Midnight Meme Of The Day!

The Deep State Has A Name. Its Name Is Spartacus
by Noah

If this was an alternate Kellyanne Conway kind of universe, one could almost feel some sympathy for President Basket Case. Almost? Well, not really. All of the troubles that the naked orange emperor is facing are of his own making; his hair, his horrid mutant children, his silicon mail order wife, even his orange skin and the weird dead white flesh around his eyes. Most immediate though is his current predicament. Wear it all well Donnie, from that silly extra long red tie, to your once over-sized suit that now appears to shrink every day, right down to your clown shoes. Wear it all well. Maybe that nice long tie can be put to a proper purpose.

Now, it's gotten so bad that even a member of Trumpanzee's inner sanctum is sending out warning messages from the gated asylum; and doing it though the hated New York Times, no less. Comrade Trump, you brought it on yourself. The Op-Ed in the Times is quite a measure of how inept and unfit you are to serve anyone but the adversaries of the United States. When even your own people, your so-called best people, are trying to inhibit the even a small portion of the mayhem your inflict upon America and the world, it should be a wake up call that, once again, you are a complete failure, but, of course you see your mayhem as a success, and, why wouldn't you? All you have to do is pick up your phone and call your handler in Moscow and he will tell you you are.

But now, that Op-Ed has got you even more frantic and unglued than ever before. You've flown into a state of "volcanic rage." Your blood pressure, if you have blood, must be through the roof. Your heart, if you have a heart, must be almost beating out of your chest, protected only by the thick walls of flab. Please, Donnie, order up some big buckets of KFC and chow them down in your angst. Have you ever tried dipping each piece of KFC into multiple jars of mayonnaise? Try it! You'll love it! Better yet, since you're the president, I'm sure you can command the KFC factories to send you jars of rendered fat to wash that chicken down with. Even better, call the CEO of one of the burger chains and get some gallons of nice red meat fat and fry oil delivered to your door. Drink it all! Chug it! Don't bother chewing the chicken. Choke on it! Just Do It, as NIKE would say!

So, what to do about the writer of the Op-Ed? As I write this, Donnie, you have reportedly narrowed your list of suspects down to 12. 20 or more have denied it was them, but you desperately want to know who dun it. Here's a thought or two for your paranoid mind to dwell on Donnie: Maybe it was all of them, maybe your own kids. Here's another thought maybe that Russian Foreign Minister you invited into the oval office left an undetectable cutting edge high tech bug and has been listening in to everything all this time. Maybe he wrote the Op-Ed and the Times is covering for him by saying it's one of your staff. Well, come on, Donnie, isn't that Russian technically one of your staff? I'm sure you see it that way, or, do you see it as you being one of his staff?

Donnie, have you thought about beating your staff for hours at a time? Or, water-boarding your staff? I can see you doing that. Maybe you'll even order up the construction of a Trump Tower Of London replica on the White House grounds and put them all on the rack. How's that sound? You could have Sean Hannity as Lord Executioner, complete with a hood. He likes hoods. But, wait, he's kinda on your staff, too. Maybe it's him. And are FOX & Fiends really your friends. What are you going to do when your mind gets so gone that you start thinking the entire country is part of the Deep State that is out to get you? Will you send out one of your remaining minions, maybe Tucker Carlson of Alex Jones, to quote the guy in the "Spartacus" movie? I can hear it now...

I bring a message from you master, Donald Jackass Trump, Commander-in-Chief of America. By command of his excellency, your lives are to be spared. Slaves you were and slaves you remain. But the terrible penalty of crucifixion has been set aside on the single condition that you identify the body or the living person of the slave who wrote the OP-ED in the failing New York Times.

The Coup d’état Against And/Or The Assassination Of... Señor Trumpanzee

Some wonder how Señor Trumpanzee could have possibly passed over Jerome Corsi when he put together his Cabinet. Is it possibly that not even the 5th level baboons he put in place would agree to serve with Corsi, the far right's foremost conspiracy theorist? His latest is that the CIA is planning to kill Señor T. Remember that Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, Indira Gandhi body guards shot her in her garden. And if that isn't proof enough, Corsi asserts in his new book, Killing The Deep State that Trump is the target of a coup d’état being undertaken by the Deep State, including the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies that maintain a commitment to a globalist New World Order." For some reason-- no doubt the CIA-- Corsi can't find a real publisher and the book is being put out by Trump’s crony Christopher Ruddy on his neo-fascist propaganda outfit, Newsmax.

So who's this Corsi, the man who is even a less believable conspiracy theorist that Trump himself?

No one, however, has gone as far as Jerome R. Corsi, the self-proclaimed “investigative reporter” whose book during John Kerry’s presidential campaign, the “Swiftboating” of his Vietnam War record, badly damaged Kerry’s campaign, although the charges were false.

He is the same man who in 2012 wrote a column claiming Obama is a homosexual. This is the same Corsi who argued he had proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth, and that a pattern on a ring Obama wore proved that he was a secret Muslim. Corsi has a Ph.D. from Harvard and uses that credential to assert that his words have credibility.

