This is a truly great piece of writing on the most important topic in the world today: is the US Govt in fact controlled by extremists in their military and crooks in their corporations?
A powerful piece of writing on the US Industrial-Military Complex.
John Tognolini
Last week, a trove of previously secret Pentagon documents were exposed to the world, after having been previously posted on a series of Discord servers frequented by a community of gamers. Most discussion of the leaks has profoundly mistaken their significance, charitably ignoring the actors who need most to be held to account. By mistaking a tree for the forest, these reports continue to reinforce an illegitimate bipartisan consensus favoring militarism at the cost of democracy, transparency, and human rights.
Earlier today, the FBI arrested Jack
Texeira, a member of the intelligence department of the Massachusetts Air
National Guard, at his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts. If past is
prologue, he will face an array of efforts to discredit him, from attacks on
his character (of the sort that Edward Snowden faced) or his sanity, lucidity,
and credibility (of the sort that, a generation earlier, drove President Nixon
to order a break-in at a psychiatrist’s office in the Watergate Hotel in order
to discredit military whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg).
While the teen who came to know
Texeira distinguishes him from whistleblowers like Snowden & Ellsberg based
on their respective motivations, the constitutional functions they have each
played (informing the public despite the machinations of bureaucrats) is
remarkably similar. In any case, focusing on the leaker—rather than what he
revealed—is a classic tactic of intelligence agencies responding to
embarrassing leaks.
I write to expose and challenge
corruption in the U.S., where journalists have unfortunately made themselves
complicit. My reach is insignificant compared to their’s, however, so I
encourage you to share this post with others who might learn from it.
What journalists have ignored
Lost in seemingly every public report
on the leaks is the dire, long-standing, and continuing failure by Congress to
assert its oversight powers. Every single one of the secrets revealed in the
Pentagon leaks represents a failure of congressional overseers to mind the
proverbial store.
In addition to exposing the failures
of Congress, the leaks also expose the abject failure of journalists to provide
even a modicum of transparency into the continuing military industrial
corruption of which America was warned 60 years ago by the last president
elected to the White House as a war hero. The uncritical amplification of
Pentagon lies by mass media sources has enabled each and every one of our
nation’s many wars waged since the Second World War. The pattern appears to
repeat itself today.
This is no mere failure to cross a T
or dot an I. The Pentagon has never passed an independent audit, and in 2018
was caught after losing track of $21 trillion in missing funds. The failure of
Congress to monitor how America’s tax dollars have been spent, and the failures
of journalists to inform the public about the scope or scale of the Pentagon’s
ongoing fraud, waste, and abuse has allowed the military—and corporate
contractors with their own private interests—to pursue any number of
fraudulent, deadly adventures.
The Pentagon’s scandal du jour in the
80s and 90s involved selling weapons to Iran in order to run crack cocaine into
U.S. cities, ultimately enslaving 2.5 million (mostly dark-skinned) Americans
through a thoroughly legal process. In the time since then, the CIA has
pioneered new human rights abuses in the form of remote robotic assassinations,
after playing a central role in abducting hundreds of people seemingly at
random, torturing them (in some cases to death), and detaining them without
charge or trial, before hacking the U.S. Senate to hide and steal evidence of
its internationally criminal trail.
Three generations ago, a U.S.
president called for the CIA to be disbanded. He died in a violent
assassination that remains a mystery to this day, largely because official
policy continues to protect the secrecy over many of the documents related to
JFK’s assassination. Why are so many government secrets so widely accepted when
so many lies have lurked beneath the surface every time anyone has managed to
look?
Rather than suppress the leaks
entirely, the press is instead watering them down by reporting on them while
reducing their significance to isolated data points, ignoring the pattern they
indicate or how it continues to unfold under our noses
In the years since the assassinations
of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X,
the propensity for secrecy in the military establishment has grown only more
expansive and pernicious. President Eisenhower warned the public of this
tendency, yet every civilian administration since has grown complicit in
precisely the pattern that he predicted.
So has Congress, as well as most major
news publications.
On the take
Too many Members of Congress profit
from the military industrial complex. That’s one reason that Eisenhower’s first
draft of his famous speech coining the term referred to a “military industrial
congressional complex.”
Allowing insider trading oligarchs to
directly profit from militarism by investing in weapons companies is only the
tip of an iceberg. Employees of weapons contractors are prohibited from
directly contributing to federal political campaigns, but nothing stops them
from bundling campaign contributions or asserting influence through other channels.
