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Corporate Media Discover Private Spies. In Other News, No WMD in Iraq
July 21, 2010: By Jeremy Scahill
Corporate Media Discover Private Spies. In Other News, No WMD in Iraq
Stop the presses and call the government spokespeople back from Martha’s Vineyard. The corporate media have discovered that the United States is radically outsourcing national security and sensitive intelligence operations. Cable news channels breathlessly report on the “groundbreaking,” “exclusive” Washington Post series, Top Secret America, a two-year investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin. No doubt there is some important stuff in this series. Both Arkin and Priest have done outstanding work for many years on sensitive, life-or-death subjects. And that is one of the main reasons why this series has, thus far, been incredibly disappointing. Its greatest accomplishment is forcing a discussion onto corporate TV years after it would have had an actual impact.
The misplaced hype surrounding the Post series speaks volumes to the ahistorical nature of US media culture. Next week, if the New York Times published a story on how there were no WMDs in Iraq, there would no doubt be cable news shows that would act like it was an earth-moving revelation delivered by Moses on the stone tablet of exclusive, groundbreaking journalism.
The Post does a fine job of exploring the scope of the privatization and providing some new or updated statistics. It also produces a few zingers from senior officials like Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “This is a terrible confession,” Gates said in Tuesday’s installment. “I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.” It was also hilarious to read CIA director Leon Panetta-who just gave Blackwater a brand new $100 million global CIA contract-act like he is anything other than a contractor addict. “For too long, we’ve depended on contractors to do the operational work that ought to be done” by CIA employees, Panetta told the Post. But replacing them “doesn’t happen overnight. When you’ve been dependent on contractors for so long, you have to build that expertise over time.” Panetta told the Post he was concerned about contracting with corporations, whose responsibility “is to their shareholders, and that does present an inherent conflict.” I wonder if the Blackwater guys working for Panetta can contain their laughter reading those statements. I imagine them taping a post-it note that says “Kick me” on Panetta’s back and then chuckling about it with the Lockheed contractors.
The Post is “doing their best to obfuscate what contractors really do for US intelligence. They’re eight years behind and still haven’t caught up…. there’s virtually nothing in their series about the broader picture-like what it means to have private for-profit companies operating at the highest levels of our national security.”
What is perhaps most telling about the Post series is how little detail is provided on the most sensitive operations performed by contractors: assassinations, torture, rendition and operational planning.
In reality, there is little in the Post series that, in one way or another, has not already been documented by independent journalist Tim Shorrock, author of the (actually) groundbreaking book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. With the exception of some details and a lot of color, much of what I have read in the Post‘s series thus far I had already read in Shorrock’s book and his previous reporting for Salon, Mother Jones and The Nation. Shorrock was the reporter who first revealed the extent of the radical privatization of intel operations. In 2007, Shorrock obtained and published a document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that 70 percent of the US intelligence budget was spent on private contractors. Shorrock was way out in front of this story and, frankly, corporate media ignored it. When I was working on my book on Blackwater, which first came out in 2007, Shorrock provided me with some crucial insights into the world of privatized intelligence. Shorrock remains a valued colleague and source and the Post is just wrong to not credit him for the work he has done on this story. Everyone should read Shorrock’s latest story which includes an exclusive photo tour through the private intelligence community.
The Post and its reporters, Shorrock told me, “are doing their best to obfuscate what contractors really do for US intelligence. They’re eight years behind and still haven’t caught up. Basically their stories are throwing big numbers at readers-such as the fact that of 854,000 people with top security clearances, 265,000 are contractors. But that’s work that can be done by interns; there’s virtually nothing in their series about the broader picture-like what it means to have private for-profit companies operating at the highest levels of our national security.”
