A G.W. Bush Intelligence Czar
Is Obviously an Oxymoron
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
The following article was released by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee on Aug. 3, 2004.
The fact that there are some rather large loopholes in the present organization of the U.S.A.'s intelligence-security system, is no excuse for the current tendency to plunge, stupidly and recklessly, into rushed efforts to create an intelligence "czar." Idiot! Get your fat foot off that gas pedal! There is no need to rush into surrendering the powers of government to some alleged superman. The U.S. does not need a Heinrich Himmler.
In fact, our nation does not have any need for the re-election of that pathetic George W. Bush who proposes that, he, now, shall create the Great Golem of national security, the man of mud, to save us all. One Mussolini, one Hitler, one Francisco Franco, one Iron Guard, were each already much too much. In fact, Golem or no Golem, the slide into national bankruptcy under one term of George W. Bush, was itself already much too much.
Better leave the decisions about intelligence reorganization to the leadership of a new President, until a new day, come January 2005, after the completed work of the "9-11 Commission" has dealt with those most crucial issues not yet touched upon by its presently uncompleted investigation.
Nonetheless, without waiting any longer for those further inquiries, there are several important conclusions which I report now, on the subject of the proposal for reorganizing the top-most structures of our nation's security apparatus.
1. The '9-11 Commission' Report Itself
To begin with, in the real world there exists no such species as the "international terrorism" which George W. claims to have seen in his visions. The effects which he has blamed upon "international terrorism," are, chiefly, an assortment of actions belonging to the modern military-science classification of properly called "asymmetric warfare," "irregular warfare," or, in German, Kleinkrieg. The reported act of terrorism, as a bomb-like effect, is not a perpetrator, but only an effect; the cause of that which produces the effect, is another matter. Those deployed to assume the disguise of terrorists, are used like a bomb; those agents have a father, who uses them, a father which poor President Bush's delusional outbursts do more to protect, than to expose.
The frequent cause of such effects, "asymmetric" or "irregular" warfare, includes such examples as the warfare used in defense against the U.S.A. deployment in the 1964-1972 U.S. War in Indo-China. It includes what the U.S.A. and the United Kingdom organized, using instruments such as their recruit Osama bin Laden, for asymmetric warfare launched against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan back during the time ever-naughty Samuel P. Huntington's confederate Zbigniew Brzezinski was incumbent National Security Advisor. When we plunge into global asymmetric warfare, enhanced with threatened use of nuclear weapons, as Vice-President Dick Cheney has done since Day One of the present G.W. Bush Administration, we bring the risks of asymmetric warfare, sooner or later, intimately into our own backyard.
Our nation were better protected, when we cease using the words "international terrorism," when we should be using the alternative terms "asymmetric" or "irregular" warfare.
The obvious task of domestic national security, is to get rid of both those presently most common causes for the risks of asymmetric warfare, and of such relevant carriers of that mass-murderous disease, as Dick Cheney; the objective should be, to push those factors of risk out of the territory of the U.S.A. and out of our nation's and partners' vital interests abroad.
Rather than entertaining proposed magical, Golem-like solutions for the problems of our present intelligence-security organization, we should weigh, very critically, the three, respectively distinct, leading features of the report of the "9-11 Commission."
Admittedly, some very good people have served on that Commission. However, they have been operating under two great impediments:
First, the obvious, concentrated demand for a "cover-up" from the relevant sources associated with the George W. Administration, especially Cheney's circles of neo-conservative "chickenhawks."
The associated cause for that appearance of a "cover-up," more significant, but less readily noticed, is not organizational, but cultural.
The chief difficulty hampering the attempts to maintain competent intelligence-security functions, has been the effect of the moral and intellectual degeneration of the popular, increasingly recreation-rather-than-reality-oriented culture of the Baby-Boomer generation. This generation is gripped by a careening custom of sophists' almost instinctive, reckless disregard for truth, practiced under pressures to "go along to get along." This pervasive avoidance of truthfulness, in favor of perceived personal convenience and "spin," has made it difficult for even the best among the relevant circles to cope with the idea of truth. The tendency of people affected by that syndrome, is to prefer to tend to perceive what they wish to perceive, while, with reckless disregard for truth, denying every reality which militates against that wishfully spun, quasi-organized pre-disposition for choosing a fanciful perception.
Thus, the worst damage our nation suffers from what have been called "terrorist attacks," is the impact of the mass-disorientation induced by the mass-media promotion of the myth of "international terrorism."
This effect among that generation is partly the carried-over by-product of the prevalent "witch-hunt" atmosphere of the post-World War II period; but, it is also the effect of the piling on top of that of the systemic infection which the subversive programs of the Congress for Cultural Freedom spawned, all combined with the impact of crucially terrifying events, such as the 1962 missiles-crisis and the unsolved assassination of President John F. Kennedy. These and related developments had special, deep psychological effects on the generation entering university age during the middle to late 1960s. The older, pre-1946 standard of professional performance, of face the truth even if it hurts, is an unwanted guest in the escapist modes, such as party-going life of post-industrial, post-'68er, recreation-centered mass-culture.
