The Deep State (5 page)

The War on Terror as a Washington Real Estate Scam

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, I recall some informal discussion in Congress to the effect that Washington and its critical governmental nodes were too vulnerable to terrorist
attacks. This was the time when there was a brief fad for “continuity of government” exercises, and Vice President Cheney, then a physical as well as political troglodyte, flitted between “secure, undisclosed locations” that were often underground. The proper institutional solution would have been to permanently disperse much of Washington's governmental operations to areas around the country: with secure, encrypted teleconferencing and other electronic aids, this plan was eminently feasible. Most other cities have cheaper real estate and living costs.

The problem was the same one defense contractors had solved by moving their headquarters to Washington: career-anxious generals and bureaucrats like to be physically, and not just electronically, close to the action. The newly created Department of Homeland Security, which rapidly became the third-largest cabinet agency, would certainly seem to have been a prime candidate for relocation: if any agency should have been concerned about terrorist attacks, DHS was it. And as a brand-new agency, it could start with a clean slate in thinking about its headquarters location. Yet it ended up in Southeast D.C., less than three miles from the Capitol Building. The kicker was that the property DHS took over was the site of a disused, dungeon-like insane asylum, Saint Elizabeths Hospital. Those readers who are tired of having their shampoo bottles confiscated at airports might ponder the cosmic justice in the location of DHS's headquarters, which is $1 billion over budget and ten years behind schedule.

This mania for physical proximity to the “decision makers” (and the purse strings they hold) is an abiding obsession of those who indulge in the Deep State's power games, much as the French aristocracy jockeyed to be in close attendance to the Sun King at the court of Versailles. It reached an apotheosis of sorts in the DOD's 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. BRAC was supposed to
reduce
the excess military base infrastructure of the Department of Defense; yet Fort Belvoir, just fifteen miles south of D.C., along with a related site not far away, ended up with 30,000
more
personnel as a result. So much for dispersal: Beltwayland already has some of the worst traffic in the country, yet the geniuses on the Army staff decreed that it was appropriate to jam-pack
commuters into facilities with no commuter rail transportation astride the main automobile evacuation route from D.C. to points south. The whole notion that 9/11 would “change everything” was, at least insofar as the convenience of the heads of agencies and commands was concerned, a fraud. The fact that the whole scam managed to lift local real estate prices has been a collateral benefit to Beltwayland's numerous brokers and fixers.

That is not to say that nothing has changed. During the first few years after 9/11, Washington's neoclassical core was defaced by checkpoints, miles of hideous Jersey wall, and swarms of ninja-suited security squads. The city began to look less like Pierre l'Enfant's architectural vision of the neoclassical capital of a virtuous republic and more like cold war East Berlin. But what fascinated me most was to watch the reaction of tourists. A large number actually seemed impressed by the display: It was just like television, and there they were in real life, caught up in some drama out of a Tom Clancy novel or an episode of
24
. It was something they could relate to via their media conditioning. One suspects the vast majority of Americans' acquiescence at airports and acceptance of surveillance can be traced to similar behavioral roots. If one is patted down or watched by the government, it is somehow reassuring to be worthy of all that trouble.

For all the bellyaching that goes on throughout the country about out-of-touch bureaucrats, corrupt and unresponsive government, and how much everyone hates Washington, these visible signs of our increasingly intrusive and overbearing government did not fall out of the sky upon an unsuspecting public. The Deep State, along with its headquarters in Washington, is not a negation of the American people's character. It is an intensification of tendencies inherent in any aggregation of human beings. If the American people did not voluntarily give informed consent to the web of unaccountable influence that radiates from Washington and permeates the country, then their passive acquiescence, aided by false appeals to patriotism and occasional doses of fear, surely played a role. A majority of Americans have been anesthetized by the slow, incremental rise of the Deep State, a process that has taken decades. But before turning to the rise of this powerful leviathan, let us consider exactly what it is.

Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt, message to Congress, April 29, 1938

The Visible State and the Invisible State

There is the visible United States government, situated in imposing neoclassical buildings around the Mall in Washington, D.C., and there is another, more shadowy and indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is the tip of an iceberg that is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.

During the last half-dozen years, the news media have been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. 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 imperative to acknowledge the
limits of this critique. On one level, it is self-evident: in the domain that the public can see, Congress and the executive branch are hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.

Other than in the two-year period after his inauguration, when Democrats held both the House and the Senate, President Obama has not been able to enact most of his domestic policies and budgets. Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the numerous vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get some of his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate during the 113th Congress responded by weakening the filibuster, but Republicans inevitably retaliated with other parliamentary delaying tactics.

Despite this apparent impotence—and defenders of the president are quick to proclaim his powerlessness in the face of ferocious Republican obstruction—President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due process, 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 through the so-called Insider Threat Program. Within the United States, we are confronted with 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 whatever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, including arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory.

Despite their habitual complaints of executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from congressional Republicans about these actions—with the minor exception of a gadfly like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save for a few mavericks like Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either—to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance. The
Constitution means one thing for most matters, but anything goes if someone in power invokes the sacred phrase “national security.”

