deep state is much bigger than we tend to think but not all of it is very deep: It's a set of structures and private interests more permanent than administrations, but these are mostly in the open, just relatively taboo and elite. More ignored or denied than hidden. And it's complicated.
So you have
- a national security bureaucracy consisting of military and civilian secret agencies who are in it for organizational interests first of all (justify missions, expand budgets, maintain total dominance militarily, maintain total surveillance on everyone, etc.)
- a power elite at the think tanks, corporations, universities and investment houses who have geopolitical religion, with some of the cast rotating in and out of public office (the Rubins, Bakers, Gates, etc.)
- consensus policies avoided in polite company that are nevertheless known (it's not really about "terrorism" but geopolitics, resources and profits),
- literally hidden policies (let's have a relatively small crew overthrow the Ukrainian government for sport, it will be so cool! - this was hardly something subject to a public debate within the power elite at large before it was undertaken)
and
- a general realm for action by private actors and informal networks that in part do whatever the fuck they like (parapolitics: one group launders some drug money over here, another does an arms deal over there, a third supports some crazy fanatic homophobic religious nonsense in Uganda, etc. etc.)
- a lot of foreign interests and agencies tied in at various nodes in the above, sometimes at odds with each other (UK, NATO countries, Israel, Saudi, Pakistan, Anglosphere, etc. etc.)
To an extent it's a self-service emporium for corruption, plunder and domination. We should distinguish between the growth of executive power relative to other branches, the permanent bureaucracy and surrounding power elite making policy, the "legal" top secret complex or national security state, the many presumed sub-branches walled off thanks to compartmentalization, and the private/parapolitical realms branching off from all this.
Glennon tends to focus on the least "deep", the permanent burecaucracy and national security state, which is also probably the most important:
... power in the United States lay initially in one set of institutions—the President, Congress, and the courts. These are America’s “dignified” institutions. Later, however, a second institution emerged to safeguard the nation’s security. This, America’s “efficient” institution (actually, as will be seen, more a network than an institution) consists of the several hundred executive officials who sit atop the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement departments and agencies that have as their mission the protection of America’s international and internal security. Large segments of the public continue to believe that America’s constitutionally established, dignified institutions are the locus of governmental power; by promoting that impression, both sets of institutions maintain public support. But when it comes to defining and protecting national security, the public’s impression is mistaken. America’s efficient institution makes most of the key decisions concerning national security, removed from public view and from the constitutional restrictions that check America’s dignified institutions. The United States has, in short, moved beyond a mere imperial presidency to a bifurcated system—a structure of double government—in which even the President now exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of U.S. national security policy. Whereas Britain’s dual institutions evolved towards a concealed republic, America’s have evolved in the opposite direction, toward greater centralization, less accountability, and emergent autocracy.
Glennon quotes an author called Nasr, then comments:
When it came to drones there were four formidable
unanimous voices in the Situaton Room: the CIA, the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the
Pentagon, and the White House’s counterterrorism adviser,
John Brennan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates . . . was
fully supportive of more drone attacks. Together, Brennan,
Gates, and the others convinced Obama of both the urgency
of counterterrorism and the imperative of viewing
America’s engagement with the Middle East and South
Asia through that prism. Their bloc by and large
discouraged debate over the full implications of this
strategy in national security meetings.(392)
What Nasr does not mention is that, for significant periods, all four voices were hold-overs from the Bush Administration; two Bush Administration officials, Michael J. Morell and David Petraeus, headed the CIA from July , 2011 to March 8, 2013.(393) The Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, had served in the Bush Administration as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command and earlier as Director of the Joint Staff in the Office of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff;(394) Brennan had been Bush’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Center;(395) and Gates had served as Bush’s Secretary of Defense.(396)
Gates of course is a key player in the permanent National Security State since the 1960s and a long-time Bush mob veteran with deep involvement in the Iran-Contra crimes. With Baker (similar pedigree), he authored the Iraq report under Bush-Rumsfeld that called for a deescalation. Just to underline the national security state's essentially Machiavellian divide between what is said and what is done, when Gates replaced Rumsfeld after the 2006 election, he oversaw the bloody escalation, "the surge." He then oversaw the Afghanistan "surge" under Obama.
