NEW REVELATIONS : Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex & The Absolute Psychosis Of Some.....

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." -President Dwight D. Eisenhower

THE SEEDS: ( 1st correspondence between President Eisenhower's assistants).

"The White House
Washington
April 5, 1960

Memorandum To: Mac Moos

As the time for the President’s (Eisenhower) retirement draws near, I recommend to your re-reading the “Farewell Address” of George Washington. It is a beautifully wise and modest piece by a faithful public servant who loved his country.

I was struck by its relevance to our day: the call for Constitutional obedience; the warnings about sectionalism; the dangers of “over grown military establishments” but the necessity of maintaining a “respectable defensive posture.” the realistic attitude “that the love of power and the proneness to abuse it which dominate the human heart”; the unhappy tendency of mankind “to seek security and repose in the absolute of power of an individual”; the necessity for an enlightened public opinion; the ungenerous habit of one generation to spend beyond its means and to throw “upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear”; the broad diplomatic advice. And much more.

This address could furnish some fine ammunition over the year and perhaps serve as a guide for a final statement in January 1961? "

Frederic Fox"

THE DISCOVERY:

A few months ago, Grant Moos was closing his boathouse, near Hackensack, Minnesota, as he does every summer, tying up loose ends, sweeping up debris. This year, though, his sister Kathy insisted that it was finally time to do something about six cardboard boxes that for decades had been stacked in a corner next to a 7.5-horsepower Evinrude engine.

The boxes belonged to their father, Malcolm Moos, a journalist and academic who was a speechwriter for President Dwight Eisenhower. When Moos left the White House, in 1961, he donated some of his papers to the Eisenhower Presidential Library, in Abilene, Kansas, but he kept some, too.

The boxes were full of pine needles, acorns, and mouse droppings, and smelled of campfires. As Moos looked through the contents, he came across a batch of folders marked “Farewell Address.” He looked up the Eisenhower Library, and sent the boxes off to Abilene.

At first, the library did not know what it had. As archivists began to go through the papers, however, they discovered a trove of drafts, memos, and research materials that had long been missing from the record of one of the twentieth century’s most important speeches. For fifty years, Americans have regarded Eisenhower’s Farewell Address with a mixture of awe and bewilderment.

Speaking three nights before the end of his Presidency, in 1961, Eisenhower warned of a “scientific-technological élite” that would dominate public policy, and of a “military-industrial complex” that would claim “our toil, resources, and livelihood.”

In the decades since, Eisenhower’s warning has seemed prescient. The convergence of American military might and a powerful arms industry has characterized wars from Vietnam to Iraq, and the web of power that he described seems present in American society today. Still, generations have wondered what prompted the most celebrated general of the Second World War to leave the White House with a warning about the military. Eisenhower’s grandson David writes in a new memoir that Ike “developed a kind of split personality about the most controversial speech of his life,” downplaying its significance to old military and business friends while professing pride in it to others.

Some historians have regarded the Farewell Address as an afterthought, hastily composed at the end of 1960 as an adjunct to the 1961 State of the Union. Others have regarded it as the soulful expression of an aging President who was determined to warn the American people of dangers ahead. But the Moos papers make clear that the address, far from being an afterthought, was among the most deliberate speeches of Eisenhower’s Presidency. Regarded in his day as inarticulate and detached, Eisenhower in these papers is fully engaged, grappling with the language of the text and the radical questions that it raised.

Contrary to what some historians have speculated, it was not Moos or his assistant, Ralph Williams, who suggested a farewell address. On May 20, 1959, Moos was meeting with the President, when Eisenhower proposed an idea for “one speech he would like very much to make.” It was to be, Moos recorded, “a ten-minute farewell address to the Congress and the American people.” Moos deemed the idea “brilliant” and began making notes.

Eisenhower was a rigorous editor. Major speeches such as the State of the Union might be refined ten or twelve times. Even by those standards, however, the Farewell Address was special. Eisenhower personally rewrote the opening passages, and his brother Milton overhauled the entire speech. It was batted back and forth for months; in the end, it underwent twenty-nine drafts (21 previously unknown drafts were found in the boathouse papers).

The papers also debunk a myth. Some historians have credited Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review, with helping to shape the speech, in December of 1960. It’s true that Cousins called the President on December 14th, but “the idea of trying to get anyone like Norman Cousins working on it would be dreadful,” Eisenhower’s secretary wrote to Moos. “How in the world do we diplomatically thank him, but say No?”

One core idea dominates every version: the first draft described “the conjunction of a large and permanent military establishment and a large and permanent arms industry.” Policing it would require “all the organizing genius we possess” to insure “that liberty and security are both well served.” It added:

“We must be especially careful to avoid measures which would enable any segment of this vast military-industrial complex to sharpen the focus of its power.”