It is difficult to maintain competent performance in intelligence-security functions in the spin-doctored realm of people of those "go along to get along" strata which refuse to see those clear facts which they find it politically uncomfortable to believe.
Thus, especially under the special pressures of the onrushing election-campaign, the first and foremost, leading feature of the appended summary conclusions of that report, is the legendary "camel: a horse designed by a committee." Those politically opportunistic conclusions appended to the body of the report, have very poor correspondence to the useful, factual features of the report as a whole.
The second feature of the report, where the body of the report is at its relative best, is the set of facts and associated findings under the heading of that arguable negligence which might have contributed to the risk of something like the September 11, 2001 attacks; this part is very useful as far as it goes.
The third feature is the matter of the authorship of the attacks, on which virtually nothing of substance is actually provided. Dead bodies and similar, probably misleading clues planted at the scene of the crime, do not, in themselves, identify the ultimate perpetrator behind the operation.
The best argument which should have been made in that report for reorganization of the intelligence establishment, would be to point out the failure of the intelligence establishment to prevent the U.S.A.'s going to war in Iraq, when we as a nation were incompetently prepared, in mind-set and deployed means, for the asymmetric-warfare reaction which was the virtually inevitable, foreseeable consequence of launching that war. All of this blundering and worse was crafted on the basis of fraudulently crafted false premises, concocted chiefly by aid of the "stove-piping" actions of neo-conservative "chickenhawks" associated with Vice-President Cheney and his office. This was a war crafted, by aid of fraud, in a way directly violating those constitutional conditions which the framers of our Constitution intended in designing the powers of an incumbent President.
A President who had actually served in the Indo-China War, and had learned the bitter lessons of that experience, were a more appropriate talent than a fellow who had spent his relevant war-time years as a Houston playboy.
Yet, even after all such factors have been considered, we do have a remaining problem of policy and organization in respect to the intelligence functions of our Executive Branch; but, on one point there should be no confusion: we do not need a Heinrich Himmler as "intelligence czar." Indeed, it were better that a President with the current incumbent's obvious personal problems, were not encouraged to continue his cat-like efforts to cover over the mess which his administration has, in large part, made. Let us sort out the artificed myths of the current administration, from the very real problems, before suggesting possible reforms in our security system.
Now, preliminaries stated, let us get down and dirty; let's get into the meat of the proper line of argument over the most crucial defects in the post-World War II organization of the U.S. intelligence establishment.
2. A Key Feature of the History of U.S. Intelligence Services
Back in the early days of the Reagan Administration, a circle including OSS veteran Max Corvo and me, were brought together with some relevant other persons, around the pressing need, at the time, to re-examine the lessons which should be drawn today from the U.S. intelligence experience of a period from the 1920s through the close of World War II. My particular, assigned point of emphasis in this collaboration, was on the need to establish a U.S. intelligence academy as a complement to the tradition of West Point and Annapolis, an academy to provide a standard and a core-complement of the future intelligence institutions of the U.S.A., an academy based on the constitutional tradition from the Winthrops, Mathers, and Franklin, and the Cincinnatus Society of Lafayette's life-time.
A key part of the problem which brought me into my collaboration with Max Corvo and others on this work, was the rot which names such as Allen Dulles and James J. Angleton represented, in their role as typical of the people who brought a certain core of the Nazi apparatus into the orbit of the functions of the NATO system. The role of the part of this left-over Nazi apparatus brought in by such as Dulles and Angleton, in Italy, for example, left over from SS General Wolff's crew, had been crucial in the terrorist operations in early 1970s Italy, including the assassination of one-time Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Among the Nazi relics still being deployed against the U.S.A. today, are the Mexico-based Synarchist organization, which was created by the Nazi Party, as directed then from Germany, using Hitler creature Francisco Franco of Spain as the tool for planting a Spanish-speaking branch of the Nazi party among the Cristero right-wing and other circles in Mexico, still today. This right-wing network, deployed from Europe, still operating inside Mexico, and elsewhere in the Americas today, had been intended to be deployed, in concert with Japan, against the territory of the U.S.A. itself, until the succession of the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad and the U.S. victory at Midway, had signalled the ultimate doom of the planned Mexican Nazi front's invasion of the U.S.A. at that time, as also the ultimate doom of Hitler's scheme.
Today that is a very active threat against the U.S.A., a threat based upon exploiting the incitement by scoundrels such as Samuel P. Huntington from inside the U.S.A., to assist the efforts of the hydra-headed Synarchist organization still based today in Mexico and points south.
