It's extremely important.
You could call this a survey of a hidden, permanent and unaccountable branch of government, except that "branch: doesn't even describe it: it is a realm of government, impervious to view, open only to a caste of the "cleared," making a mockery of our pretense to democracy or constitutionalism. Self-evidently the people can play no role in a system in which policies and whole agencies don't officially exist, and the key actors are allowed to lie for the purpose of concealment. (For example, to pose as other agencies, thus corroding trust in any agency.)
Since 9/11 the Top Secret realm, home to the deep state and parapolitics, has grown dramatically. Black budgets more than doubled and the majority of the funds now goes to private contractors, so that the secret state is now primarily also the private state. Operators in this realm have received the additional carte-blanche of a permanent emergency (fake but treated as real), and the legitimacy of an omnipresent deadly enemy (also largely a construct).
It is a prescription for absolute corruption. We say we don't trust politicians, we want verification and limits on all power, and we don't trust parties (at any rate, none of us here trusts the Republicans). But meanwhile we don't even know who is in charge of an $80 billion realm, except that it's a safe guess most of them are Republicans, lifetime spies, and corporate chiefs. In fact, no one necessarily knows (see below on the "Super Users").
Here are some thoughts I put together back in December at
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28897&start=15#p371809A comparison of the US national security state to the East Bloc states may be illuminating, including for the differences.
In the GDR, the Stasi employed about 100,000 people at any given time (so figure at least that many former members, many of whom remained connected as they drew a standard pension). It ran a network of 175,000 informants so far identified. This is in a country of 16 million people. It was centralized and it was obvious. For all the stories like that of the woman who discovered her husband was actually her spy of a dozen years standing, for the most part people knew or could guess when they were dealing with their own watchers, and at any rate knew they were being watched.
The Stasi and the state had a comparatively clear internal hierarchy and chain of command and a clear primary function of maintaining the power of a centralized one-party state over a population who, while generally conformist during most periods of East German history, as a whole would have preferred to see that state disappear; as it did, in the end.
Furthermore, the Stasi was not home to a habitat for parapolitics and private or rogue initiative nearly one-tenth as rich as that provided by the giant riot of US alphabet agencies, black budget programs, front companies and, of course, the private contractors who now get most of the US intel budget money. (The latter can do other business in addition, and have more options for doing that business in collaboration with allied agencies and contractors as well as money launderers and arms and drug dealers and militias and proxy armies across a worldwide empire.)
The Stasi's per-capita internal GDP, so to speak, was necessarily lower than they would have liked, and compared to the US secret state there were fewer opportunities for profit, fewer actors worldwide clamoring to do business with them. The overseers of the Stasi could look into its compartments with relative ease, when they desired, and thus had an easier time remaining in control of it. For them, the Stasi was comparably transparent!
The Stasi kept well-organized, centralized and comprehensive records, on paper; notwithstanding a great deal of re-writing and fakery that entered from the operative level. The state and its officials did not need to develop the same sophistication of establishing cover stories for plausible deniability, and thus did not flood the world with as many levels of disinformation. It was a small world run by one big gorilla. They told their lies, nobody believed them, and it didn't matter; they got their way.
The constitutional arrangements were generally known to be fake and thus East Germany was a dictatorship that called itself a democracy, but functionally much less of a dual state.
APPROACHING THE DUAL STATE OF THE WEST
Ola Tunander
In a 1955 study of the United States State Department, Hans Morgenthau discussed the existence of a US ‘dual state’. According to Morgenthau, the US state includes both a ‘regular state hierarchy’ that acts according to the rule of law and a more or less hidden ‘security hierarchy’—which I will refer to here as the ‘security state’ (also known in some countries as the "deep state") that not only acts in parallel to the former but also monitors and exerts control over it. In Morgenthau’s view, this security aspect of the state—the ‘security state’—is able to ‘exert an effective veto over the decisions’ of the regular state governed by the rule of law. While the ‘democratic state’ offers legitimacy to security politics, the ‘security state’ intervenes where necessary, by limiting the range of democratic politics. While the ‘democratic state’ deals with political alternatives, the ‘security state’ enters the scene when ‘no alternative exists’, when particular activities are ‘securitised’ —in the event of an ‘emergency’. In fact, the security state is the very apparatus that defines when and whether a ‘state of emergency’ will emerge. This aspect of the state is what Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, referred to as the ‘sovereign’.
Logically speaking, one might argue that Morgenthau’s ‘dual state’ is derived from the same duality as that described in Ernst Fraenkel’s conception of the ‘dual state’, which Fraenkel described as typifying the Nazi regime of Hitler’s Germany. In the Nazi case, though, this duality was overt, combining the ‘regular’ legal state with a parallel ‘prerogative state’, an autocratic paramilitary emergency state or Machtstaat that operated outside or ‘above’ the legal system, with its philosophical foundation in the Schmittian ‘sovereign’. Fraenkel refers to Emil Lederer, who argues that this Machtstaat (‘power state’, as distinct from the Rechtstaat) has its historical origins in the European aristocratic elite, which still played an important role within European society after the triumph of democracy. This elite acted behind the scene in the 1920s, but considered it necessary to intervene in support of the Nazi Party in the 1930s to prevent a possible socialist takeover. However, this autocratic Machtstaat—the Nazi SS-state—was arbitrary, because of its individualised command. In his analysis, Morgenthau draws a parallel between Nazi Germany and the US dual state. Indeed, in his view, the autocratic ‘security state’ may be less visible and less arbitrary in democratic societies such as the US, but it is no less important. Morgenthau argues that the power of making decisions remains with the authorities charged by law with making them, while, as a matter of fact, by virtue of their power over life and death, the agents of the secret police… (and what I would call the security state: author) at the very least exert an effective veto over (these) decisions.
