Dedicated to the grandson of a former New York mayor … 😉
The Watergate hearings did not delve into the depth of the Deep State, it just scratched the surface. Even the Church Committee report could not uncover the dark state of America as it too had been lied to by persons from the Intelligence Community (IC). Politics in Washington DC is just kabuki theater for the insane. The US Supreme Court determines the outcome of not so democratic elections and will step in to determine the election of a president. Its nine members determine the cultural landscape of the US population for decades to come. Money talks, the essence of pure capitalism. Bribery and corruption to the nth scale.
○ The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru | NY Times – May 2016 |
I too would rather be considered an activist!
More below the fold …
Jeremy Scahill: the man exposing the US Dirty War | The Guardian – Nov. 2013 |
Jeremy Scahill, whose provocative documentary Dirty Wars is released in the UK this week, has been described as a “progressive journalist” and an activist in the same mould as Glenn Greenwald. Is “progressive” a word he is comfortable with? “It’s not a term I would reject in terms of my personal politics,” he says, “but I see myself as an independent journalist and my mission is to try to tell stories about real people.”
Scahill’s critics write him off as an activist or an advocate, but he argues that all journalists have a point of view. “Oftentimes the ones who are activists on behalf of the state don’t get labelled as activists. People who accept the state’s version of events are considered objective journalists. People who question the state’s version of events, particularly in the face of overwhelming evidence that the state is either lying or involved in extra-legal activity, are tarred with the brush of being activists. There is a systematic smearing of anyone who questions the state, while people who are slavishly devoted to advocacy for the state somehow wear the crown of objectivity. “
The real people in the film – and the book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which accompanies it – are the victims of what are, in effect, US hit squads operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places where the American government is waging its “war on terror”.
…
I wanted to make a film that my uncle, who’s a construction contractor and never pays attention to these issues at all, would be able to watch, absorb and feel like he walked away understanding something about this extraordinary moment that we’re in in this post 9/11 world.”On those terms, Dirty Wars succeeds. The extent of the US military’s covert operations and the amount of “collateral damage” are shocking; the film shows that even US citizens have been the victims of non-judicial executions; and the argument that the war on terror is ultimately unwinnable because indiscriminate killings radicalise whole populations is persuasive. “Somehow, in front of our eyes, undeclared wars have been launched in countries across the globe; foreigners and citizens alike assassinated by presidential decree; the war on terror transformed into a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Scahill laments at the end of the film. “How does a war like this ever end, and what happens to us when we realise what was hidden in plain sight?”
…
In the late 1990s he worked on TV shows with radical film-maker Michael Moore, whom he calls a “master communicator”, before moving on to the Nation magazine, where he became national security correspondent, reporting on a succession of wars and writing the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.[About Jeremy Scahill:
Who’s Afraid of the Alt-Deep State?
Does Donald Trump want to make 1980s Reagan-era covert wars great again? This week on Intercepted: Matthew Cole joins Jeremy for a discussion about their explosive report in The Intercept that Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a former CIA officer and Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame have been pitching a private spy operation to the White House and CIA to counter the “deep state” attempting to undermine Trump’s presidency.
See my recent diaries on topic …
○ Geheimdienste Amyntor – Victor In Chains
○ Holland Heritage: Hoekstra – DeVos – Erik Prince
There Is No Deep State | The New Yorker – March 2017 |
… But he kept in touch with his friend, seeing him as a kind of career counsellor and, not without guile, as a potential source. Soon, the F.B.I. man confided in the reporter, telling him that he believed that the Nixon Administration was corrupt, paranoid, and trying to infringe on the independence of the Bureau.
In the summer of 1971, both men were promoted, one to the No. 3 job at the F.B.I., the other to the metropolitan staff of the Post. Within a year, their friendship became the most important reporter-source relationship in modern history. The reporter was Bob Woodward, who, with Carl Bernstein, led the coverage of the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon. The F.B.I. man was Mark Felt, who, until he was in his nineties and revealed himself as Woodward’s source, was known to the world only as Deep Throat.
Contrary to the opinion of Arthur Gilroy here, the “deep state” was established on the ashes of Worl War II during the Eisenhower/Nixon years of McCarthyism …
○ Reorganising OSI – ONI – G2
○ Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government