Much of the series reads like a description of the mundane work of analysts and IT people with the types of stats Shorrock mentioned thrown in. Of course, it is meant to feel insider-ish to read the description of the General Dynamics contractor tracking a white pick-up truck in Afghanistan suspected of being “part of a network making roadside bombs” and with a few clicks of the mouse revealing the history of the vehicle, the address and identity of the driver and a list of visitors to his house. But what about the ultra-sensitive work contractors do for the NSA or the highly secretive National Reconnaissance Office? “It’s very significant that, in their database, [the Post] eliminated information about what key contractors do for the agencies such as NSA,” says Shorrock. “There’s tons of data about these companies in their database, but not what they actually do.” (People wanting more information on contractors doing this work, such as Booz-Allen, SAIC, Northrop Grumman and others should check out the contractor database Shorrock developed with CorpWatch last year.)
Also, what about the contractors who have tortured prisoners, flown rendition flights and participated in lethal “direct actions” ie assassination operations?
According to the July 20 article in the Post‘s series: “Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up in the Washington suburbs. At Langley headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency’s training facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of American spies…. Contractors kill enemy fighters. They spy on foreign governments and eavesdrop on terrorist networks. They help craft war plans. They gather information on local factions in war zones.”
Wow, an engaged reader might think after reading that, this will be fascinating. Now we are getting somewhere. But instead of revealing new details on these types of operations and naming names and employers and specific incidents, none of that is to be found. The discussion of torture and extrajudicial killings committed by private contractors is relegated to a whitewashing by the Post. “Contractor misdeeds in Iraq and Afghanistan have hurt U.S. credibility in those countries as well as in the Middle East,” Priest and Arkin write. “Abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, some of it done by contractors, helped ignite a call for vengeance against the United States that continues today. Security guards working for Blackwater added fuel to the five-year violent chaos in Iraq and became the symbol of an America run amok.” [Emphases added.]
I’m sorry, Blackwater “added fuel” to “chaos?” “America run amok?” These are very strange descriptions of the take-away message from the massacre of seventeen innocent Iraqi civilians, the alleged murder of a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president and night-hunting Iraqis as “payback” for 9/11. Not to mention the allegations of young prostitutes performing oral sex for a dollar, guns smuggled on private planes in dog food bags, hiding weapons from ATF agents and on and on. But more important, where in the Post series is the examination of the CIA assassination program that relied on Blackwater and other private contractors? Where is the investigation of Erik Prince’s hit teams that operated in Germany and elsewhere? What about the ongoing work of contractors in the drone bombing program? What about Blackwater contractors calling in air-strikes in Afghanistan or operating covertly in Pakistan?
Also, since when is torturing prisoners a “misdeed?” According to the Post, torture at Abu Ghraib “helped to ignite a call for vengeance against the United States.” This type of vapid description of the consequences of heinous crimes committed by America and its proxies has become like daily bread in corporate media outlets. The Post‘s focus on the calls for vengeance rather than the incredible uphill quest for justice in the US courts by the victims of this torture is telling. As is the total omission of the other torture facilities employed by the United States-some of which were revealed first by Dana Priest and the Washington Post.
Marcy Wheeler–another unfamous journalist who rarely gets credit from the corporate all-stars when she scoops them-described this aspect of the Post story on her EmptyWheel blog: “Abuse of prisoners happened. But apparently, only at Abu Ghraib, not at Bagram, not at Gitmo, not at firebases where detainees died. And the names of those contractors? Their role in the abuse? The WaPo stops short of telling you, for example, that a CACI interrogator was the one instructing the grunts at Abu Ghraib to abuse detainees. The WaPo also doesn’t tell you the CACI contractors never paid any price for doing so. The WaPo doesn’t mention that DOD believed they had no way of holding contractors accountable for such things (though the case of David Passaro, in which a detainee died, of course proved that contractors could be prosecuted).”
Perhaps the Post plans to publish a story called “Top Top Super Duper Triple-Decker Secret America” where the paper actually delves deep into the outsourcing of assassinations, torture, rendition, interrogation and “find fix and finish” operations. That would truly be ground-breaking. Until then, buy Tim Shorrock’s book and read Marcy Wheeler.