The hydra-headed-like Synarchist network, extending south from Mexico toward Cape Horn, is not, and never was an indigenous Mexico phenomenon. This operation is based in Europe today, as it was when it was created in Mexico, in 1935, on direct orders from Adolf Hitler, with traditional Synarchist ties, via Mexico and the Franco organization in Spain, to the right-wing Buckley family, and to certain dirty churches inside the U.S.A. itself. This is typical of the crucial security threats to the U.S.A. today. This is the greatest single threat to the U.S.A. in the Americas today.
These creatures, and similar leftovers of the fascist tyrannies of 1922-1945 continental Europe, had been promoted under the pretext that they would serve as "useful talents" against the Soviet system. Contrary to that attempt at a rationale, many leading patriotic figures of our intelligence community have agreed, that the price paid for bringing those disease-bearing cockroaches into the NATO kitchens was much, much too great. Those left-overs from the parts of the fascist apparatus brought into the system, by the likes of Allen Dulles and Angleton, as "useful anti-Communist talent," are still, categorically, a leading security threat operating inside our system today. They were obviously a threat during the 1970s and early 1980s, before the Soviet system collapsed; they are among the most important threats, including terrorist threats today. Presently, for example, they are, in pro-Franco guises as priests and in related other guises, the greatest strategic security threat to the U.S. from inside the Americas today.
The purpose of the collaborative study of the early 1980s, was to uproot those and related forms of corruption from within our political-intelligence establishment.
The Historical View
The original intelligence institution of the U.S.A., from the mid-1780s, until the death of the Marquis de Lafayette, was organized around the Cincinnatus Society, which included one exemplary member of the Society released from West Point military training, for medical reasons, epilepsy, to play what became a leading role in our nation's domestic and foreign counterintelligence functions, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was of a type of volunteer associated with such foreign-intelligence specialists as Washington Irving and the James Fenimore Cooper who was a sometime associate of Poe's in foreign intelligence operations conducted under the wing of Lafayette. So, the U.S. intelligence tradition also includes some of us who never had any official membership in a U.S. intelligence agency, as persons who were never spies in any of today's conventional uses of that term, but who were often much more useful than any of the standard varieties of official spies could have been.
Implicitly, those who serve officially, or privately, in the defense of the U.S.A. and its mission, are virtually an integral part of the resources of our unique form of Constitutional Presidential system, constituting the militia of national defense and security generally. Such is our tradition.
Some, as I was, since Calcutta 1946, were simply impassioned patriots who acted personally, as private citizens who, being dumped back into civilian life, took seriously what they read as the intent of the oath they had previously, and willingly sworn, under President Franklin Roosevelt, to serve faithfully. They were, essentially, simply persons with a developed instinct to be of service to what we considered the purpose of the existence of our United States. If we unlicensed, unpaid patriots of that sort became either a nuisance, or an asset, in the eyes of incumbent agents of our official institutions, the responsible leaders of those institutions took note of our work, and sometimes reacted positively by appearing not to react at all. I, for example, was considered too uncontrollably independent to be "taken in," but also came to be recognized by intelligent and patriotic observers of my independent role, as a unique talent too important not to be left to roam as his patriotic instincts guided him, inside and outside the U.S.A.
So, on that account, for example, during the early 1980s, suddenly declassified, relevant documents of U.S. intelligence services from the interval between the 1920s and 1945, were made available to me for my study of the long-term, continuing threat to the U.S.A. from the Europe-based Synarchist International networks and assets deployed, from within the Americas, against the U.S.A. This was made available in connection with my arguments for the development of a national intelligence academy. The purpose of my involvement, was to serve as part of the work of designing a remedy for certain leading systemic problems of our nation's intelligence functions, problems, such as the legacy of Dulles and Angleton, which had built up within our institutions over the 1945-1984 period to that date.
I am still dedicated to that same mission, as here, in criticizing the work of the "9-11 Commission," today. The fruits of that dedication have a significant bearing on the way in which we must look, very critically, at the current, impulsive, chiefly half-baked gestures toward immediate establishment of an "intelligence super-czar."
I refer to my own experience here, now, because it touches upon crucial features of our required intelligence functions, respecting national-security matters, features which are not being properly considered in the current public discussion of proposals for a reorganization of the top-most features of our national intelligence capabilities.
We must approach the present crises with a clear view of the role of the de facto intelligence services defending the U.S.A. as an institution of combined serving and other citizens who remain in place, in readiness, even as Presidents come and go. These include not only those intelligence, military, and diplomatic persons in active service to our official institutions, but both retired representatives of those institutions, senior retired figures of our political institutions, and those who have never served formally in institutions of government, but are established as tested sometime advisors to official institutions of government in relevant matters. The role of experienced such persons, now often operating with the freedom to speak of matters which in-service personnel are not permitted to say, is the historically defined conscience of our intelligence and related services. These circles, which act in a responsible way respecting the constitutional functions of in-place agencies, are an integral part of our nation's intelligence capability, as my own experience in related matters during the early 1980s reminded me most forcefully.