Corsi is Washington correspondent for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars. Recently, he appeared on C-Span’s book show Afterwords, where he talked about his new book, Killing the Deep State. In a nutshell, here is how Corsi describes his thesis: “The central premise of this book is that President Trump is the target of a coup d’état being undertaken by the Deep State, including the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies that maintain a commitment to a globalist New World Order.”

From the moment Trump won, Corsi believes the “deep state” promised to interfere with his presidency, beginning with the NSA and Brennan at CIA placing Trump under electronic surveillance. Brennan, along with John Podesta, Corsi claims, began the story about “Russian collusion” to delegitimize the campaign. Robert Mueller was made special counsel because he is “a partisan deep state operative with close ties to FBI Director James Comey.” The deep state, Corsi believes, is seeking to force Trump to resign. If that doesn’t work, it plans to move to “impeachment or a charge under the 25th Amendment that he is mentally incompetent.”

Up to this point, Corsi’s book reads as a rehash of all the claims regularly made daily about the conspiracy by Trumpists. But he takes this one original, and scurrilous, step further. Should that not work, he claims, the deep state operatives have one measure left to take, and that is “‘executive action’-- a CIA plan to assassinate Trump… the deep state’s last resort.”

...Corsi’s narrative is a compendium of all the conspiracy theories put together and is bound to be a basic source for Trump’s defenders, who are taking out the crude edges and using his analysis as the standard for showing why Trump’s presidency must be defended at all costs against the nefarious deep state. In today’s polarized climate, the more that narrative is spread and adopted, the more it poses a serious threat to our democracy.

And it looks like Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has joined the assassination team! Oh yes... plotting a coup and murder, Grassley told CNN that "If I were President of the United States and I had a lawyer that told me I could pardon myself, I think I would hire a new lawyer."

How Does The Country Protect Itself From Trump?

Gaius was in L.A. this week. One night he and his wife came to dinner with Digby and I (Nerano-- unbelievable). At one point we entertained the idea that "the deep state" really is seeking to overturn the will of the people who put Trump in the White House. (In my mind that would be some combination of Putin, people addicted to prescription drugs and these folks; that said, I still respect the process and insist the only way to stop him is by electing progressives to Congress in 2018.)

None of us were especially comfortable with the idea that we're in the midst of a soft coup by the deep state and its an idea being pushed, more and more hysterically by Bannon and Trump (and Dennis Kucinich). How dare they think they can overturn the results of an election Putin worked so hard to fix for Señor Trumpanzee!

This may be intellectually dishonest and expose me for lacking integrity... and I probably feel less horrible about a soft coup against Trump, Pence and Bannon because of the existential threat this people are putting democracy, the country and the world in. Especially the world. A bumbling imbecile like Trump has no conception of the damage he can cause with his war against Science, a war that includes not just hiring that Pruitt maniac to head the EPA but by withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord. Sources on the right say he's decided to go for it. It helps explain why this horrible picture is so popular on social media:

Chelsea Clinton is ready to scold anyone who dares laugh at this

People are serious about saving the planet, even if it's beyond Trump's ken. Hopefully the dementia treatment he's getting-- the flashing red lights in the White House residence windows the other night-- will help wake him up more than Ivanka has been able to do.



Wednesday morning Michael Shear warned NY Times readers that "three officials with knowledge of the decision" have confirmed that Señor Trumpanzee "is expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement... A senior White House official cautioned that the specific language of the president’s expected announcement was still in flux Wednesday morning. The official said the withdrawal might be accompanied by legal caveats that will shape the impact of Mr. Trump’s decision. And Mr. Trump has proved himself willing to shift direction up until the moment of a public announcement. He is set to meet Wednesday afternoon with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has advocated that the United States remain a part of the Paris accords and could continue to lobby the president to change his mind."

[F]aced with advisers who pressed hard on both sides of the Paris question, Mr. Trump appears to have decided that a continued United States presence in the accord would harm the economy; hinder job creation in regions like Appalachia and the West, where his most ardent supporters live; and undermine his “America First” message.

Advisers pressing him to remain in the accord could still make their case to the boss. In the past, such appeals have worked. In April, Mr. Trump was set to announce a withdrawal from the Nafta free trade agreement, but at the last minute changed his mind after intense discussions with advisers and calls from the leaders of Canada and Mexico. Last week, a senior administration official said Mr. Trump would use a speech in Brussels to make an explicit endorsement of NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense provision, which states that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. He didn’t.

The exit of the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas polluter would not dissolve the 195-nation pact, which was legally ratified last year, but it could set off a cascade of events that would have profound effects on the planet. Other countries that reluctantly joined the agreement could now withdraw or soften their commitments to cutting planet-warming pollution.

“The actions of the United States are bound to have a ripple effect in other emerging economies that are just getting serious about climate change, such as India, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that produces scientific reports designed to inform global policy makers.

Once the fallout settles, he added, “it is now far more likely that we will breach the danger limit of 3.6 degrees.” That is the average atmospheric temperature increase above which a future of extreme conditions is considered irrevocable.

The aim of the Paris agreement was to lower planet-warming emissions enough to avoid that threshold.