© 2010 The Nation
Sayanim — Israeli Operatives in the U.S.
July 19, 2010: By Jeff Gates
Sayanim — Israeli Operatives in the U.S.
Americans know that something fundamental is amiss. They sense—rightly—that they are being misled no matter which political party does the leading.
A long misinformed public lacks the tools to grasp how they are being deceived. Without those tools, Americans will continue to be frustrated at being played for the fool.
When the “con” is clearly seen, “the mark” (that’s us) will see that all roads lead to the same duplicitous source: Israel and its operatives. The secret to Israel’s force-multiplier in the U.S. is its use of agents, assets and sayanim (Hebrew for volunteers).
When Israeli-American Jonathan Pollard was arrested for spying in 1986, Tel Aviv assured us that he was not an Israeli agent but part of a “rogue” operation. That was a lie.
Only 12 years later did Tel Aviv concede that he was an Israeli spy the entire time he was stealing U.S. military secrets. That espionage—by a purported ally—damaged our national security more than any operation in U.S. history.
In short, Israel played us for the fool.
From 1981-1985, this U.S. Navy intelligence analyst provided Israel with 360 cubic feet of classified military documents on Soviet arms shipments, Pakistani nuclear weapons, Libyan air defense systems and other intelligence sought by Tel Aviv to advance its geopolitical agenda.
Agents differ from assets and sayanim. Agents possess the requisite mental state to be convicted of treason, a capital crime. Under U.S. law, that internal state is what distinguishes premeditated murder from a lesser crime such as involuntary manslaughter. Though there’s a death in either case, the legal liabilities are different—for a reason.
Intent is the factor that determines personal culpability. That distinction traces its roots to a widely shared belief in free will as a key component that distinguishes humans from animals.
Agents operate with premeditation and “extreme malice” or what the law describes as an “evil mind.” Though that describes the mental state of Jonathan Pollard, Israeli leaders assured us otherwise—another example of an evil mind as the U.S. was played for the fool.
Played for the Fool, Again
Pollard took from his office more than one million documents for copying by his Israeli handler. When those classified materials were transferred to the Soviets, reportedly in exchange for the emigration of Russian Jews, this spy operation shifted the entire dynamics of the Cold War.
To put a price tag on this espionage, imagine $20 trillion in U.S. Cold War defense outlays from 1948-1989 (in 2010 dollars). The bulk of that investment in national security was negated by a spy working for a nation that pretended throughout to be a U.S. ally.
Pollard was sentenced to life in prison. Israel suffered no consequences. None. Zero. Nada. Not then. Not now. Then as now, we were played for the fool.
At trial, Pollard claimed he wasn’t stealing from the U.S.; he was stealing secrets for Israel—with whom the U.S. has long had a “special relationship.” He thought we should have shared our military secrets with them. That’s chutzpah. That also confirms we were played for the fool.
Looking back, it’s easy to see how seamlessly we segued from a global Cold War to a global War on Terrorism. In retrospect, the false intelligence used to induce our invasion of Iraq was traceable to Israelis, pro-Israelis or Israeli assets such as John McCain (see below).
Even while in prison, Pollard’s iconic status among Israelis played a strategic role. Was it just coincidence that Tel Aviv announced a $1 million grant to their master spy less than two weeks before 911? Is that how Israel signaled its operatives in the U.S.?
Did that grant have any relationship to the “dancing Israelis” who were found filming and celebrating that mass murder as both jets smashed into the World Trade Center?
Absent that provocation, would we now find ourselves at war in the Middle East? Surely no one still believes that America’s interests are being advanced in a quagmire that has now become the longest war in U.S. history.
“I know what America is,” Benjamin Netanyahu told a group of Israelis in 2001, apparently not knowing his words were being recorded. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”
Let’s face it: the U.S. was again played for the fool.
