CIA Propaganda?

Propaganda in the form of a TV series: it really sounds/looks as if it comes from the CIA.

Madam Secretary is a made for streaming on Netscape.

The new Secretary, “the Company’s” emergency candidate after the last one exploded near Africa, is a youngish, good-looking blonde, who doesn’t care about her appearance, until it becomes necessary. She cares about “making a difference.” It appears she’s ex-CIA, and still well-connected to it: the diplomatic corps, not at all, apparently.

Action involves a heart-rending kidnapping of two teens in Syria. Her solution, after a failed “extraction” attempt: shady international mafia/CIA connections, $1.5 million, and the two boys are kissing the ground as they arrive back in the good old USA.

You see. Just let the CIA do it. You don’t even need the Pentagon. CIA and its myriad foreign allies and illicit connections can fix everything, and for so little money.

I mean: $1.5 million to get those two American boys out of Syria: you can bet the previous “extraction” attempt cost more.

A few minutes mistake of mine cost our military $10,000, my angry Sergeant told me (in 1963).

So, the CIA solves our problems by cutting corners. But it hasn’t solved our problems in the past. The CIA’s first great triumph was overthrowing the “Socialist” (not Communist) Mossadegh in Iran, and installing the Shah and a pro-western government, that opened up Iran to US exploitation—of its oil. So, why did those ungrateful Iranians rebel and establish the Islamic Republic?

Extreme religion breeds in such instances; it finds fertile ground. The Iranian revolution was part religious, a large part nationalist, as in expel the exploitative foreigners who don’t even know how cultured and sophisticated we are, even as we are good Muslims.

But here’s the point: it was CIA meddling that destabilized Iran enough to make the Islamic revolution happen.

Not that Pentagon meddling in Iraq was even as successful. We’d be a lot better off with Saddam, and the semi-stability he maintained, than the chaos that Iraq is now. So would the Iraqis, except, possibly, the Shia in the south.

CIA disasters are legion: Bay of Pigs, Castro assassination plots, Allende-Pinochet, the Guatemalan coup against Social Democrat Jacopo Arbenz that began civil war lasting a generation. The intel during the Iraq war, perhaps “the best in the world,’ was “tailored.” CIA assessments of Soviet strength was consistently boosted, so Defense expenditures could rise.

Perhaps every major nation has to have intelligence services. Point of disclosure: I was a lowly analyst of radio traffic in places like Sinop, Turkey and Bad Aibling, then West Germany. I found the work rewarding: I was helping to monitor what the Soviets were doing, and possibly all of our work was mandated by international treaties. It was understood they did the same.

To solve problems through these same undercover institutions—and their illicit connections—injects real moral problems into American foreign policy.

Which is what we’re doing with our drone wars, almost none of which are officially acknowledged in the country in which the bombing happens, except for our limping survivor, Afghanistan.

The CIA only conducts about a third of the attacks; they are much less mouthy about them, compared to the Pentagon. The latter will give medals to drone “pilots” in their bunkers, in the Rockies, probably in a poor attempt to bolster morale.

Drone pilots, it seems, can’t stand the work: seeing real people in real time destroyed, graphically, before their eyes, onscreen, by the drones they control 3,000 miles away—and then having to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, because the Air Force can’t train them as fast as they’re leaving. A canker at the heart of the Empire.

Which brings me back to Madam Secretary, and a lot of other “product” available at places like Netflix and Amazon. There is a noticeable (to me) attempt to persuade us that we have to be hard-boiled. We have to use any means, even torture, but only when necessary: we’re the good guys. Morality is… troublesome.

What do we stand for? It’s not at all clear, except, we’re Americans, so we must be good. I don’t think the words ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ were even spoken during the episode I saw of Madam Secretary.

The World We Live In

A little history: when Lenin and his Bolsheviks created a new revolutionary state, Stalin was always helpful, willing to please, until he fully controlled the secret police. Once he controlled it, he was able to control everyone's lives in a way no ruler ever had before, partly because of the huge amount of information he amassed about everyone who mattered. The secret police mission: know what everyone is thinking. Stalin's monopoly of power was unparalleled.

