21st Century Wire says…
Those who pull the strings behind the curtain will be a lot harder to get rid of than the puppets which they control.
Watch a video of this report here:
Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon gave a strong warning to the American people back in 2014 that you can vote all you want – but the Secret Government won’t change.
Glennon’s argument is that a small clique of so-called national security experts, who might otherwise be called elites from the military industrial complex, are always influencing policy makers and over-emphasising security threats.
Currently, the only candidate posing a real threat to these elites appears to be Donald Trump, who is claiming he wants ‘to get along with foreign countries‘, particularly Russia.
But, what is the main reason why we cannot fix this problem? Glennon says it’s ‘the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people’.
Here are the key questions and responses from the interview:
What evidence exists for saying America has a double government?
GLENNON: I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case?
Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials?
GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision. Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.
Isn’t this just another way of saying that big bureaucracies are difficult to change?
GLENNON: It’s much more serious than that. These particular bureaucracies don’t set truck widths or determine railroad freight rates. They make nerve-center security decisions that in a democracy can be irreversible, that can close down the marketplace of ideas, and can result in some very dire consequences.
Couldn’t Obama’s national-security decisions just result from the difference in vantage point between being a campaigner and being the commander-in-chief, responsible for 320 million lives?
GLENNON: There is an element of what you described. There is not only one explanation or one cause for the amazing continuity of American national security policy. But obviously there is something else going on when policy after policy after policy all continue virtually the same way that they were in the George W. Bush administration.
This isn’t how we’re taught to think of the American political system.
GLENNON: I think the American people are deluded to believe that the institutions that provide the public face actually set American national security policy. They believe that when they vote for a president or member of Congress or succeed in bringing a case before the courts, that policy is going to change. Now, there are many counter-examples in which these branches do affect policy. But the larger picture is still true—policy by and large in the national security realm is made by the concealed institutions.
Do we have any hope of fixing the problem?
GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.
Read Mark Glennon’s 2014 epic Op Ed from the Boston Globe here
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