With oversight by Israeli case officers (katsas), Israeli operations proceed in the U.S. by using agents, assets and volunteers (sayanim). Let’s take a closer look at each.
The Sayanim System
Sayanim (singular sayan) are shielded from conventional legal culpability by being told only enough to perform their narrow role. Though their help may be essential to the success of an Israeli operation, these volunteers (sayanim also means helpers) could pass a polygraph test because their recruiters ensure they remain ignorant of the overall goals of an operation.
In other words, a sayan can operate as an accomplice but still not be legally liable due to a lack of the requisite intent regarding the broader goals—of which they are purposely kept ignorant. Does that intentional “ignorance” absolve them of liability under U.S. law? So far, yes.
Much like military reservists, sayanim are activated when needed to support an operation. By agreeing to be available to help Israel, they provide an on-call undercover corps and force-multiplier that can be deployed on short notice.
How are sayanim called to action? To date, there’s been no attempt by U.S. officials to clarify that key point. This may explain why Pollard was again in the news on July 13th with a high-profile Israeli commemoration of his 9000th day of incarceration.
To show solidarity with this Israeli-American traitor, the lights encircling Jerusalem were darkened while an appeal was projected onto the walls of the Old City urging that President Obama order Pollard’s release from federal prison.
Pollard has long been a rallying point for Jewish nationalists, Zionist extremists and ultra-orthodox ideologues. In short, just the sort of people who would be likely recruits as sayanim. The news coverage given this Day of Adoration may help explain how Israel signals its helpers that an operation is underway and in need of their help.
Are pro-Israelis once again playing Americans for the fool?
When not aiding an ongoing operation, sayanim gather and report intelligence useful to Israel. This volunteer corps is deeply imbedded in legislative bodies, particularly in the U.S.
Thus far, this Israeli operation has advanced with legal impunity as the Israel lobby—though acting as a foreign agent—continues even now to pose as a “domestic” operation.
Morris Amitay, former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, explains how this invisible cadre aids the Israel lobby in advancing its geopolitical agenda:
“There are a lot of guys at the working level up here [on Capitol Hill]…who happen to be Jewish, who are willing…to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness…These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators…You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.”
What sayanim are not told by their katsas is that an Israeli operation may endanger not only Israel but also the broader Jewish community when these operations are linked to extremism, terrorism, organized crime, espionage and treason. Though sayanim “must be 100 percent Jewish,” Ostrovsky reports in By Way of Deception (1990):
“…the Mossad does not seem to care how devastating it could be to the status of the Jewish people in the Diaspora if it was known. The answer you get if you ask is: “So what’s the worst that could happen to those Jews? They’d all come to Israel. Great!” [Mossad is the intelligence and foreign operations directorate for Israel.]
Assets, Agents and Sayanim
Assets are people profiled in sufficient depth that they can be relied upon to perform consistent with their profile. Such people typically lack the state of mind required for criminal culpability because they lack the requisite intent to commit a crime.
Nevertheless, assets are critical to the success of Israeli operations in the U.S. They help simply by pursuing their profiled personal needs—typically for recognition, influence, money, sex, drugs or the greatest drug of all: ideology.
Thus the mission-critical task fulfilled by political assets that the Israel lobby “produces” for long-term service in the Congress—while appearing to represent their U.S. constituents.
Put a profiled asset in a pre-staged time, place and circumstance—over which the Israel lobby can exert considerable influence—and Israeli psy-ops specialists can be confident that, within an acceptable range of probabilities, an asset will act consistent with his or her profile.
Democrat or Republican is irrelevant; the strategic point remains the same: to ensure that lawmakers perform consistent with Israel’s interests. With the help of McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform,” the Israel lobby attained virtual control over the U.S. Congress.
The performance of assets in the political sphere can be anticipated with sufficient confidence that outcomes become foreseeable—within an acceptable range of probabilities. How difficult was it to predict the outcome when Bill Clinton, a classic asset, encountered White House intern Monica Lewinsky?