Often, as in today's crises, busy in-service political figures, gripped by the combination of their political-career ambitions and pressures of popular opinion, become so concerned with near-term press and other public opinion, that they lose sight of the character of our nation, its purpose, and its future destiny, as a nation essentially rooted in the history of the way in which we came into being, and have survived ominous threats and other challenges over the course of the time since the founding of the first European colonies on our shores. Too often, as now, the in-service political figures' preoccupation with notions of success of self or party faction, blinds them to those more profound, true interests of our republic, well known to the founders of our republic, which are rooted in our own history and the historical experience of a European civilization's toils and torment, over a period since the time of the conflict between the struggle for freedom, led by Solon of Athens against the legacy of tyranny traced from Sparta's Lycurgus.
We "old boys" who share the common passion of Solon, the Winthrops, the Mathers, and Benjamin Franklin, are, in the long run, the truest informed conscience of our nation, and, on that account, the most critical judges of our true national interest. To the degree, we might see those predecessors viewing us now, our judgment on crucial policy-matters, especially a matter such as the composition of our intelligence-security establishment, might be trusted.
3. What Is the Intelligence Function?
Most people debating "intelligence functions" publicly today, have shown us not the slightest competent idea of what the term "intelligence" ought to mean when used in the kind of context implicitly defined by the "9-11 Commission's" work.
"Intelligence" in the strictest sense of the term's institutional usages in national security matters, refers to the role which must be played in the functions of our intelligence and security institutions, as by, comparably, the human quality of creative intelligence's production of experimentally validated universal physical principles, as a function of the developed individual human mind: the ability to think with that creative insight which is, regrettably, usually lacking in most members of the rank of heavily bureaucratized serving professionals of the U.S.A. and other nations today.
It is of most notable relevance here, that intelligence so defined, is a quality entirely absent in all visible evidence respecting the observed behavior of the mouth and mind of that President George W. Bush, Jr., now babbling impetuously about creating an intelligence "czar." "Intelligence" should signify, for the subject of U.S. national-security functions at the relatively highest level, the discovery of true but usually overlooked matters of principled interest of the nation's present and future existence. As I have just written above, these are matters of brain function expressing that same quality of intellectual effort as the discovery of experimentally validatable universal physical principles.
The most characteristic part of the function performed by intelligence services is beyond the comprehension of the incumbent President. Intelligence is not making deductions from what are loosely identified as "facts"; intelligence is essentially a process of recognizing the importance of what both "party-line" officials, and the routine fact-finders are stubbornly ignoring. The ordinary quality of intelligence-security fellows, debate conclusions based on a standard sort of deduction from facts. The more highly qualified analyst considers the class of relevant, crucial facts which are not prescribed in the present manuals. This is a distinction related to the role of strategic flanking in military affairs.
For example, in competent physical science, the principal object of the profession is the discovery of those experimentally validated hypotheses which have been prompted for attention by some stubbornly systemic anomaly which shows us the falseness of knowledge we had previously taken for granted as self-evidently true. The skilled cop on the beat concentrates on looking for new anomalies in the ongoing life of the community. The scientist and qualified intelligence professional look for a principled kind of falseness in generally accepted doctrines and other assumptions. The competent intelligence specialist functions as the gifted scientific discoverer does, discovering the principles which are operating in a way which is contrary to generally accepted popular and professional opinions. I, personally, have repeatedly shown myself to be most unusually good at reacting in that way, which brought me, ultimately, into the kinds of function I have played in society, internationally, during recent decades.
Take the following not-uncommon problem as an example of this distinction.
How the Healthy Mind Works
Think of a newborn baby, which must learn to define sense-perceptual objects. Those same powers of the individual human mind, for defining objects, come into play not only in the domain of sense-perception, but also in the way in which a capably developed mind thinks about non-perceptible real objects, such as experimentally validated universal physical principles, as definite thought-objects. From a combination of my personal, happy and unhappy experiences with those claiming to be intelligence specialists, the development of this latter capacity, the same capacity which sets a true physical scientist apart from, and above a mere mathematical statistician, or the usual run of today's academic economist, is the most crucial of the qualifications of a senior intelligence-security specialist.
The most common cause of tragic failures of performance of would-be historians, and of the related category of higher-ranking intelligence specialists, is the mediocre intellect's obsession with mere sense-perceptual facts. This obsession reflects an inability to look behind the sense-perceptual expression of behavior of his, or her subject, into the functioning of the mind which is controlling the subject's empirically observable behavior. The essence of intelligence, whether in operational military strategy or the security matters posed by the phenomena of asymmetric warfare today, lies in the refined form of developed capability of a senior strategic thinker, to see beyond the screen of mere sense-perceptual data, into the mind which is controlling the observed behavior.