Through scores of revisions, that idea persisted. As delivered, the speech memorably read, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

At the library, the staff is ecstatic about the find. Karl Weissenbach, the director, predicted that the new documents will “change the history and interpretation of the most famous farewell address in American history.”

It’s also a reminder of the contingency of historical research. Had Moos vacationed in Florida rather than in Minnesota, the documents might have disintegrated. Instead, the memos and drafts survived, snug in a boathouse corner, rejoining history just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s address.

THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS HERE

CREDITS:

- Memo from (Eisenhower's chief speech writer) Malcolm Moos to ( Staff Assistant to the President) Frederic Fox re: the content of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s future Farewell Address: " Military-Industrial Complex" Speech, 1960. Article: -Jim Newton, Ike’s Speech, New Yorker Magazine, 12.10.10. Image: President Dwight D. Eisenhower's handwritten edits of final speech, NARA, 1960).

The Imperial State: Pepper Spray, Rubber Bullets, Concussion Grenades & Excessive Force...Oh My!

"In the months leading up to the Republican National Convention, the FBI-led Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force actively recruited people to infiltrate vegan groups and other leftist organizations and report back about their activities. On May 21, the Minneapolis City Pages ran a recruiting story called "Moles Wanted." Law enforcement sought to preempt lawful protest against the policies of the Bush administration during the convention.

Since Friday, local police and sheriffs, working with the FBI, conducted preemptive searches, seizures and arrests. Glenn Greenwald described the targeting of protestors by "teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets." Journalists were detained at gunpoint and lawyers representing detainees were handcuffed at the scene.

"I was personally present and saw officers with riot gear and assault rifles, pump action shotguns," said Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, who is representing several of the protestors. "The neighbor of one of the houses had a gun pointed in her face when she walked out on her back porch to see what was going on. There were children in all of these houses, and children were held at gunpoint."

During Monday's demonstration, law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force. At least 284 people were arrested, including Amy Goodman, the prominent host of Democracy Now!, as well as the show's producers, Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. "St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city to be," Greenwald wrote, "with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas cannisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations."

Bruce Nestor said the timing of the arrests was intended to stop protest activity, "to make people fearful of the protests, but also to discourage people from protesting." Nevertheless, 10,000 people, many opposed to the Iraq war, turned out to demonstrate on Monday. A legal team from the National Lawyers Guild has been working diligently to protect the constitutional rights of protestors."

- Marjorie Cohn (President of the National Lawyers Guild and a Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Excerpt: "Preemptive Strikes Against Protest at RNC," commondreams.org, 9.2.08 Image: American Fascism poster, lilith-ezine.com, 2008).

Orwell & Strauss: The Labyrinth Of Doublethink...

George Orwell, in his novel “1984,” described Oceania, a society in which the prime motivating force for controlling the populace was fear, both fear of its own government and its enemies. He wrote of continual war, of enemies so horrendous that the public was constrained to rigid compliance with its rulers in order to demonstrate its patriotism. Much of Orwell’s description is found again in the teachings of University of Chicago Professor Leo Strauss, who died in 1973.

Strauss’s political philosophy contains many subtle and not-so-subtle effects evident in the Bush administration’s activities since Sept. 11. And remarkably, taken as a whole, they resemble the fictional world of Oceania. For instance, there’s the perpetual political deception between rulers and ruled, a necessity according to Strauss. There’s the obsession with secrecy and the Machiavellian conviction that stability among the populace requires an external threat, that if no such threat exists one must be manufactured. John Foster Dulles fully understood this when he recommended that, “In order to bring a nation to support the burdens of great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to psychology. There must be the portrayal of external menace. This involves the development of a nation-hero, nation-villain ideology and the arousing of the population to a sense of sacrifice.”

Strauss and today’s neocons believe that our nation must maintain the appearance of continuous war. As Vice President Dick Cheney said, “This war may last for the rest of our lives.” The government can thus sustain a continued state of war hysteria to keep the population motivated. Through this creation and control of mass paranoia they can maintain an intense nationalism with complete loyalty and TOTAL SUBSERVIENCE to the “national interest.”

Orwell described a “labyrinthine world of doublethink …” for instance, “to believe that democracy was impossible, and that the party was the guardian of democracy.”

Americans believe very deeply in the ideals that America stands for, will sacrifice their lives and those of their children when necessary to defend them. Yet at the same time, the neocons have convinced the public to believe that these ideals are impractical in dealing with the complexities of today’s world. To burden the federal government with our revered Constitution and its checks and balances would cripple it in its difficult fight against terrorism. We must, they say, "sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve them."

The neocons, who have controlled the White House for the past seven years, have utilized Strauss and Orwell’s observations to provide a society much like that described in Orwell’s novel.

Oceania had an archenemy which the population was encouraged to fear and hate. In the novel this demonic figure was of Jewish heritage, but today’s “hated” figure is an Iranian leader named Ahmadinejad.

