Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
In a Huffington Post interview on February 23rd, the Clinton-Bush former head of the NSA and CIA, and defender of their use of waterboarding, and of their violating the 4th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution (both of which types of legal violations he
says are necessary in order to keep Americans safe), accused Congress of
being gutless: “Congress didn’t step up and authorize the use of military force” to invade Syria.
Michael Hayden
said this in a video clip at Huffington Post Live, where the context of
what he was saying was left ambiguous, but it concerned only the
treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, so his comment there was
gratuitous: he asserted (at 23:00 in the complete interview)
that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are prisoners of war and thus can
legally be kept imprisoned for the rest of their lives without there
being any need at all for them (and there were 775 of them)
to be heard in any court — he said they’re prisoners of war and not
prisoners of any legal system at all; and, so, even if they were
actually captured in error (as many of them were found to have been),
they’ve got no legal rights at all. Innocence or guilt is legally
irrelevant to their continued imprisonment, says this former chief of
America’s CIA and of the NSA.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush hired
people like that to run U.S. intelligence. Are America’s CIA and NSA
merely the U.S. version of the Soviet Union’s KGB? What, in principle, differentiates the two dictatorships?
The only
scientific study of whether the U.S. has been a dictatorship, or
instead a democracy, in the period from 1980 onward, found that it’s a
dictatorship — an “oligarchy” controlled by only the very
wealthiest Americans, not a national government that reflects the
policy-preferences and priorities of the citizens who economically are
in the lower 99% of the population, but instead the preferences of the
people who are in some stratum within the top 1%, if not within the top
0.1% or even higher. The study finds that this government is actually a
dictatorship — that the desires of the lower 99% don’t affect its
policies unless those desires are consistent with the desires of the
billionaires.
Michael Hayden reflects this
oligarch-directed culture. However, within the U.S. national-security
Establishment, especially the CIA and NSA, this aristocratic or
“oligarchic” control has been operating at least ever since the CIA
overthrew the democratically elected and progressive President of Iran,
Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953. Furthermore, even Britain’s own BBC documented in a classic TV documentary,
the creation of the oligarchic CIA, from the moment that Dwight
Eisenhower became President in 1953. The CIA was clearly pro-fascist
ever since Eisenhower appointed Allen Dulles to lead it.
What Michael Hayden is, is a recent
example of the Republican Party’s tradition in this matter, but
something that’s even worse — its becoming trans-partisan, a reflection
now of both of America’s political Parties. This is now a bi-partisan
oligarchy, in which the billionaires are so remote from the
voting-public whose minds they control, that — at least within our
national-security circles — the oligarchs are free to ignore the
public’s desires and values, ignore them altogether. This government is
theirs. The U.S. Constitution now holds sway only to the extent that
they want it to.
But even worse than that: as the BBC
documentary shows, this is an international oligarchy. Though the CIA
has been the chief global center of its enforcement-operation, it
entails aristocrats from all of the NATO countries.
Hayden’s testimony displays the
dropping-away of the ‘democratic’ restraints upon the oligarchy’s
operations. It’s less and less necessary to keep up the pretense that we
live in a ‘democracy’: now, we live in a society that ‘does what it
must to keep the people safe.’
Here is how ‘safe’ they have been keeping us.
It didn’t start with 9/11. It merely has intensified since then.
This is basically a 1984 world.
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