This is not to deprecate so-called factual intelligence. It is to point to the virtual psycho-sexual impotence of the mind of the person so obsessed with deductive or inductive reading of "facts," that he or she refuses to take into account that behind all human behavior, there lies an intention which is inaccessible to the senses, but which, like an experimentally demonstrated universal physical principle, is clearly visible to those powers of what is called "insight," otherwise manifest in physical science. To see an experimentally proven discovery of an hypothesis expressing an intended universal physical principle as an object of thought, rather than those mere shadows of reality called sense-perceptions, is the essence of all competent forms of higher intelligence-security practice. I mean thought-objects in the sense of the usage of the German term "Geistesmasse" by Herbart and Riemann.
Imagine that you have compiled a massive array of facts, all bearing on, for example, a highly important counterintelligence problem in national security. At that stage of the investigation, your job, or someone else's, is to make sense of the awkward accumulation of evidence and relevant other things in that file.
If you then think about that job now set before you, you appreciate the significance of the fact that some of our country's top spies, such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe, were extremely gifted writers of a quality of Classical fiction which, often, was disguised by the appearance of being fictional, but, like Cooper's The Spy, actually reflected real-life-based intelligence reports on forms of developments which were rigorously, truthfully relevant to unravelling a specific feature of ongoing, real-life intelligence concern.
As in writing a book based on a relevant mass of non-fictional facts available, the task of the intelligence/counterintelligence specialist, is to make sense of those facts for the user of that report, and to do that, preferably, in a way in which the unifying truth of those facts as a whole is presented as a concept of one to several paragraphs' length at the start of the written text. Even in the opening sentence or two.
Any serious professional intelligence analyst, or higher-ranking responsible, should study the opening of Bernhard Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation profoundly, for an outstanding example of what any important good piece of writing on serious intelligence matters does, to focus the reader's attention on the concept which makes that mass of facts comprehensible, and correctly so, to a reader of the intended professional qualifications.
In other words, the task is to discover the single, indivisible thought-object which not only makes the entire mass of relevant fact hang together in the unified way needed to focus the concentration of the intended user of that report, but does this to scientifically valid effect.
It is the same thing in the case of a successful Classical musical composition crafted in the Bach tradition, rather than the silly paste-ups from Rameau and his tradition, or comparable noise-making by so-called popular musical entertainers today. A capable performer of such a Classical work, has the entirety of the composition about to be performed encapsulated in a single seamless, indivisible conception; that conception guides the performer all the way through, without change in that conception itself, thus achieving a functional unity of effect for both the performers and the qualified audience. So, such a memory of a single, indivisible thought-object, the indivisible identity of the object as a whole, steers the performance of the composition through each transformation of its unfolding. Reducing a mass of detail to such individual germ-conceptions, is the essential quality of effective professional intelligence work, as it is of Classical artistic composition and its performance. The single idea, as thought-object, is the remembered "face" of the composition, the image which steers the unfolding of the development of the composition's performance as a whole.
To pin down this crucial point, I have asked your attention to the preceding, interpolated point of fundamental importance for all competent scientific and political intelligence work.
Some Crucial Examples
Take as an example of this principle of unifying strategic intelligence conception, the formulation which Secretary of State John Quincy Adams used, in crafting what U.S. President James Monroe uttered as the so-called "Monroe Doctrine." Adams's treatment, in his own papers, of the principled long-term interests of the U.S. republic which were threatened by the treaty-agreement proposed by British minister Canning, is a crucial case in point.
Adams emphasized a universal principle of the statecraft of the modern sovereign nation-state republic, a principle drawn from that central principle of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia on which all competent international law among actually civilized sovereign nations is based still today: "the advantage of the other." In the matter of the Canning proposal, Adams advised President Monroe that the proposed treaty with the (de facto) British Empire must be rejected. Former Presidents Jefferson and Madison were consulted by President Monroe, and all agreed. Adams stipulated that the interest of the U.S.A., which must be applied as soon as the U.S.A. had the power to do so, was to expel the European powers, including especially the British and the Habsburg interest, from the Americas, in defense of the sovereignty of each and all of the independent republics of the Americas. This was the principle uttered by President Franklin Roosevelt under the rubric of a "Good Neighbor Policy."
At the close of World War II, it had been the intention of President Franklin Roosevelt, to extend that same principle, as the vital interest of the U.S.A. itself, as the application of the Westphalia principle to such matters as the eradication of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism from the post-war world. Unfortunately, President Truman, politically a factional ally of the British imperialist Winston Churchill against President Roosevelt, overturned that policy, by launching support for recolonization. It was this reversal which set the stage for the prolonged principal international security crisis of the 1946-1989 interval.