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 began to paralyze the business of governance in Washington and the Treasury juggled accounts to avoid breaching the statutory limit on public debt, the United States government somehow scraped together $1 billion to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French military intervention there. And 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 raise $385 million to keep a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100 million to the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to buy access to that country's intelligence (including its surveillance intercepts within the United States, which the NSA would be legally or constitutionally barred from collecting).
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Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed because of inadequate maintenance of infrastructure; during that same period of time, the government has spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of seventeen football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the NSA to store a yottabyte of information, which is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text—basically, everything that has ever been written. The NSA needs that much storage to archive every single electronic trace you make.

An Evolution, Not a Conspiracy

Yes, there is another government concealed beneath 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, tethered to but only intermittently controlled by the visible state
whose leaders we nominally choose. Those who seek a grand conspiracy theory to explain the phenomenon will be disappointed. My analysis of the Deep State is
not
an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal. Logic, facts, and experience do not sustain belief in overarching conspiracies and expertly organized cover-ups that keep those conspiracies successfully hidden for decades.

Belief in conspiracy as a systematic explanation for the functioning of a complex society is like belief in intelligent design, a pseudoscience which imagines that wisdom teeth, tonsils, and appendixes came about as the intentional result of a grand designer's infallible master plan. Mountains of empirical evidence teach us that those features arose by tiny degrees over eons as random adaptations to chance and necessity—and they are not always optimal designs: our eyes possess blind spots because they are wired backward. In the same way, mechanisms of social control evolved through historical circumstances, chance, and the peculiarities of human psychology. The Deep State, like a set of infected tonsils, is hardly an optimal design, but it became ascendant over our traditional representative democracy as a result of the gradual accumulation of historical circumstances.

Some on both ends of the political spectrum, but now mainly on the increasingly radical Right, routinely liken the prevailing governance of the United States to Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. Aside from trivializing historical crimes of unthinkable magnitude, such irresponsible hyperbole leads us away from proper diagnosis and cure. Given that the current cries of “Hitler!” from the Right have coincided with a Democratic presidency, we can safely infer political partisanship from the people who regard Barack Obama as a tyrant unique in the American experience but who were undisturbed by the same policies and trends under his immediate predecessor.

Likewise, many on the Left saw George W. Bush as a demonic figure when in reality he was a man out of his depth who came to the presidency at exactly the wrong time in history—a reprise of the hapless James Buchanan on the eve of the American Civil War. As the world's oldest
constitutional republic in continuous existence, there remain many procedures, traditions, and habits of mind within the American body politic that have ensured, until now, the essential aspects of a free life for most of our citizens most of the time. The overall trends, however, should cause concern to us all. Rather than making ludicrous and politically self-serving historical comparisons to other nations in other epochs, we should ask which specific deformities in our own system created lamentable specimens like Bush and promoted them to power, and why a president with a personality so apparently different as Obama's should govern in a manner so similar to Bush on the big issues of national security, the economy, and the accountability of government to the people. My purpose with this book is to question the rationale of the game rather than attack the player who happens to be at bat in any given inning.

The Components of the Deep State

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies, plus key parts of the other branches whose roles give them membership. The Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Justice Department are all part of the Deep State. We also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its extensive bureaucracy devoted to enforcing international economic sanctions, and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street (as we shall see, the Treasury has quietly become the epicenter of a new form of national security operation, with some of its day-to-day execution outsourced to American financial institutions in almost the same way that the Pentagon has outsourced military logistics in war zones to contractors). 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, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme 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 its emissaries.

While the government may be obsequiously attentive to the desires of all corporate entities, this governmental complex I have described is even more intimately connected by a web of money, mutual goals, and careerism to specific and very powerful elements of corporate America. These elements include the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and—surprising as it may sound to some—Silicon Valley (one former NSA insider told me the spy agencies are completely dependent on Silicon Valley's technology, communications backbones, and cooperation to even begin to perform their mission).

The Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called private enterprise is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in the
Washington Post
called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks.
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There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances—a number greater than that of cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: since 9/11, thirty-three facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons—about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community's budget goes to paying contracts with private-sector companies.

The membrane between government and industry personnel is highly permeable: the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, was an executive of Booz Allen, the government's largest intelligence contractor. His predecessor as director, Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company. Booz Allen is virtually 100 percent dependent on government business (the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with $189 billion in assets under management, owns a majority stake in Booz Allen's government business). These contractors increasingly set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they set the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the
Congressional Record
or the
Federal Register,
and they are rarely subject to congressional hearings.

Corporate Influence on the Deep State

Washington is the most important node of the Deep State, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary puppet show. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice—certainly beyond the dreams of a government salaryman.
*

This inverted relationship is also true between the visible
government and Silicon Valley, defined here in its broader sense to mean not only hardware and software companies, but the telecommunications backbones that enable these devices to work. Growing rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, and then exploding in the twenty-first century, the Valley has far outstripped traditional smokestack industries as a generator of wealth and has created individual fortunes that easily rival those of Wall Street. Its research-and-development operations are vital to the operation of the Deep State—not only for its globe-spanning surveillance technology, but for the avionics, sensors, and guidance systems of every plane, ship, tank, missile, and drone that the military buys.