“We will see more extreme heat, damaging storms, coastal flooding and risks to food security,” Professor Oppenheimer said. “And that’s not the kind of world we want to live in.”

Foreign policy experts said the move could damage the United States’ credibility and weaken Mr. Trump’s efforts to negotiate issues far beyond climate change, like negotiating trade deals and combating terrorism.

“From a foreign policy perspective, it’s a colossal mistake-- an abdication of American leadership ” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat and the under secretary of state during the presidency of George W. Bush.

“The success of our foreign policy-- in trade, military, any other kind of negotiation-- depends on our credibility. I can’t think of anything more destructive to our credibility than this,” he added.

But Mr. Trump’s supporters, particularly coal state Republicans, cheered the move, celebrating it as a fulfillment of a signature campaign promise. Speaking to a crowd of oil rig workers last May, Mr. Trump vowed to “cancel” the agreement, and Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, has pushed the president to withdraw from the accord as part of an economic nationalism that has so far included pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade pact, and vowing to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Coal miners and coal company executives in states such as Kentucky and West Virginia have pushed for Mr. Trump to reverse all of President Barack Obama’s climate change policies, many of which are aimed at reducing the use of coal, which is seen as the largest contributor to climate change.

...Although the administration has been debating for months its position on the Paris agreement, the sentiment for leaving the accord ultimately prevailed over the views of Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and close adviser, who had urged the president to keep a seat at the climate negotiating table.

...Without the United States, there is likely to be far less pressure on major polluting countries and industries to accurately report their emissions. There have been major questions raised about the accuracy of China’s emissions reporting, in particular.

“We need to know: What are your emissions? Where are your emissions?” said Todd D. Stern, the lead climate negotiator during the Obama administration. “There needs to be transparent reporting on countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. If the U.S. is not part of that negotiation, that’s a loss for the world.”

Is that a good enough reason for either a soft coup or... a Kathy Griffin solution, which Señor Trumpanzee claimed his 11 year old son Barron is having "a hard time" with? If Trump goes through with his plans for Climate Change, it's likely Barron Trump and every other 11 year old will have a much harder time a very few decades down the road. In the end, though, I don't believe in coups or assassinations and I'm convinced we can and will win back the House in 2018 and stop Trump's madness from irreparably harming the country and the planet that way. Agree? If you do, please consider helping the progressive House candidates you'll find by tapping the ActBlue 2018 thermometer on the right.

Explosive WikiLeaks Release Exposes Massive, Aggressive CIA Cyber Spying, Hacking Capability

CIA org chart from the WikiLeaks cache (click to enlarge). "The organizational chart corresponds to the material published by WikiLeaks so far. Since the organizational structure of the CIA below the level of Directorates is not public, the placement of the EDG [Engineering Development Group]and its branches ... is reconstructed from information contained in the documents released so far. It is intended to be used as a rough outline of the internal organization; please be aware that the reconstructed org chart is incomplete and that internal reorganizations occur frequently."

by Gaius Publius

"O brave new world, that has such people in it."

Bottom line first. As you read what's below, consider:

• That the CIA is capable of doing all of the things described, and has been for years, is not in doubt.

• That unnameable many others have stolen ("exfiltrated") these tools and capabilities is, according to the Wikileaks leaker, also certain. Consider this an especially dangerous form of proliferation, placing cyber warfare tools in the hands of anyyone with money and intent. As WikiLeaks notes, "Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by peer states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike."

• That the CIA is itself using these tools, and if so, to what degree, are the only unknowns. But can anyone doubt, in this aggressively militarized environment, that only the degree of use is in question?

Now the story.

WikiLeaks just dropped a huge cache of documents (the first of several promised releases), leaked from a person or people associated with the CIA in one or more capacities (examples, employee, contractor), which shows an agency out-of-control in its spying and hacking overreach. Read through to the end. If you're like me, you'll be stunned, not just about what they can do, but that they would want to do it, in some cases in direct violation of President Obama's orders. This story is bigger than anything you can imagine.

Consider this piece just an introduction, to make sure the story stays on your radar as it unfolds — and to help you identify those media figures who will try to minimize or bury it. (Unless I missed it, on MSNBC last night, for example, the first mention of this story was not Chris Hayes, not Maddow, but the Lawrence O'Donnell show, and then only to support his guest's "Russia gave us Trump" narrative. If anything, this leak suggests a much muddier picture, which I'll explore in a later piece.)

So I'll start with just a taste, a few of its many revelations, to give you, without too much time spent, the scope of the problem. Then I'll add some longer bullet-point detail, to indicate just how much of American life this revelation touches.

While the cache of documents has been vetted and redacted, it hasn't been fully explored for implications. I'll follow this story as bits and piece are added from the crowd sourced research done on the cache of information. If you wish to play along at home, the WikiLeaks torrent file is here. The torrent's passphrase is here. WikiLeaks press release is here (also reproduced below). Their FAQ is here.

Note that this release covers the years 2013–2016. As WikiLeaks says in its FAQ, "The series is the largest intelligence publication in history."