It was the tendency of such as Secretary of Defense Cheney, under Bush 41, to launch a perpetual war of "preventive nuclear warfare," to create a post-Soviet, Anglo-American one-world empire of "globalization," which has been the principal source of the conditions of U.S. and related major, post-Soviet insecurity today.
Strategic intelligence functions are subsumed by essential preoccupation with long-range destinations. As in space-travel, one can not pause en route to pick a different destination carelessly; the result is implicit in the launch and design of the mission, from the start. Competent practice of strategic intelligence is essentially long-range planning of operations; this attitude then spills over into the form of questions such as, where is the presently implied drift of policy carrying society over the next couple of generations ahead? Everything, including minute details, are judged against that background of long-range thinking, long-range thinking expressed as by "the face" of a single, individual idea of that principled course of unfolding development.
Our Present Insecurity
From that standpoint of reference: The underlying root of our nation's present insecurity, which is only reflected by what the silly current Bush Presidency terms "the war against terrorism," is expressed in three principled forms.
One: the insecurity caused by the onrushing general physical-economic collapse of the world's present monetary-financial system.
Two: the reaction to the instabilities fostered by certain Anglo-American efforts to establish an imperialistic form of globalized society under conditions provided by the collapse of the Soviet system. The policy of the liberal-imperialist government of Fabian British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Robert Cooper and Baroness Liz Symons, typifies a current expression of this.
Three: the use of strategies mimicking Hermann Göring's setting fire to the Reichstag, in February 1933, to panic governments into proffering dictatorial powers to replace representative government, on the pretext of "fighting terrorism," for example. The role of the spin-offs of the British Foreign Office's child, the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Osama bin Laden's crew, is to be regarded as a typical reflection of the convergence of the effects of these three principled problems.
Washington and London, chiefly, created Osama bin Laden as their instrument of policy. We created and nurtured the operating environment in which he functions today. How do we dry out the conditions on which the continuation of his operations depends? What have we done wrong, not only to create him, but, as the Bush Administration did in its wildly insane and reckless launching of the current Iraq war (and it is still very much an ongoing, and spreading war) to nourish the kind of environment in which we, by our policies, are creating the very so-called "terrorist" threat which we, on the other hand, claim to be devoutly committed to uprooting?
Competent intelligence services deal with problems by the methods of Edgar Allan Poe, not the gumshoe antics of a "new age" clown such as Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Admittedly, good security intelligence must and does diagnose those particular effects, as part of the security measures to be taken in response to the effects of the interaction of the three cited principal causes of our present insecurity. Poe's case of "The Purloined Letter," or "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," are examples of a solution to unfolding patterns of events, which each reduced to a solution-form by giving the story as a whole a single, indivisible image of a "face."
This "face-likeness" of solutions to such mysteries, is the same quality of idea we associate with the idea of a discovered universal physical principle, as distinct from the mathematical details left like a flight-trail in the wake of the movement of that object-principle. However, our essential responsibility is to remove the principled causes of those threatening effects. Often, for example, we recognize the goal of successful operations in warfare as creating secure foundations for the acceptance of peace in the generality of our momentary adversaries.
Good intelligence work thus follows the precept, that the governing principle of military strategy is to bring about peace, by placing the emphasis in the application of military strategy and tactics on what is sometimes popularly termed "an exit strategy" of the type which was excluded from the Bush 43 Pentagon's lurch to that unnecessary war in Iraq, which has created a far greater threat of what is called terrorist action than had existed until President George W. Bush's lunatic lurch in his State of the Union address of January 2002.
What Changes in Organization Are Needed?
Before proposing to change the top-down organization of our republic's intelligence-security functions, consider a crucial test-question. Why did we not clean house of those accomplices of Vice-President Dick Cheney whose fraudulent concoctions and duplicitous schemes led the U.S.A. into an Iraq war which simply should not have happened as it did? In other words, why did we not fire Wolfowitz's and Cheney's crews, and do the same thing, in effect, with the core of the security problem, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney? What prevented us from doing that in a timely way, and what changes might have caused that necessary reversal of the folly of failing to dump them before the war actually started?
Any proposed change in the structuring of our intelligence-security establishment, which does not meet that test-question standard, should be sent back to the drawing board, or, probably, to a new firm of architects.
Also, consider the likelihood that the solution to that challenge might have been: fire the President, too. There are ways, which involve the Congress, by which a President as defective as 43 appears to be, can be removed constitutionally, such as ordering his culpable Vice-President to resign, and then "fall on the political sword" himself. It is probable that failing to bring exactly that change about, would be future historians' estimate of the reason for the plunge into an unconstitutional (e.g., illegal) war, and the spread of terrorism which that war has already brought about. One senses that many relevant circles in and around the military and intelligence community otherwise knew that might be the result of the war. What happened to the checks and balances? Why, similarly, has the "9-11 Commission's" report, so far, not succeeded in getting even to first base on uncovering proof of the actual higher-ranking authorship of that attack, nearly three years later?