Whether indirectly (through bundled
political campaign contributions) or directly (through their own shared
ownership), too many policymakers share the interests of corporate weapons
manufacturers. Their deference to military industrial corruption is not only an
abdication of their constitutional responsibilities and oath of office, but
also a straightforward defense of their own bank accounts.
Few examples of corruption could rival
this pattern. It has driven U.S. foreign policy for the last 75 years, yet few
voices in the press have ever publicly recognized it.
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Asleep at the switch
The pattern of the Pentagon’s lies and
obfuscation is disturbingly well-entrenched, revealing that both Congress and
the press have repeatedly fallen asleep at the switch.
Every whistleblower or leaker
represents a failure of congressional oversight. The reason government
employees blow whistles and come forward with information to inform the press
is because they encounter information in the course of their jobs that
contradicts what their bosses previously claimed in public, usually in
congressional hearings before our elected representatives.
Many voices reporting on the latest
leaks have noted how classified Pentagon documents were hosted on a nominally
public server for several months before anyone noticed. Most of those voices
focus their critique on the Pentagon and its failure to guard its own secrets.
But the journalists who repeated the
propaganda exposed by the leaks share equal—if not more—blame. Guarding secrets
is ancillary to the military’s core function, but exposing them is the very
purpose of the press.
Yet American journalists routinely
defer to their managers in the national security establishment, assisting the
executive branch in duping Congress and the voting public again and again. For
instance, the New York Times suppressed coverage before the 2004 election of
the mass surveillance regime eventually exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013. That
editorial decision likely swung a presidential election.
And it was not an isolated incident.
Spanning more than half a century, the wars on Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan
were all enabled by media sources parroting recurring Pentagon lies.
Even today, the pattern continues in
Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has
thoroughly documented Washington’s recent covert attack on the Nordstream
pipeline through which Germany used to secure Russian natural gas. Even though
the attack represented a prolific act of both international terrorism and
ecocide, and Hersh has a long record of exposing Pentagon crimes that
Washington attempted to cover up, most major news publications have refused to
cover his most recent findings.
Even as it is being exposed for some
of its secrets, the Pentagon continues to somehow hide many of its others in
plain sight. Among them is a classified analysis of the CIA’s torture program
that reportedly documented abuses including the rape and murder of detainees.
The recent revelations of Pentagon secrets reflect just a few among God-only-knows
how many.
One journalist who demonstrated the
temerity to expose the U.S. military’s 2007 assassination of Reuters
journalists in Iraq, Julian Assange, is himself the target of a bipartisan
prosecution. Another, James Risen, wrote in 2018 about facing government
demands in court seeking sources on whom he had relied for his reporting at the
New York Times:
The Obama administration was demanding
that I reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for a chapter about a
botched CIA operation in my 2006 book, “State of War.” I had also written about
the CIA operation for the New York Times, but the paper’s editors had
suppressed the story at the government’s request. It wasn’t the only time they
had done so.
…
My case was part of a broader
crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency
of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama
administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous
administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal
leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown
on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak
investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated
with kid gloves.
…
As I took the stand, I thought about
how I had ended up here, how much press freedom had been lost, and how
drastically the job of national security reporting had changed in the post-9/11
era.
Retaliation against the public is
predictable
As with every supposed threat to U.S.
national security, the leaks announced last week will inevitably be used as a
pretext to expand mass surveillance. Despite having long monitored social media
sites, government “intelligence” agencies somehow overlooked that their secrets
were being circulated online for weeks. Resulting calls to expand government
monitoring of social media sites are as predictable as the pattern that has
repeated itself ever since the authors of the PATRIOT Act opportunistically
took advantage of the 9-11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
Beyond a continuing unaccountable
groupthink among bureaucrats is a congressional oversight apparatus that is
effectively broken, a press corps that is absent or co-opted, and a voting
public that is left ignorant as a result.
Ignorance might be bliss for
Americans, but our ignorance of Washington’s role in the world continues to
drive human beings into early graves by the thousands.
Better 20 years late than never
Another event from last week offers an
interesting juxtaposition that has been widely overlooked. On Wednesday, the
Senate approved a measure to repudiate the 2002 authorization for the use of
military force, at the same time that it finally repealed the authorization for
the Persian gulf war in 1991.
Each of these votes comes a generation
(if not two) after the fact, cementing the abdication by Congress of its
warmaking powers to the executive branch.