Preface: Trump and Our "Brave New World"

But first, this preface, consisting of one idea only. Donald Trump is deep in the world of spooks now, the world of spies, agents and operatives. He and his inner circle have a nest of friends, but an even larger, more varied nest of enemies. As John Sevigny writes below, his enemies include not only the intel and counter-intel people, but also "Republican lawmakers, journalists, the Clintons, the Bush family, Barack Obama, the ACLU, every living Democrat and even Rand Paul." Plus Vladimir Putin, whose relationship with Trump is just "business," an alliance of convenience, if you will.

I have zero sympathy for Donald Trump. But his world is now our world, and with both of his feet firmly planted in spook world, ours are too. He's in it to his neck, in fact, and what happens in that world will affect every one of us. He's so impossibly erratic, so impossibly unfit for his office, that everyone on the list above wants to remove him. Many of them are allied, but if they are, it's also only for convenience.

How do spooks remove the inconvenient and unfit? I leave that to your imagination; they have their ways. Whatever method they choose, however, it must be one without fingerprints — or more accurately, without their fingerprints — on it.

Which suggests two more questions. One, who will help them do it, take him down? Clearly, anyone and everyone on the list. Second, how do you bring down the president, using extra-electoral, extra-constitutional means, without bringing down the Republic? I have no answer for that.

Here's a brief look at "spook world" (my phrase, not the author's) from "The Fox Hunt" by John Sevigny:

Several times in my life - as a journalist and rambling, independent photographer — I've ended up rubbing shoulders with spooks. Long before that was a racist term, it was a catch-all to describe intelligence community people, counter intel types, and everyone working for or against them. I don't have any special insight into the current situation with Donald Trump and his battle with the IC as the intelligence community calls itself, but I can offer a few first hand observations about the labyrinth of shadows, light, reflections, paranoia, perceptions and misperceptions through which he finds himself wandering, blindly. More baffling and scary is the thought he may have no idea his ankles are already bound together in a cluster of quadruple gordian knots, the likes of which very few people ever escape.

Criminal underworlds, of which the Trump administration is just one, are terrifying and confusing places. They become far more complicated once they've been penetrated by authorities and faux-authorities who often represent competing interests, but are nearly always in it for themselves.

One big complication — and I've written about this before — is that you never know who's working for whom. Another problem is that the heirarchy of handlers, informants, assets and sources is never defined. People who believe, for example, they are CIA assets are really just being used by people who are perhaps not in the CIA at all but depend on controlling the dupe in question. It is very simple — and I have seen this happen — for the subject of an international investigation to claim that he is part of that operation. [emphasis added]

Which leads Sevigny to this observation about Trump, which I partially quoted above: "Donald Trump may be crazy, stupid, evil or all three but he knows the knives are being sharpened and there are now too many blades for him to count. The intel people are against him, as are the counter intel people. ... His phone conversations were almost certainly recorded by one organization or another, legal or quasi legal. His enemies include Republican lawmakers, journalists, the Clintons, the Bush family, Barack Obama, the ACLU, every living Democrat and even Rand Paul. Putin is not on his side — that's a business matter and not an alliance."

Again, this is not to defend Trump, or even to generate sympathy for him — I personally have none. It's to characterize where he is, and we are, at in this pivotal moment. Pivotal not for what they're doing, the broad intelligence community. But pivotal for what we're finding out, the extent and blatancy of the violations.

All of this creates an incredibly complex story, with only a tenth or less being covered by anything like the mainstream press. For example, the Trump-Putin tale is much more likely to be part of a much broader "international mobster" story, whose participants include not only Trump and Putin, but Wall Street (think HSBC) and major international banks, sovereign wealth funds, major hedge funds, venture capital (vulture capital) firms, international drug and other trafficking cartels, corrupt dictators and presidents around the world ... and much of the highest reaches of the "Davos crowd."

Much of the highest reaches of the .01 percent, in other words, all served, supported and "curated" by the various, often competing elements of the first-world military and intelligence communities. What a stew of competing and aligned interests, of marriages and divorces of convenience, all for the common currencies of money and power, all of them dealing in death.

What this new WikiLeaks revelation shows us is what just one arm of that community, the CIA, has been up to. Again, the breadth of the spying and hacking capability is beyond imagination. This is where we've come to as a nation.

What the CIA Is Up To — A Brief Sample

Now about those CIA spooks and their surprising capabilities. A number of other outlets have written up the story, but this from Zero Hedge has managed to capture the essence as well as the breadth in not too many words (emphasis mine throughout):

WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest ever release of confidential documents on the CIA. It includes more than 8,000 documents as part of ‘Vault 7’, a series of leaks on the agency, which have allegedly emerged from the CIA's Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, and which can be seen on the org chart below, which Wikileaks also released: [org chart reproduced above]

A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said that ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”

WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.

Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, "would rock the technology world", the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

With respect to hacked devices like you smart phone, smart TV and computer, consider the concept of putting these devices in "fake-off" mode:

Among the various techniques profiled by WikiLeaks is “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In 'Fake-Off' mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.