The US security state is much more complex, rich and labyrinthine, with many more compartments that do not know what's happening in the other boxes, many more storehouses of protected information, many more primary actors in the mix pursuing independent agendas in competition, and less oversight or even possibility of oversight, not just from Congress but from any authority at the top.
The US security state is not dedicated to a true primary function as a whole, despite its manufacture of hundreds of threats, but above all to its own self-perpetuation and growth. Otherwise its blind tentacles pursue thousands of different interests in 200 countries worldwide.
From the Washington Post series at
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/ "There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.
In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.
"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration. "I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.
Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered. "I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."
Here the Washington Post shows its limits in failing to ask a rather elementary question:
Who devised the slide-show that was too fast and long and overwhelming for the "Super-User" to follow? Obviously, someone did.
The Super-User, presumably the holder of a high-ranking office as appointed by the elected government of the United States, doesn't have the authority to take notes at his briefing, but some team, however it may itself be compartmentalized or cleared, prepared this enormous briefing and is privy to the information. Who is that? Who are the "Slide-Makers"?
My possible answer is sociological and based on the concept of caste and the organic development of bureaucracies that outlive all users, "Super" and otherwise. There is no One Driver of the Car. It's more like a herd that functions by the behavioral rules its species evolved over time, rules that the herd leader does not determine and is not necessarily more conscious of than the others.
Why can't the Super-User, whose position in the official hierarchy legally is probably superior to the Slide-Makers', command that, yes, he will take notes and go at his own speed? Who made the rules of this briefing, and who can change them? On what understanding of authority was it doubtless the case that the Super-User, before being allowed to take office, was subjected to a background vetting process by other members of the Slide-Maker caste, and does he get to vet them in return? Who wrote the vetting rules, and when?
This is the dual state in action, even within the top offices of the Pentagon. The dividing line between formal state and deep state is everywhere within the state and its industrial complexes, and can be found running through the people themselves.
But to get back to the question of the deep state's size, it must be a lot of spooks and former spooks now occupying a host of roles in our society, and enjoying benefits of their spook connections, and/or continuing to pursue spook agendas under private cover, and the most interesting questions are probably not about grocers or parish priests but Senators and news anchors and corporate chiefs and hedge fund managers and think-tank professors and gurus and popes.
Currently according to WaPo there are 865,000 holders of Top Secret clearances, two-thirds of them spread among a couple of thousand private contractors, a couple of million graduates, a labyrinth of parapolitics, all this only begins to indicate the size of the "dark matter." And we've not even begun to consider the local analogues, FBI and state and municipal police and their fifth-generation Red Squads and informants and contractors and barnacles.
Very broadly speaking it all lives from one ideology, however. On this scale very little of it can be animated from within or justified to the outside without the "national" in national security. It needs believers on the inside, and on the outside. It needs people to perceive secret agents as servants to the people, to trust that we don't need to know what's going on hidden under its enormous umbrella.
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Above I only scratched the surface and showed a bias toward the chaos and "everyone's in it for the profit" aspects of an attempted map. However, large sectors of the national security state are visible (at least in outlines), highly structured and clearly hierarchical, and run on behalf of policy (which may differ from announced policy, ha ha) as set by the civilian administrations over decades and with maintenance of empire as the raison d'etre.
The machine does follow civilian orders. There are of course civilian steering committees with influence in defining policy, although that's a conditional term since these "civilians" will tend to be veterans of the Top Secret caste requiring clearance from it to assume their supervisory position. Under Bush civilian policy-setting instances would have included the PFIAB, the Cheney energy meetings and the Defense Policy Review Board, as well the complex of mini-offices set up to carry out the WMD hoax (WHIG, OSP).
There is also policy as injected by the corporate clients, notably the contractors as well as the financial sector, arms dealers, and the big energy companies. The State Department cables released by Wikileaks give a glimpse into this side, with all the examples of the USG acting as an aggressive lobbying arm for favored US corporate interests, right or wrong, and freely using threats and espionage on their behalf.
Large sectors are stable, self-perpetuating bureaucracies that just want to scare Congress into continuing that perpetuation without asking questions. (They're busy planning every possible contingency regardless of policy, and plans gradually have a habit of coming true independently of civilian-set policy.)
And all of these structures are surrounded by unknowable compartments and what I've called the parapolitical dark matter of inner rogues, networks, private operators, allied agencies, etc. So if I gave the impression the last is the only thing, well not at all.
Again, many more posts here:
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28897&start=15#p371809.
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