There were warnings, but the warnings did not get through to bring about the needed correction in a timely way. Would an "intelligence czar's" appointment provide a solution? By no means. We must build into our intelligence-security system a set of checks and balances of the type which would have tended to break through the barriers against a constitutional regard for truth, barriers erected by those behind Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, and the latter's "chickenhawk" crew.
The Root of the Problem
On this account, there were known problems built into the U.S. national security system from the time of its erection. Without taking those problems into account, it were impossible to make practical sense of the kinds of problems arising from the way in which the present national security system sometimes functions, and often does not.
The untimely death of President Franklin Roosevelt, as it led to the succession of Roosevelt's factional adversary, Harry S Truman, resulted in the immediate, severe aggravation of a duality in sense of direction of national mission which had already existed, essentially, since the preparations for the founding of our national independence, which began in the wake of the February 1763 Peace treaty at Paris, the treaty which established the triumphant British East India Company as an empire in fact. The division between patriots and Essex Junto Tories, which developed over the 1763-1800 interval, around the opposition of the patriot Alexander Hamilton and the traitor Aaron Burr, defined a differentiation in philosophy which has been the uninterrupted, characteristic internal issue of our republic to this present moment of writing. The division in post-war policies, between those of Roosevelt and Truman, thus introduced an aggravated state of pre-existing moral and strategic ambiguity in our national mission, an ambiguity which has crippled our institutional definition of national mission, in and outside our intelligence establishment, to the present day.
That ambiguity, which has been greatly worsened by the Bush 43 Administration's efforts, in the Congress, to replace a two-party system with a system of rule by a pro-utopian one-party majority, prohibits our tolerating any scheme for putting a super-czar, a virtual Golem, in charge of the nation's security system. Such a damnable innovation would soon be the end of the U.S. Constitution and our people's freedoms.
The relevant observations to that effect, run as follows:
The problem expressed by the murky closing summary of the report of the "9-11 Commission," is rooted in the "go along to get along" moral uncertainties expressing that legacy of rot in our system to the present day. The tendency to address a crisis of indecision, by proposing an absolute arbiter, rather than settle a conflict in principle, is a proposed remedy worse than the disease which the report purports to cure. It is a step down the road to the kind of emergency government which Germany adopted in the immediate aftermath of that February 1933 Reichstag Fire, organized by Hermann Göring, which made the spread of fascism throughout continental Europe inevitable, and brought the world into the horrors of World War II.
In the post-Franklin Roosevelt U.S.A., this conflict in philosophy took the leading form of a conflict between the military-strategic traditionalists, such as Generals of the Armies Douglas MacArthur and Eisenhower, on the one side, and the pro-fascist utopians typified by Allen Dulles and Angleton on the other. The Bush 43 administration, of a mentally unqualified virtual puppet under the thumb of Synarchist Anglo-American pro-imperialist asset Vice-President Cheney, carries the differences expressed by the rise of post-war nuclear military utopianism to the verge of a threatened dictatorship in and over the U.S.A. now. The conflict between the best among our general officers and the Cheney-Rumsfeld utopian madmen, from the installation of Bush 43 to the present moment, is essentially an expression of that threat of a fascist dictatorship in and over the U.S.A. now.
The role of those who triumphed over the still warm body of President Franklin Roosevelt, those typified by Allen Dulles and Angleton, and others who covered up the evidence against the real financier-oligarchical backers of the Synarchist International's 1922-1945 rampage of fascism in Europe, defined the roots of the presently immediate threat to civilization globally, in the world today.
In this circumstance, the proposal for an intelligence super-star, a virtual Golem, is one of the worst ideas which could be proposed as an act of intellectual negligence. It is time to vote against Cheney's re-election as if the life of almost any among you, especially the poor and aged, depended upon that vote; as the victims of Hitler, were they alive to speak, would probably warn you against repeating their negligence in allowing Hitler, in January 1933, it probably does.
The task is not to uncover some scapegoat to be blamed for the crimes of "international terrorism." We already know, from the lessons learned in the history of Hitler and of the cover-up for those Nazi and related elements which we took inside our nest at the end of that war, what the enemy is. We know already enough of the relevant names for today, to deal a crippling blow to that foe. What we need is not some Golem as a super-spy; we need a mission-orientation to rid the planet of the enemy, as we should have done, but for Dulles, Angleton, Buckley, and the Synarchist bankers of France and elsewhere, at the close of World War II. Let us who know, do our job, with no help needed from any damned Golem.
This brings us to a crucial feature of competent intelligence-work.