As Kim Dotcom chimed in on Twitter, "CIA turns Smart TVs, iPhones, gaming consoles and many other consumer gadgets into open microphones" and added "CIA turned every Microsoft Windows PC in the world into spyware. Can activate backdoors on demand, including via Windows update"[.]

Do you still trust Windows Update?

About "Russia did it"...

Adding to the "Russia did it" story, note this:

Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in "false flag" cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks' source notes that it "collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.["]

As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding, "CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state...."

This doesn't prove that Russia didn't do it ("it" meaning actually hacking the presidency for Trump, as opposed to providing much influence in that direction), but again, we're in spook world, with all the phrase implies. The CIA can clearly put anyone's fingerprints on any weapon they wish, and I can't imagine they're alone in that capability.

Hacking Presidential Devices?

If I were a president, I'd be concerned about this, from the WikiLeaks "Analysis" portion of the Press Release (emphasis added):

"Year Zero" documents show that the CIA breached the Obama administration's commitments [that the intelligence community would reveal to device manufacturers whatever vulnerabilities it discovered]. Many of the vulnerabilities used in the CIA's cyber arsenal are pervasive [across devices and device types] and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals.

As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in "Year Zero" [that it] is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts. The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities ("zero days") possessed by the CIA[,] but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.

Does or did the CIA do this (hack presidential devices), or is it just capable of it? The second paragraph implies the latter. That's a discussion for another day, but I can say now that both Lawrence Wilkerson, aide to Colin Powell and a non-partisan (though an admitted Republican) expert in these matters, and William Binney, one of the triumvirate of major pre-Snowden leakers, think emphatically yes. (See Wilkerson's comments here. See Binney's comments here.)

Whether or not you believe Wilkerson and Binney, do you doubt that if our intelligence people can do something, they would balk at the deed itself, in this world of "collect it all"? If nothing else, imagine the power this kind of bugging would confer on those who do it.

The Breadth of the CIA Cyber-Hacking Scheme

But there is so much more in this Wikileaks release than suggested by the brief summary above. Here's a bullet-point overview of what we've learned so far, again via Zero Hedge:

Key Highlights from the Vault 7 release so far:

• "Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

• Wikileaks claims that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

• By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.

• The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

• Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

Also this scary possibility:

• As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks.

• The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.

Journalist Michael Hastings, who in 2010 destroyed the career of General Stanley McChrystal and was hated by the military for it, was killed in 2013 in an inexplicably out-of-control car. This isn't to suggest the CIA, specifically, caused his death. It's to ask that, if these capabilities existed in 2013, what would prevent their use by elements of the military, which is, after all a death-delivery organization?

And lest you consider this last speculation just crazy talk, Richard Clarke (that Richard Clarke) agrees: "Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, told the Huffington Post that Hastings’s crash looked consistent with a car cyber attack.'" Full and fascinating article here.

WiliLeaks Press Release

Here's what WikiLeaks itself says about this first document cache (again, emphasis mine):

Press Release

Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.

By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.

Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that "There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such 'weapons', which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of "Year Zero" goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective."

Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the "Year Zero" disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should analyzed, disarmed and published.

Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in "Year Zero" for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in "Vault 7" part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.

Be sure to click through for the Analysis, Examples and FAQ sections as well.

"O brave new world," someone once wrote. Indeed. Brave new world, that only the brave can live in.

GP
 

"Five Eyes," Global Spying & Deep State

You can vote for the puppets, but not
for the puppeteers (image source)

by Gaius Publius

On the one hand, this is old news, in the sense that we knew it had to be true anyway. On the other hand, here's yet more evidence that the NSA does indeed, according to one of its own slides, "sniff it all, know it all, collect it all, process it all, exploit it all."

There's a global network of what appears to be both satellite- and cable-sniffing stations, identically outfitted with nearly identical instrumentation, trained on our global communications networks, sniffing it all, collecting it all (etc.) — and sending it all back to the NSA for processing. Five nations are involved in the project — the U.S. and U.K. (natch), plus Canada, New Zealand and Australia. These are the "Five Eyes" mentioned in the report.

Satellite- and cable-sniffing station in New Zealand
preparing to phone home. Credit: Tim Cuff/
New Zealand Herald/AP (click to enlarge; source).

There are multiple sources in this reporting — The Intercept, New Zealand's Sunday Star Times, the New Zealand Herald among them. I'm going to quote John Queally's piece in Common Dreams and let you click deeper if you're interested in more. The ultimate source for this is ... Edward Snowden (natch), but there's been followup, especially regarding New Zealand's involvement, which spotlights the entire operation.

Common Dreams (my emphasis):

A new batch of Snowden documents offer[s] an unprecedented look into the close relationship of the surveillance agencies of the so-called "Five Eyes" nations and how a close look at a secretive base in New Zealand reveals new details about a global network of listening stations are operating to fulfill the NSA mantra on communications data which says, "Sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all and exploit it all."

Reported on Saturday by The Intercept in the U.S. and the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand, the documents offer a detailed look at the "alien-like" station located in Waihopai Valley [of New Zealand] and reveals who and what kind of information the station targets, its inner workings, and how its operations link to an international network of spy facilities run by the other so-called "Five Eyes"—comprised of the intelligence agencies of the U.S., U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

With names like "Jackknife," "MoonPenny," "Scapel," and "LadyLove" – the Five Eyes maintain enough listening bases around the world to capture the bulk of the entire planet's digital and telephonic communications.