Senator John McCain has long been a predictable asset. His political career traces its origins to organized crime from the 1920s. It was organized crime that first drew him to Arizona to run for Congress four years before the 1986 retirement of Senator Barry Goldwater.
By marketing his “brand” as a Vietnam-era prisoner of war, he became a reliable spokesman for Tel Aviv while being portrayed as a “war hero.” No media outlet dares mention that Colonel Ted Guy, McCain’s commanding officer while a POW, sought his indictment for treason for his many broadcasts for the North Vietnamese that assured the death of many U.S. airmen.
As a typical asset, it came as no surprise to see McCain and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, a self-professed Zionist, used to market the phony intelligence that took us to war in Iraq. McCain’s ongoing alliance with transnational organized crime spans three decades.
His 1980’s advocacy for S&L crook Charles Keating of “The Keating 5” finds a counterpart in his recent meetings with Russian-Israeli mobster Oleg Deripaska who at age 40 held $40 billion in wealth defrauded from his fellow Russians.
McCain conceded earlier this month in a town hall meeting in Tempe, Arizona that he met in a small dinner in Switzerland with mega-thief Deripaska and Lord Rothschild V.
For assets such as McCain to be indicted for treason, the American public must grasp the critical role that such pliable personalities play in political manipulations. McCain is a “poster boy” for how assets are deployed to shape decisions such as those that took our military to war. In the Information Age, if that’s not treason, what is?
The predictability of a politician’s conduct confirms his or her qualifications as an asset. They are routinely developed and “produced” over lengthy periods of time and then—as with John McCain—maintained in key positions to influence decision-making as key junctures.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was candid in his assessment four weeks after 911. He may have been thinking about John McCain when he made this revealing comment:
“I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.” [October 3, 2001]
Indictments for Treason
Are assets culpable? Do they have the requisite intent to indict them for treason? Does John McCain possess an evil mind? Did he betray this nation of his own free will or is he typical of those assets with personalities so weak and malleable that they can easily be manipulated?
As federal grand juries are impaneled to identify and indict participants in this trans-generational operation, how many sayanim should the Federal Bureau of Investigation expect to uncover in the U.S.? No one knows because this subtle form of treason is not yet well understood.
Victor Ostrovksy, a former Mossad katsa (case officer) wrote in 1990 that the Mossad had 7,000 sayanim in London alone. In London’s 1990 population of 6.8 million, Israel’s all-volunteer corps represented one-tenth of one percent of the residents of that capital city.
If Washington, DC is ten times more critical to Israel’s geopolitical goals (an understatement), does that mean the FBI should expect to find ten times more sayanim per capita in Washington?
What about sayanim in Manhattan, Miami, Beverly Hills, Atlanta, Boston, Charleston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Toledo?
No one knows. And Tel Aviv is unlikely to volunteer the information. This we know for certain: America has been played for the fool. And so has our military.
This duplicity dates back well before British Foreign Secretary Alfred Balfour wrote to an earlier Lord Rothschild in 1917 citing UK approval for a “Jewish homeland.” In practical effect, that “homeland” now ensures non-extradition for senior operatives in transnational organized crime.
To date, America has blinded itself even to the possibility of such a trans-generational operation inside our borders and imbedded inside our government. Instead the toxic charge of “anti-Semitism” is routinely hurled at those chronicling the “how” component of this systemic treason.
Making this treason transparent is essential to restore U.S. national security. That transparency may initially appear unfair to the many moderate and secular Jews who join others appalled at this systemic corruption of the U.S. political system.
Yet they are also concerned that somehow they may be portrayed as guilty by association due to a shared faith tradition. That would be not only unjust to them but also ineffective in identifying and indicting those complicit.