The Principle of Dialogue
The principled foundation of our constitutional republic, our peculiar national genius, so to speak, is not rooted in the simplistic notion of "democracy," but what is sometimes mistaken for democracy, the uncertainty that anyone has a final monopoly on truth. To put the same point otherwise, the danger is that the assumption that existing opinion represents truth, simply because it might be currently prevalent official, or simply popular opinion, is an assumption which, by its nature, is the explicit enemy of truth-seeking.
The wisest among us, over these generations, have limited a sense of certainty about truth to a few propositions which, in retrospect, have survived every objection which might have been made against them over all known times. The rock-bottom of our belief, is that man and women are equally distinguished as made in the immortal likeness of the Continuing Creator of the universe, and that our highest obligation is to spend the mortal span of individual life, by acting as in effect the likeness of that Creator, as some might say: like a visiting angel on a mission. It is therefore our commitment, that all men and women shall be treated as of that nature, nurtured in the development of those competencies for angelic services, including the correction of errors of belief among their fellow-citizens.
Therefore, we resist the imposition of what some might wish to consider a fixed system of belief about every imaginable subject-matter of human behavior. Rather, instead of using the commonly abused name of "democracy," let us think of the struggle of each to contribute to the discovery of some truth which frees prevailing mere opinion of the time from its typical falsehoods. We require a system which hates the sophistry of today's spin-doctors, which hates all expressions of reckless disregard for truth, and which loves truthfulness.
A replacement for the incompetent notion of a super-Golem of security intelligence, should therefore be a process of controversy which will be efficiently brought to bear, even to the degree that discoveries made could lead to the impeachment of the incumbent President which that intelligence community has dutifully served, in bringing about the duly considered removal of that particular President from office. The standard of performance required, is not the assertion of absolute truth, but simply the fruit of competently pursued discovery of truthful conclusions.
To that end, the functions of intelligence and security planning must assume the quality of a Platonic Socratic dialogue, a dialogue thus composed as a search for discovery of truth. All views must be openly set forth at a common table. In that function, leadership, strong leadership is needed, but no arbitrary boss can be tolerated. This will succeed only if the government, and a large portion of the citizenry is committed to, and supports the methods of a Socratic dialogue as the means by which estimates of truth are composed.
The standard for truthfulness we require to such ends, is the form of controversy we associate, typically, with great experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principle, discoveries made in defiance of all supposedly self-evident definitions, axioms, and postulates. This requires a form of organization of the intelligence community at large, in which the inherent tendency for fallacy of composition by specialist agencies, or intruding partisanship, is corrected through an office which functions, not as a czar, but as a secretary of the assembled functions of all the relevant intelligence and security services. The secretary is so defined, as one which can never enjoy the authority of suppressing the evidence of any participating agency, but, on the contrary, acts as chief among equals in a general staff system, comparable to a military general staff system, in the assigned mission of ensuring that the government of the U.S.A. has the advantage of knowing even when it is wrong in even its currently steadfast, ostensibly principled opinion.
Such a general staff mode of organization, can be achieved with the desirable least change in organization of government, by a certain concretizing of the separation of the function of Director of Intelligence from that of Direct of Central Intelligence. The Director of Intelligence, functioning as a non-elected professional officer to the body of the Cabinet, with voice equal to that of the rank of a member of the Cabinet, would be a recommended change producing the needed Secretary-coordinator of a general staff system composed of the principal representatives of the various security and intelligence agencies of the Federal government. Under that Secretary (Director of Intelligence), the Director of Central Intelligence would rank as a coordinating first among equals for all other intelligence functions, but without the authority to suppress the voice of peers in matters presented to the Secretary and to the body of distinguished advisors associated with that Secretary.
The included objective is to rid the system, as much as is feasible, of those abuses of the intelligence and security functions associated with the regrettable memories of such as Allen Dulles and James J. Angleton. This requires an adjustment, elevating the responsible directors of intelligence for other Federal agencies to the authority for intelligence matters associated with membership in a general staff system. If that specific intention is not made emphatically, even the best intentions otherwise, will fail; one can not cure the patient without addressing the disease, and the Dulles-Angleton syndrome has been an ugly disease.
By general staff system, we should intend to avoid the evils of a bureaucratic system. The serving director of each agency must have the degree of independence for investigations which the term general staff system connotes.
However, that said, the essential problem of principle involved, is the need to uproot the legacy of what we have experienced as the utopian faction in our national policy-making and practice since the close of World War II. Without a commitment to a single principle of government, as expressed most vividly by that succinct statement of intention, the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, as a Preamble whose intention is of overriding authority in interpreting other, subordinate features of the Constitution, its amendments, and Federal law, the root of the failures of intelligence can not be removed. Without that affirmation of our national principle, the division between American tradition and utopianism, which is expressed in an ugly way by the role of Vice-President Cheney et al., will continue; if that is continued, our republic may be doomed rather soon.