Here's a look at that network of communications "sniffers":



More:

According to the reporting, each of these bases is relatively identical and all of the information collected at the various sites is sent back to the NSA via a series of databases controlled and monitored by the agency.

Here's what the New Zealand leg of the operation does:

(Click to enlarge; source)

As the source article says, "The documents, provided by US whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that most of the targets are not security threats to New Zealand, as has been suggested by the [New Zealand] Government." Note the one long path back to DC and the NSA. And hold that thought about the targets not being security threats. It has other implications.

NSA Is Getting Both Cable and Satellite Data

About my statement at the start, about both satellite- and cable-sniffing, The Intercept says:

Last year, The Intercept reported that the New Zealand agency was planning a secret project to tap into Internet data flowing across undersea cables. The Waihopai base focuses on gathering data and communications from another source — vacuuming them up as they are being transmitted through the air between satellites.  

The New Zealand station is pictured near the top of this piece. Again, these stations are reportedly similarly outfitted with U.S.–supplied equipment.

Deep State and Those "Targets" — Who Else Wants That Spy Data?

So, New Zealand listens to all communications between and among its neighbors. Look at that last image above one more time, then ask yourself — how else could "all communications" within that region be used?  Back to the New Zealand Herald:

GCSB [New Zealand's spy agency] directs its spying against a surprising array of New Zealand's friends, trading partners and close Pacific neighbours.

I think we're starting to sniff out something for ourselves. If the Western world's spy agencies are "collecting it all," that makes those agencies a strong nexus of power in the real world of power (Deep State*), as opposed to the world of power voters imagine exists.

Here's an example of NSA as a node of power in the "network of networks" that comprises Deep State. If NSA has spy data on all FISA and SCOTUS judicial nominees — and there are reports that they do — would they use it just to make sure that NSA-friendly candidates make it through, or also use it to make sure that easily blackmailed candidate get through as well? What would you do if you were the "control it all" freaks running NSA? Would you "stoop" to blackmail? If yes, would you use what you know to set up blackmail opportunities? And if yes yet again, how easy would it be to execute that plan (he asked rhetorically)?

If NSA (an agency of the Pentagon, don't forget) is a node of power in Deep State, there must be others. NSA can't itself be running the country, certainly not alone. There are whole areas it has no interest in. So what about the billionaires — what's their relationship to NSA and Deep State? What's their place in this "network of networks"?

To answer that, go back to New Zealand and its spying. Look one more time at the graphic above. Who in New Zealand would like to get their hands on all that spy data? Remember, these are New Zealand's trading partners being spied on. How about the Big Money people who keep the current New Zealand government in power in the first place? Would they want a look at, even have regular access to, that data?

This isn't an accusation, just a recognition of the existence of a local New Zealand–specific opportunity. Now take that recognition to the U.S. How interested would Big Money be in NSA-collected data, spy data on our own "trading partners" and competitors, if they could get at it regularly? New York banks, let's say; Exxon and Mobil; Apple, Google and Microsoft; Walmart; a host of very-big-money others.

Heck, how about Koch Industries — or Chinese corporate partners (Foxxconn, say) to U.S. firms like Apple. Is NSA helping them? In exchange for what?

Big Money clearly has a controlling hand in how the world is run. That part we can see. Is the nexus of billionaires that comprises Big Money, whether "left-leaning" or "right-leaning" (whatever that even means for the money-obsessed), already working with NSA behind the scenes? If so, how? (And if not, why not? It would be madness, billionaire malfeasance, not to be.)

NSA and Industrial Espionage — Who's Really in Charge of What?

The flow of information can't just be one way — from Microsoft to NSA, for example. After all, NSA and the Five Eyes nations have much they can offer in trade. Is it likely they do engage in these trades, perhaps regularly? The likely answer is: Yes, of course. A cursory look turned up this in the Guardian:

NSA accused of spying on Brazilian oil company Petrobras

Accusations that NSA is conducting intelligence-gathering operations that go beyond its core mission of national security  

The US National Security Agency has been accused of spying on Brazil's biggest oil company, Petrobras, following the release of more files from US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The latest disclosures, which aired on Brazil's Fantástico news program, have led to accusations that the NSA is conducting intelligence-gathering operations that go beyond its core mission of national security – often cited as the key distinction between the agency and its counterparts in China and Russia.

The revelations are likely to further strain ties between the US and Brazil ahead of a planned state dinner for president Dilma Rousseff at the White House in October. Bileteral relations have already been muddled by the earlier release of NSA files showing the US agency intercepted Brazilian communications and spied on Rousseff and her aides.

Which led Reuters to publish this, quoting Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff:

NSA spying on Petrobras, if proven, is industrial espionage: Rousseff

Reports that the United States spied on Brazilian oil company Petrobras, if proven, would be tantamount to industrial espionage and have no security justification, Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff said on Monday.