This much is certain: a Democrat as president offers no real alternative to a Republican on those issues affecting U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Today’s corruption predates the duplicity in 1948 that induced Harry Truman to extend recognition to this extremist enclave as a legitimate nation state. Our troubles date from then.
That fateful decision must be revisited in light of what can now be proven about the “how” of this ongoing duplicity—unless Americans want to continue to be played for the fool.
Homeland Security Mission Creep: The Drug War
July 13, 2010: By Kevin Carson
Homeland Security Mission Creep: The Drug War
In recent columns, I’ve been discussing the way that the national security state, given an almighty big hammer in the name of “fighting terrorism,” is finding nails all over the place. Suppressing the anti-globalization movement, fighting the Drug War, and fighting “intellectual property crime” all fall under the post-9/11 security state’s expansive reading of its counter-terror mission.
Specifically, I’ve recently been examining the work of retired USAF Colonel Jennifer Hesterman, a national security scholar whose body of research covers the very broad area where counter-terrorism meets all those other missions.
Her monograph “Transnational Crime and the Criminal-Terrorist Nexus” (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University Press, 2005) devotes considerable space to the international drug trade as a support for international terrorism. She notes: “The once-clear lines between the international drug trade, terrorism, and organized crime are now blurring, crossing, and mutating as never before.” Laundered money from narco-trafficking is a source of funds for terrorists.
Col. Hesterman gets the causality pretty much backward on all this. The black market for drugs is a lucrative source of money because, and only because, drugs are illegal. Repeat after me: the narco-traffickers are the world’s biggest supporters of the drug war — just as Al Capone was Prohibition’s number one fan. You can bet that one of the biggest sources of campaign funding for any hardline Drug Warrior politician is laundered drug money.
The drug trade is a source of funds for terrorism because of black market prices. If you could buy marijuana, coca, opium and their derivatives in any store for a nickel on the dollar of their current price, that international black market money would dry up overnight.
The primary effect of drug prohibition is to turn the country over to organized crime gangs fighting to control the illegal drug trade, just as Prohibition did ninety years ago. What’s more, drug prohibition has had the effect of turning police forces into just another criminal gang fighting to control the black market money. As Willie Nelson says, he gets his best weed from his cop friends. All kidding aside, the domestic Drug War machine is one of the most powerful criminal gangs in the United States — an Evil Empire built on civil asset forfeiture, no-knock raids on non-violent offenders, coerced testimony from jailhouse snitches, warrants obtained by perjury, planted evidence, entrapment, and all the rest of it. Police forces have been militarized and the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments turned into toilet paper.
Internationally, the biggest narco-trafficking operation of them all is the one involved in funding the U.S. government’s Black Ops around the world. Drug money does, indeed, fund terrorism. Gangsters like the CIA and Ollie North depend on it for funds to support terrorists from the Khmer Rouge and the Contras to the Kossovar Liberation Army (as Gary Webb demonstrated pretty effectively in regard to the Contras in particular).
So while lower and mid-level policy analysts (including, with all due respect, Col. Hesterman) may want to win the Drug War, and useful idiots like Bill Bennett may spout its propaganda, the Big Dawgs at the top most decidedly don’t want it ever to come to a victorious conclusion. The big drug cartels, the international terrorist movements, and the American national security state — like the three superpowers in “1984″ — prop each other up. Orwell used the image of three sheafs of corn leaning against each other.
And that’s precisely why the drug trade will never be stamped out. The drug cartels aren’t the enemy of the state, any more than the neighboring farmers were the enemies of the pigs at Animal Farm. The drug cartels and the state prop each other up.
The enemy is you.
C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley
By Anders Gullestad
Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley
Simon Critchley is chair of the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His recent books include “The Book of Dead Philosophers” (Vintage, 2009), “On Heidegger’s Being and Time” (Routledge, 2008) and “Infinitely Demanding” (Verso, 2007). His next book, “How to Stop Living and Start Worrying: Conversations With SC” (Polity) will be published in October. In the following interview with Anders Gullestad, Critchley explores a broad span of topics, from political disappointment to the use of fictions in the political realm.