Our government and news media must keep painting him as a terrible threat, not only to Israel, but also to world peace. Our administration has distorted many of Ahmadinejad’s talks into violent threats, and the media has repeated them endlessly, making them seem truthful, just as Orwell described in his novel.

For instance, in a talk by our president in March 2006, “the threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That’s a threat, a serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace.”

Yet Ahmadinejad was actually calling for a regime change in Israel and the U.S. He was not threatening to physically “wipe Israel off the map.” His goal was to end the terrible oppression of the Palestinians. Common sense must reveal that, should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, bombing Israel would also destroy the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. And it would mean certain suicide for Iran.

This fostering of fear and hate among Americans is necessary in order to prepare our nation to go to war. It was carefully crafted prior to the invasion of Iraq and is now being used to stir up the blood of Americans for invading another country. This is the “continuous war” predicted by Orwell.

When will we ever learn?

-Eliot J. Chandler ("Behind Politics, A Philosophy of Fear," Bangor Maine Daily News, 8.15.08. Image: Front page headlines signaling end of WWI: "War Is Over, War Is Peace," Chicago Herald & Examiner, 11.11.1918).

VioletPlanet Says: When the oil runs out!

Prophecies of Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower & Ronald Reagan...

"Government is not a solution to our problem, Government is the problem."
- President Ronald Reagan (Inauguration Speech, 1.20.1981).

"President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea of the “military-industrial complex”to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961:

“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances.

In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the public still deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms because of the way they had contributed to the Great Depression.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt’s use of public-private “partnerships” to build up the munitions industry, and thereby finally overcome the Great Depression, did not go entirely unchallenged. The leading Italian philosopher of fascism, the neo-Hegelian Giovanni Gentile, once argued that it should more appropriately be called “corporatism” because it was a merger of state and corporate power.

Some critics were alarmed early on by the growing symbiotic relationship between government and corporate officials because each simultaneously sheltered and empowered the other, while greatly confusing the separation of powers. Since the activities of a corporation are less amenable to public or congressional scrutiny than those of a public institution, public-private collaborative relationships afford the private sector an added measure of security from such scrutiny. These concerns were ultimately swamped by enthusiasm for the war effort and the postwar era of prosperity that the war produced.

Beneath the surface, however, was a less well recognized movement by big business to replace democratic institutions with those representing the interests of capital. This movement is today ascendant. Its objectives have long been to discredit what it called “big government,” while capturing for private interests the tremendous sums invested by the public sector in national defense.

Perhaps the country’s leading theorist of democracy, Sheldon S. Wolin, has written a new book, Democracy Incorporated, on what he calls “inverted totalitarianism." He warns of “the expansion of private (i.e., mainly corporate) power and the selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry.” He also decries the degree to which the so-called privatization of governmental activities has insidiously undercut our democracy, leaving us with the widespread belief that government is no longer needed and that, in any case, it is not capable of performing the functions we have entrusted to it. Wolin writes:

“The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture, from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributory elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.”

The military-industrial complex has changed radically since World War II or even the height of the Cold War. The private sector is now fully ascendant. The uniformed air, land, and naval forces of the country as well as its intelligence agencies, including the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and even clandestine networks entrusted with the dangerous work of penetrating and spying on terrorist organizations are all dependent on hordes of “private contractors.” In the context of governmental national security functions, a better term for these might be “mercenaries” working in private for profit-making companies.

Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist and the leading authority on this subject, sums up this situation devastatingly in his new book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. The following quotes are a précis of some of his key findings:

“In 2006… the cost of America’s spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends each year on foreign and domestic intelligence… [The] number of contract employees now exceeds [the CIA’s] full-time workforce of 17,500."

“To feed the NSA’s insatiable demand for data and information technology, the industrial base of contractors seeking to do business with the agency grew from 144 companies in 2001 to more than 5,400 in 2006… At the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency in charge of launching and maintaining the nation’s photoreconnaissance and eavesdropping satellites, almost the entire workforce is composed of contract employees working for [private] companies..."

“If there’s one generalization to be made about the NSA’s outsourced IT [information technology] programs, it is this: they haven’t worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures…"

In 2006, the NSA was unable to analyze much of the information it was collecting… As a result, more than 90 percent of the information it was gathering was being discarded without being translated into a coherent and understandable format; only about 5 percent was translated from its digital form into text and then routed to the right division for analysis.

“The key phrase in the new counterterrorism lexicon is ‘public-private partnerships’… In reality, ‘partnerships’ are a convenient cover for the perpetuation of corporate interests.”