Brazil's Globo television network reported on Sunday that the U.S. National Security Agency hacked into the computer networks of Petrobras and other companies, including Google Inc., citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The report came as Brazil is preparing to auction rights to tap some of the largest oil finds in the world in recent decades, deposits trapped under a salt layer off its Atlantic coast. State-run Petrobras, Brazil's largest company and a source of national pride, made the discoveries in recent years and will be a mandatory partner in developing all of the new deep-sea fields.

At some point, all of these dismissible "dirty tricks" add up to a fundamentally different picture of the world than the one we hold.

For example, how about this as a possibility? What if the President doesn't run the U.S. government in any way that matters to the real holders of power (Deep State)? Evidence: A NSA whistleblower said in 2005 on national television that he once had the NSA order to spy on Senator Barack Obama "in his hand." How would such an order be used? Has this revelation been re-reported anywhere that matters? Does knowing about this order change your picture of the "network of networks" that may comprise the real government of the U.S.? I have to say, it does mine.

I'm going to follow this up in the months ahead. It's an interesting world. I have a picture of it that I haven't yet written about, but will.

*Deep State: The part of the government that can’t be touched by the political process (my definition, explained here, or see the cartoon at the top of this piece.)

GP

Obama Did Real Good On Cuba Yesterday But... There Are Some Serious Problems Elsewhere He's Involved With

You may not be aware that there's a lot of evidence coming out that the whole mess in Ukraine was, is essence, a CIA coup. A few days ago Eric Zuesse talked about it in the context of how American media avoids reporting on stories the military-industrial complex don't want to see out in the open. "How many Americans," he began, "know that the current regime in Ukraine was installed in a very bloody February 2014 coup d'etat, that was planned in the U.S. White House, and overseen by an Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and run by the CIA, and carried out for the White House by one of Ukraine's two racist-fascist, or nazi, political parties, whose founder and leader still controls Ukraine though not officially, even these many months after his coup, and which nazi party has been up to their elbows since then in a genocidal policy to exterminate the people in the region of Ukraine that had voted approximately 90% for the man whom Obama and those nazis overthrew in February?

The implications to any semblance of any open/informed democracy, if Zuesse is even partially correct, are absolutely chilling. And the secrecy around U.S. policy in Ukraine is hardly unique. The other day we looked at the secrecy around the TPP negotiations. And obviously, the blatantly unconstitutional spying on Americans by the NSA and the CIA running a rogue torture regime for Dick Cheney. Mike Lofgren has long been our favorite Republican ex-staffer/operative. Tuesday he wrote about the implications of the torture report for Truthout. It's pretty heavy... scary even.

"Hysteria" does not arise from groundless causes, but from a guilty and conflicted id seeking to displace blame from itself onto others. The reaction to the senate study is as significant as the facts that the study uncovered in providing a window on the psychology and methods of those who run the Deep State-- the hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with limited reference only to the consent of the governed as it is normally expressed through the formal political process. This essay will discuss some of the implications of that reaction.

President Obama is an operative of the Deep State, but it is unclear whether he is its master or its prisoner. The president's role in this affair has been extremely puzzling. On March 11, 2014, when the torture issue blew up in the senate because of Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein's allegations of CIA spying on her committee's staff members, she said that the White House had been supportive of her committee's probe of CIA activities. That may have been true, but that is still only what she said she believed. It is hardly beyond the realm of plausibility that the president or one of his aides told her that the White House was supportive of her committee's investigation while at the same time tolerating, or even encouraging, CIA obstruction. But suppose the president did support the committee's probe? That would imply that the White House does not really control the CIA. In either case, whether from obstruction or lack of control, the implications of the CIA's spying on Congress merited Senator Feinstein's description of it as a constitutional crisis.

Obama showed a similar split personality nine months later when the report was finally released. The president, and his White House press secretary, insisted that he was in favor of the public seeing the study (or at least the redacted summary of it). Yet on the Friday before its release, John Kerry, the most senior cabinet official in the government, called Senator Feinstein and urged her not to disclose it.

Shorter Kerry: "Lots of things going on in the world; not a good time for disclosure." But when is there ever not a lot of things going on in the world? Kerry seems to have travelled a great distance since he was the young Winter Soldier who proclaimed that you can't ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake. Did Obama authorize Kerry to make that call? If not, did he care that Kerry was contravening stated White House policy? Or does Obama have any say in the matter?

...General Hayden waxed positively lyrical about the blessings of torture, as he has been doing virtually nonstop since he stepped down as CIA director in 2009.

It was all hogwash and misdirection. The rebutters produced no concrete evidence that torture brought worthwhile results. Blaming the revelation of the crime, rather than its commission, on anything bad that might happen in the future is to stand ordinary ethics, not to mention common sense, on its head.

It requires only a moment's thought to realize that mistreated detainees who were subsequently released knew exactly what was happening to them, and they would tell their family, friends and anyone else in their home countries, including local media, what went on in those prisons. The only people who would not know, absent official disclosure, would be the American people. That, however, is how the Deep State operates: It forces through its agenda by appealing to the elemental fear of terrorism so that it short-circuits the logic of the listener.