Anders Gullestad: Throughout your career, you’ve written about a wide range of topics: about philosophers living and dead – especially dead ones, deconstruction, Continental philosophy, humor, Samuel Beckett, Terence Malick, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, political philosophy, ethics, neo-anarchism, religion – in fact you are here in Bergen to talk about Saint Paul – and countless others. Would you say there is a red thread connecting these and, if so, what is it?
Simon Critchley: The best way of answering that is by thinking about the question of disappointment. I have argued that philosophy doesn’t begin in wonder or in the fact that things are, it begins in a realization that things are not what they might be. It begins with a sense of a lack, of something missing, and that provokes a series of questions. The two main axes that have organized my work, for the most part, are the themes of political and religious disappointment. The latter is the realization of the death of God, that there is no guarantee of transcendence. That opens up the problem of nihilism, namely that the highest values that drove classical metaphysics – God, freedom, immortality – had devalued themselves, as Nietzsche puts it. This is something that drives a big part of my work and then the question of what form revaluation might take.
Over the years, I’ve then looked – for example in “Very Little … Almost Nothing” – at aesthetic and literary ways of recreating meaning, the project of romanticism. That has led me into discussions of authors like Beckett. The funny thing is that the very first time I talked about him, it was here in Bergen – in January 1995. I was writing what was then just a disconnected series of reflections. I stumbled into Beckett as my father was dying, reading “Malone Dies” and the other parts of his trilogy, then wrote something in a real sort of frenzy, which I presented here. It was a very important moment for me and I always connect this place with that experience.
The other side of my work is political disappointment – the realization that we are living in an unjust world. “Blood is being spilled in the merriest way, as if it was champagne,” Dostoevsky says. That raises the problem of justice, what it might mean in an unjust world and whether there can be an ethics and a political practice that would be able to face and face down the injustice of the present. How might we begin to think about that? “Infinitely Demanding” is a short book, but very important for me, because I try to lay it out in one continuous argument my response to that question.
So the unity of my work is around the question of disappointment and different forms thereof. But there is nothing disappointing about it. It is what motivates you into action, as a condition for engagement with the world. So it does not mean resignation, which some people seem to think. On the contrary, if you begin from an idea of wonder or enchantment, then you’re really going to be disappointed. [Laughter.]
AG: So, if we were to rephrase the Bible, we could say that for you, “In the beginning was disappointment”?
SC: The Bible of modernity, as it were.
AG: As you say, disappointment and having a bleak outlook on life aren’t necessarily connected. You, in fact, come across as somewhat of an optimist in your work.
SC: Yeah. It depends what day of the week it is, but basically, yes. I’m convinced that the conditions which we find ourselves in give us modest grounds for belief in emancipation and hope. One of the figures I continually come back to, is the figure of passive nihilism and I think we live in a time of pervasive passive nihilism. In the face of a chaotic and bloody world, one withdraws into oneself to cultivate practices of self-perfection. This can be linked to all sorts of new age beliefs, as well as to those that cultivate a sort of literary or aesthetic pleasure. I don’t share this feeling. I feel that human beings, in concert, in the right conditions, are capable of extraordinary outcomes.
AG: Now that you’re nearing 50, would you say that there’s been one continual evolution to your thought, or have there been any major paradigm shifts, philosophically speaking?
SC: Many and there continue to be so. It feels like I’m just at the beginning, really. I think things are shifting all the time. There was a real shift towards political philosophy in the early 1990s. I worked closely together with Ernesto Laclau at Essex. I was a young faculty member at the time and I really soaked up his work, read a lot of Gramsci, a lot of democratic theory. Even though I had political sympathies, I wasn’t really a political thinker, so I taught myself a lot more about that in the real hothouse environment at Essex.