Several inferences can be drawn from Shorrock’s shocking exposé. One is that if a foreign espionage service wanted to penetrate American military and governmental secrets, its easiest path would not be to gain access to any official U.S. agencies, but simply to get its agents jobs at any of the large intelligence-oriented private companies on which the government has become remarkably dependent. These include :

Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with headquarters in San Diego, California, which typically pays its 42,000 employees higher salaries than if they worked at similar jobs in the government;

Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation’s oldest intelligence and clandestine-operations contractors, which, until January 2007, was the employer of Mike McConnell, the current director of national intelligence and the first private contractor to be named to lead the entire intelligence community;

CACI International, which, under two contracts for “information technology services,” ended up supplying some two dozen interrogators to the Army at Iraq’s already infamous Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.

Remarkably enough, SAIC has virtually replaced the National Security Agency as the primary collector of signals intelligence for the government. It is the NSA’s largest contractor, and that agency is today the company’s single largest customer. As David Bromwich, a political critic and Yale professor of literature, observed in the New York Review of Books:

“The separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president and the stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies. To have much of the work parceled out to private companies who are unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among its other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all detection.”

Euphemisms are words intended to deceive. The United States is already close to drowning in them, particularly new words and terms devised, or brought to bear, to justify the American invasion of Iraq — coinages Bromwich highlights like “regime change,” “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “the global war on terrorism,” “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” a “slight uptick in violence,” “bringing torture within the law,” “simulated drowning,” and, of course, “collateral damage,” meaning the slaughter of unarmed civilians by American troops and aircraft followed — rarely — by perfunctory apologies.

The wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to private, often anonymous, operatives took off under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and accelerated greatly after 9/11 under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Often not well understood, however, is this:

The biggest private expansion into intelligence and other areas of government occurred under the presidency of Bill Clinton. He seems not to have had the same anti-governmental and neoconservative motives as the privatizers of both the Reagan and Bush II eras. His policies typically involved an indifference to — perhaps even an ignorance of — what was actually being done to democratic, accountable government in the name of cost-cutting and allegedly greater efficiency. According to Shorrock:

“Bill Clinton… picked up the cudgel where the conservative Ronald Reagan left off and… took it deep into services once considered inherently governmental, including high-risk military operations and intelligence functions once reserved only for government agencies. By the end of [Clinton’s first] term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had been transferred to companies in the private sector — among them thousands of jobs in intelligence… By the end of [his second] term in 2001, the administration had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll and the government was spending 44 percent more on contractors than it had in 1993.”

After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the process Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were enthusiastic supporters of “a neoconservative drive to siphon U.S. spending on defense, national security, and social programs to large corporations friendly to the Bush administration.”

The Privatization — and Loss — of Institutional Memory

The end result is what we see today: a government hollowed out in terms of military and intelligence functions. The costs — both financial and personal — of privatization in the armed services and the intelligence community far exceed any alleged savings, and some of the consequences for democratic governance may prove irreparable.

On November 14, 2002, the New York Times published a column by William Safire entitled “You Are a Suspect” in which he revealed that DARPA had been given a $200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300 million Americans. He wrote, “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every web site you visit and every e-mail you send or receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a ‘virtual centralized grand database.’” This struck many members of Congress as too close to the practices of the Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism, and so, the following year, they voted to defund the project.

However, Congress’s action did not end the “total information awareness” program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to continue it through its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton to carry on with what Congress had declared to be a violation of the privacy rights of the American public — for a price.

The most serious immediate consequence of the privatization of official governmental activities is the loss of institutional memory by our government’s most sensitive organizations and agencies.

This means that the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the other 13 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community cannot easily be reformed because their staffs have largely forgotten what they are supposed to do, or how to go about it. They have not been drilled and disciplined in the techniques, unexpected outcomes, and know-how of previous projects, successful and failed.

As numerous studies have, by now, made clear, the abject failure of the American occupation of Iraq came about in significant measure because the Department of Defense sent a remarkably privatized military filled with incompetent amateurs to Baghdad to administer the running of a defeated country. Gates believes that we are witnessing a “creeping militarization” of foreign policy — and, though this generally goes unsaid, both the military and the intelligence services have turned over far too many of their tasks to private companies and mercenaries.

Nonetheless, the current situation represents the worst of all possible worlds. Successive administrations and Congresses have made no effort to alter the CIA’s role as the president’s private army, even as we have increased its incompetence by turning over many of its functions to the private sector. We have thereby heightened the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim, as well as of surprise attack because our government is no longer capable of accurately assessing what is going on in the world and because its intelligence agencies are so open to pressure, penetration, and manipulation of every kind."

-Chalmers Johnson ( Excerpt: "The Military-Industrial Complex It’s Much Later Than You Think," TomDispatch.com 7.28.08. Image: Military Industrial Complex: skizumberlin.wordpress.com).

Barack Obama 2008 Campaign Poster: Believe It!

-Image:MAKE YOUR OWN POSTER HERE