Seeing "Citizen Four" on Snowden's revelations, I was reminded of how Stalin had amassed such power. But here, at least for now, the power is organized at a seemingly lower level: the management. The CIA, the FBI and now the NSA, and of course the militarized police and the DOD are each contributing to the creation of a police state even more effective than Stalin's. It hasn't quite gotten there, yet. More properly, they have not. On the other hand, no President is going to go against them: witness Obama's almost fearful expression as he says Ed Snowden should just turn himself in…he should have followed procedures…he'd get a fair trial….

Wow! I seem to remember a different Obama.

Of course we could only have the same SuperStalin for eight years, and the people would decide who would best represent them--every four, but really eight years: a new form of democracy, or the most oppressive totalitarianism ever yet devised? Technology makes it all so much easier, ultimately, for the few who amass all the wealth. They will 'brainwash' everyone to love them.

They'll control, equally, by what they know about each of you, and what they persuade you to think. That will be through the schools and the media, of course, but carefully modulated to fit all 'tendencies' in the population. So, of course there will be jobs for teachers, journalists, image-makers and attractive faces and voices, as long as they are careful. Yet, technology might make more of you redundant, anyway.

And the intelligence community would know, if even a keystroke--an eye-flick--implied DANGER.

Guantanamo and the gulags' successors will be called supermax correctionals, and life there might even be more hideous than in their predecessors'. Water boarding, pfft!

So, what can we do? On the one side are the terrorists and on the other side are the Government--and all its corporate allies, and the money behind all of them.

And we are between them.

But think about this: terrorism is used to scare most of us enough that we're willing to give up our rights, in order to be protected from them. But Snowden has revealed that the intelligence agencies, government departments and corporations gain tremendous streams of information about all of us. They say they'll only keep the records for five years, but any time your name, number, email, Facebook, etc. comes up relating to anything--a crime, a stirring of dissent, even if the connection is tenuous, then all your communications over the last five years could be mined for the crime, of dissent, at very least.

Stalin made such a spectacle of his show trials!

There are dangers, of course: the new barbarism of the Taliban, Boko Haram and now Islamic State do have appeal to those left out of, or oppressed by, global capitalism and civilization. More on that next time.

Classic Catch 22!

"Obama Justice Department have argued individuals and organizations must be able to show they were monitored by the surveillance program to have standing and challenge it in court.

"But the program's target list is secret. The U.S. government won't tell potential targets whether they have been monitored. Therefore, the government contends, no one has standing." http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/01/06/Under-the-US-Supreme-Court-Spying-on-Americans-phase-2/UPI-75011357461000/ - ixzz2HQS7khMr



This is reminiscent of Orwell--1984, Animal Farm--but this is real life! The NDAA gives the Administration the power to monitor any communications between anyone in the US and anyone overseas. If, in some cases, there have to be warrants issued by the FISA Court (a special court set up to oversee covert surveillance), warrants can be highly generalized: they might even permit surveillance on a whole class of potential suspects.

There is a whole lot going on behind closed doors! So far, the people who are supervising it, making use of it, are apparently doing so for what might pass as "the Common Good," as in protecting the US from terror attacks. What is scary: there are so few checks on this surveillance, even in the cantankerous Congress! If no one has a need to know, and it's classified, then no one will know. Except those who take unto themselves the need to know--like the President, the intelligence heads, Defense and Justice at the top levels.

And, there are ominous signs, like the upending of General Petraeus, and before him, Governor Eliot Spitzer, when both were caught in the general surveillance web, apparently by accident.

In the hands of a Stalin, or, arguably, a Nixon, the powers the President has amassed in the realm of National Security would easily lead to the kind of dictatorship Orwell described in 1984.

I wouldn't argue Obama has made the best choices, or that he's egoless in wielding power. But so far, it doesn't look as if he aspires to be the kind of dictator that sweeps opposition aside; or one who's driven to re-make the nation in his own image, through his overpowering personality.

Has no one in power really thought this through? The power they've seized since 9/11--in order to safeguard the nation--is the power to control the nation, but not the world.

US Drones may terrorize Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, but look what all our vaunted power has gotten us there: recruits for al Qaeda. In Afghanistan: a lull before we leave. After we leave, who knows what will happen.

The American Empire is turning inward: the elites--government and corporate--are gaining the power to control us, power much greater than was held by Roman Senators over their serfs and slaves.

If the bipartisan drive towards austerity drives people to revolutionary desperation, then State repression will be necessary--for the survival of our Roman Senators--and the machinery will be ready to use.