This, also, is not just a cosmetic
failure. At the time when our Republic was founded, the allocation of war
making authority was a crucial bone of contention in the drafting of the
Constitution. Our founders understood that chief executives share a political
incentive to initiate war, and aimed explicitly to prevent it from dragging the
country into unnecessary conflict. Writing The Federalist Number 69 in 1788,
Alexander Hamilton discussed at some length the limited power of the chief
executive in the proposed constitutional design, specifically noting that it
reserved the power to declare war to the legislature.
That was 150 years before America’s
emergence as a global hegemon in the wake of the Second World War.
In the time since then, Congress has
abandoned its authority to limit the Pentagon, and constrain it from a
murderous foreign policy entirely disconnected from the security of We the
people of the United States. In doing so, it has effectively invited resource
coups around the world, from dozens in Latin America engineered to literally
steal fruit to the notorious oil wars of the 2000s.
Will future wars over lithium and
increasingly scarce fresh water replace them?
If Congress has anything to say about
it, the answer will be an ignorant and enthusiastic “yes.” And the political
consensus supporting that militarism will be enabled by public lies, covered up
by the press and supported by the peoples’ elected representatives in
Washington from both major political parties.
Here we go again
Washington’s fraudulent proxy conflict
in Ukraine, its foolish and unnecessary escalation in the South China Sea, and
recent act of international ecocide and terrorism in the North Atlantic all
indicate the continuing unaccountability of a military industrial establishment
more dedicated to selling weapons than guarding human rights or keeping people
alive.
Voters generally think that their
elected voices have priorities more closely aligned with theirs. But their
collective failure of oversight, more than any of the discrete secrets that
have been exposed, should be the overarching take away from this saga.
Unfortunately, the press is once again
doing its best to cover up the crimes of the military industrial establishment.
Rather than suppress the leaks entirely, the press is instead watering them
down by reporting on them while reducing their significance to isolated data
points, ignoring the pattern they indicate or how it continues to unfold under
our noses—even now, when increasingly in plain sight.
Some journalists have noted how the
leaks expose the bizarre expansiveness of access to top-secret information
within the military establishment. This is not news, however. The overclassification
of military secrets has itself been an open secret for years. I ran for
Congress on a platform including proposed reforms to the classification regime
in order to force government officials to justify claims of secrecy, and to
shift the presumptions under the Freedom of Information Act to better enable
the public, press, and policymakers to access information.
Few journalists among the many who
covered our campaign understood the profundity of that position or bothered to
mention it in their reporting, which tended instead to favor racist
disinformation peddled by Democrats across the ideological spectrum loyal to
either Pelosi or their own careers. One exception was Jeremy Scahill, an editor
at the Intercept who hosted me for an interview three weeks before the
character assassination that began on my birthday and ended my career in law
and politics. As I explained then:
I’m gravely disappointed in seeing the
Democratic Party line up to promote the militarism that Dr. King warned us to
repudiate….[E]very time we’ve seen voices in the Democratic Party gain
widespread traction, it’s [when] they oppose militarism. Barack Obama won the
White House as the peace candidate and Bernie got a lot of the traction that he
got around the country in the last two presidential cycles precisely because he
opposes the militarism that unites the corporate wing of the Party.
Transparency is a critical enabler of
democracy, without which we cannot claim in any way to respect the consent of
the governed. Military secrets, especially in a country with the largest
military budget on Earth and global military operations spanning bases in over
170 countries, are simply incompatible with civilian governance.
They reveal the fascist nature of the
United States in 2023, and confirm the historical success of a constitutional
coup over the course of the past three generations, as secret agencies have
eclipsed Congress as the ultimate decision making authority over how our
resources are used across the world.
In this context, the recent leaks are
more than simply an embarrassment for the Pentagon. They should be a clarion
call for Congress to finally start showing up for work again by doubling down
on its oversight responsibilities, tightening purse strings at agencies where corruption
appears to have run amok, and insisting on accurate information from government
officials from whom members of Congress too often accept self-serving lies.
Ultimately, the most crucial things
for Congress to do now include exposing the rest of the Pentagon’s historical
secrets, ending the continuing escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, and
seeking a diplomatic detente with China. Conflict in neither Europe nor Asia
serves American interests, yet the military industrial establishment continues
to pound war drums from one side of the planet to the other.
Informed by how often it has been told
lies in the past, Congress might, one hopes, develop a spine to restore its own
institutional authority, if not the human rights of people around the world abused
by the military industrial establishment it has completely failed to check and
balance.
Shahid Buttar Advocate, artist, lawyer, organizer, won 81k votes in 2020 to serve San Francisco in Congress.
https://shahidforchange.us/more-about-shahid-buttar-pelosis-challenger/
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