The news media are complicit. The rebutters' gaps in logic and evidence have almost never been challenged by the bulldogs of our gloriously free and adversarial press. During the two or three days prior to the senate report's release, the media were awash with unbalanced stories trumpeting the (hypothetical) damage disclosure would cause, all based on interviews with former government officials with an obvious interest in keeping the report under wraps.

This is in part because the media maintain an incestuous relationship with their current and former government sources. One of the most egregious examples was CBS News; one of its national security consultants is Michael J. Morell, a former acting CIA director. The network actually permitted Morell to inveigh against the report's release under color of being a news consultant, despite the fact that he was one of the former CIA big-shots who had prior access to the document and had worked on a rebuttal to it! The mortal remains of Edward R. Murrow are presumably spinning like a rotisserie.

"We're the real victims here." When they are caught in the act, it is a frequent psychological ploy among bullies and con men to accuse other of the crime and to play the victim. The senate study has been accompanied by a torrent of such behavior on the part of the Deep State's current and former operatives. Several former CIA directors and other former intelligence players have even launched, with suspiciously miraculous speed, a website devoted to attacking the senate report and portraying themselves as victims.

The themes were predictable: senate Democrats were just picking on dedicated public servants doing their patriotic duty to keep Americans safe. The program they administered was lawful. CIA officers now have to worry about shifting political winds. We got bin Laden, didn't we? Those sloppy senate staffers didn't even interview us. And so on. Let us examine those assertions.

False appeals to patriotism have become so common after 9/11 that they are almost an involuntary reflex. But, as Samuel Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In reality, however much of the rebuttal brigade see themselves as patriots, they were actually senior operatives of the Deep State, deeply imbued with an ideology that is neither specifically Republican nor Democrat, and certainly not the beliefs necessary for the maintenance of a constitutional republic under law and the informed consent of the governed.

The ideology of the Deep State is about maintaining and enhancing power-- and cashing in afterwards. It is worth noting that almost all senior national security operatives never retire after leaving government; they cash in with consultancies and board memberships with security-related corporations. It's not that no one ever truly retires, but like snakes in Ireland, they are a vanishingly rare phenomenon. It is profoundly in the material interest of these operatives to defend the Deep State so as to keep the cash flowing.

When they complain about the CIA being subject to shifting political winds, they are expressing distaste for the very processes of elective politics that constitute the democracy they once swore to defend. Their demand for secrecy is really a penchant for self-dealing without public scrutiny. It is exactly what James Madison warned about: "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

The Dangers Inherent In The Deep State-- And Partisan Politics

Mike Lofgren had been a GOP operative and congressional aide for nearly 3 decades when he retired in 2011 and penned the book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted the following year. His critique of his former party is that they care solely and exclusively about their rich contributors-- "The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public"-- and that they are war mongers who pander to primitive religionist fundamentalism. For most of us at DWT that was the first time we became acquainted with his work.

This weekend, an essay he penned for BillMoyers.com, Anatomy of the Deep State should rocket him to national fame. It won't. American conventional wisdom has no room for his uncomfortable, jarring revelations about a shadowy, indefinable "invisible" government that is easily dismissed as a "conspiracy theory." He reminds us that since Obama was elected, the mass media conventional wisdom "has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system… The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction."

As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.

Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented-- at least since the McCarthy era-- witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions-- with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either-- even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.

How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

…Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State-- the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us to “stay the course” in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that makes us all better off in the long run-- are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well considered advice based on profound expertise. That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology. That is why describing torture with the word “torture” on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply “not done.”

…We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.

But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by Vladimir Putin.

Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal-- if only rhetorically-- from their knee-jerk defense of the agency.

Reading the rest of Lofgren's essay is a luxury you should treat yourself to tonight. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to remind DWT readers that we support candidates who are not just instinctively progressive but instinctively indepedent-minded as well. Independent thinking may not show up in a questionnaire candidates are asked to fill out-- and we may not get it right 100% of the time-- but it's a trait we look for in our candidates and we shy away from backing any candidates who don't exhibit it and appear to us to be the kinds of men and women likely to "go along to get along." We're looking for more people like Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. These are our House candidates and our Senate candidates, vetted for independent thinking and ability to resist the Deep State that Lofgren warns us about. The DCCC and DSCC-- like their Republican counterparts, the NRCC and NRSC-- vet candidates who look like they will happily submerge their instincts into the Orwellian GroupThink that is a prerequisite for the Deep State. It's the opposite of what Blue America does. It's why we don't support the same candidates. It's why they back Military Industrial Complex stalwarts like Kevin Strouse, John Lewis, Jennifer Garrison, Suzanne Patrick, and Jerry Cannon and easily manipulable, weak-minded boobs like Pete Aguilar, Domenic Recchia and Ann Callis, while Blue America is working towards electing strong, independent-minded candidates like Shenna Bellows, Daylin Leach, George Gollin, Paul Clements, and Rick Weiland. It means one thing to be endorsed by the DCCC and something else entirely to be endorsed by Blue America. And, like we often say, there is no such thing as a contribution being too small.