Follow the Money: The Secret Heart of the Secret State. The Deeper Implications of the Snowden Revelations
Eschewing the Wikileaks approach, the guardians at the Guardian have not let us judge the material for ourselves, opting instead to adopt, unwittingly, the same approach of the apparat: “we are the keepers of knowledge, we will decide what you need to know.”
As Silber notes, this doesn’t vitiate the worth of the revelations, but it does dilute their impact, leaving gaps that the apparat — and its truly repulsive apologists all through the ‘liberal media’ — can exploit to keep muddying the waters. He explores these ramifications, and others, in “In Praise of Mess, Chaos and Panic” and “Fed Up With All the Bullshit.”
In his latest piece, “‘Intelligence, Corporatism and the Dance of Death,” he cuts to the corroded heart of the matter, the deep, dark not-so-secret secret that our secret-keepers are trying to obscure behind their blizzards of bullshit: it’s all about the Benjamins.
After noting the gargantuan outsourcing of “intelligence” to private contractors like Booz Allen — the very firm that employed Snowden — Silber gives a quick precis of the essence of state-corporate capitalism (see the originals for links):
The biggest open secret all these creepy
jerks are hiding is the secret of corporatism (or what Gabriel Kolko
calls “political capitalism”):
There is nothing in the world that can’t
be turned into a huge moneymaker for the State and its favored friends
in “private” business, at the same time it is used to amass still
greater power. This is true in multiple forms for the fraud that is the
“intelligence” industry.
The pattern is the same in every
industry, from farming, to manufacturing, to every aspect of
transportation, to the health insurance scam, to anything else you can
name. In one common version, already vested interests go to the State
demanding regulation and protection from “destabilizing” forces which,
they claim, threaten the nation’s well-being (by which, they mean
competitors who threaten their profits). The State enthusiastically
complies, the cooperative lawmakers enjoying rewards of many kinds and
varieties. Then they’ll have to enforce all those nifty regulations and
controls. The State will do some of it but, heck, it’s complicated and
time-consuming, ya know? Besides, some of the State’s good friends in
“private” business can make a killing doing some of the enforcing. Give
it to them! Etc. and so on.
Silber then goes on:
… But that’s chump change. The real money
is elsewhere — in, for instance, foreign policy itself. You probably
thought foreign policy was about dealing with threats to “national
security,” spreading democracy, ensuring peace, and whatever other lying
slogans they throw around like a moldy, decaying, putrid corpse. The
State’s foreign policy efforts are unquestionably devoted to maintaining
the U.S.’s advantages — but the advantages they are most concerned
about are access to markets and, that’s right, making huge amounts of
money. Despite the unending propaganda to the contrary, they aren’t
terribly concerned with dire threats to our national well-being, for the
simple reason that there aren’t any: “No nation would dare mount a
serious attack on the U.S. precisely because they know how powerful the
U.S. is — because it is not secret.”
How does the public-”private” intelligence industry make foreign
policy? The NYT story offers an instructive example in its opening
paragraphs:
When the United Arab Emirates wanted to
create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to
Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful
spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.
It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s
cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the
United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell
who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster
the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”
See how perfect this is? All the special
people are making tons of money — and, when the day arrives that the
U.S. wants to ramp up its confrontational stance with Iran, well,
there’s the UAE helping to “track the Iranians” with all the tools that
the U.S. has given them and taught them to use. And how easy would it be
to get the UAE to provide the U.S. with just the right kind of new and
disturbing “intelligence” that would get lots of people screaming about
the “grave Iranian threat”? You know the answer to that: easy peasy. A
wink and a nod — and off the U.S. goes, with bombing runs or whatever it
decides to do. But whatever it does will be determined in greatest part
not by a genuine threat to U.S. national security (there is no evidence
whatsoever to suggest that Iran’s leaders are all suicidal), but by
what will make the most money for the State and its good friends.
Silber then underscores once more the highly instructive principle laid out by Robert Higgs:
I remind you once again of what I call
The Higgs Principle. As I have emphasized, you can apply this principle
to every significant policy in every area, including every aspect of
foreign policy. Here is Robert Higgs explaining it:
As a general rule for understanding
public policies, I insist that there are no persistent “failed”
policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the
actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the
U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years,
you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics:
follow the money.
When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle
East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they
have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical,
financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for
those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign
policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars.So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set of squalid concentration areas, so the “peace process” never gets far from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the policies failures; these things are all surface froth, costs not borne by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing.
….It’s all about wealth and power. Here
and there, in episodes notable only for their rarity, “the intelligence
world” might actually provide a small piece of information actually
related to “national security.” Again, I turn to Gabriel Kolko:
It is all too rare that states overcome
illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany,
Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence
anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes
that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false
expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more
likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth
century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence
since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it
accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these
nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies.
When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if
there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing
so.
Silber concludes:
…The intelligence-security industry isn’t
about protecting the United States or you, except for extraordinarily
rare, virtually accidental occurrences. It’s about wealth and power. Yet
every politician and every government functionary speaks reverently of
the sacred mission and crucial importance of “intelligence” in the
manner of a syphilitic preacher who clutches a tatty, moth-eaten doll of
the Madonna, which he digitally manipulates by sticking his fingers in
its orifices. Most people would find his behavior shockingly obscene, if
they noticed it. But they don’t notice it, so mesmerized are they by
the preacher with his phonily awestruck words about the holy of holies
and the ungraspably noble purpose of his mission. Even as the
suppurating sores on the preacher’s face ooze blood and pus, his
audience can only gasp, “We must pay attention to what he says! He wants
only the best for us! He’s trying to save us!”
What the preacher says — what every politician and national security
official says on this subject — is a goddamned lie. The ruling class has
figured out yet another way to make a killing, both figuratively and
literally. They want wealth and power, and always more wealth and power.
That’s what “intelligence” and “national security” is about, and
nothing else at all. When you hear Keith Alexander, or James Clapper, or
Barack Obama talk about “intelligence” and surveillance, how your lives
depend on them, and why you must trust them to protect you if you wish
to continue existing at all, think of the preacher. Think of his open
sores, of the blood and pus slowly dribbling down his face.All of them are murdering crooks running a racket. They are intent on amassing wealth and power, and they’ve stumbled on a sure-fire way to win the acquiescence, and often the approval, of most people. They are driven by the worst of motives, including their maddened knowledge that there will always remain a few people and events that they will be unable to control absolutely. For the rest of us, their noxious games are a sickening display of power at its worst. For us, on a faster or slower schedule, in ways that are more or less extreme, their lies and machinations are only a Dance of Death.
There is much more in Silber’s essays; go read them all now, if you haven’t done already.
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