Then in the mid-1990s, psychoanalysis became hugely important for me. I was teaching a lot of Freud, became interested in Lacan and that was a shift: realizing the depth in the psychoanalytic view of human beings. A series of other shifts would be connected with different authors, figures like Blanchot and then there were also further political ones, particularly in connection with the anti-globalization movement. It’s a misnomer, but anyway, the sort of shift in the politics of resistance that happened after November 1999. That was something that became more and more important to me through the impact of Hardt and Negri’s “Empire” – although I disagree with that book profoundly – and then a turn back to Marx. A lot of that was reflected in “Infinitely Demanding,” where you can also see a shift towards a more anarchist position from 2005 and onwards. The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote are best articulated within an anarchist program.
AG: So, these connections to the so-called anti-globalization movement and then, later, to these neo-anarchist practices, are they both on a theoretical and practical level or do you stick mainly to the former?
SC: Initially, it was theoretical, but it has become increasingly practical, in the sense that being in New York, I was introduced to a whole activist scene. To give one practical example, there’s been a struggle at the New School, concerned with the governance of the University. We have a president who is not capable of the job and there’s been a movement amongst faculty and students to get rid of him. So there’s a very practical, local issue of how we can reclaim the autonomy of an institution, but which at the same time has been a very theoretical enterprise, in that a lot of the students involved I’d taught in reading groups, there were activists that I knew. David Graeber, for example, who is an anarchist thinker and practitioner, was very important in the early years in New York. Through actions like that, I read things like “The Invisible Committee,” the Tiqqun group in France.
So yeah, it’s theoretical – I teach philosophy and I write. I can’t claim to be at the barricades throwing Molotov cocktails at the police all the time, but I still have a connection to practical politics. In fact it’s gone in a strange way, as, during the 1980s in England, I was someone who came from the extreme left, but joined the Labour Party in 1984. A lot of people like me decided that it was the only vehicle that could remove Thatcher, so we infiltrated it and I worked in the Labour Party for eight years. Now, I feel completely ashamed and appalled as to what has happened. I still consider it to be my party, but I left in 1992. Since then, I’ve become more and more distrustful of the politics of the state and the traditional mechanisms of representation within democracy. I guess what happens to a lot of people as they get older is that they get more conservative, but with me, the opposite is the case.
AG: In “Infinitely Demanding,” you state what we could call your own ethico-political project in a very clear and succinct manner and you advocate what you term a form of neo-anarchism. Could you describe the current political malaise this project arose out of, what you label the “motivational deficit” of liberal democracy?
SC: I begin from the idea that the institutions, practices and habits of liberal democracy simply do not motivate citizens. Did they ever? I think for periods, yes, especially after periods of crisis and war. In Western Europe there is a situation of slackening and drift, which for me is also linked to the problematic shift from the nation state to the EU, where most people’s bonds of attachment and identification are politically still at the level of the nation state. One thinks of oneself as a Swede or as a Dane and then maybe in some ways as a European, but those European bonds are terribly weak. So people’s identification is still with the nation state, but this has taken a negative form now, so that people are identifying with it in some sort of nostalgic way, usually around issues of “us” and “them” and issues of immigration.
AG: I know you don’t always agree with Chantal Mouffe, but would you concur with her assessment that this motivational deficit has helped cause the current rise of the populist neo-right?
SC: Yes, it has. I mean, I agree with Chantal in many ways in terms of political diagnosis and I agree with her critique of liberalism. I disagree about her political agenda, in particular the way she wants to deprive it of any ethical motivation. For me, there has to be an ethico-political core to any notion of political practice. What’s wrong with someone like Chantal is a hypnotized fascination with figures like Carl Schmitt, who seems to be doing real politics. For me, there are problems with that, but the diagnosis I agree with. The populist right is growing all around in Europe. I have a part time job at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands and I have been experiencing that close up. This is particularly frightening, because you have a demotivation on the political level which is producing a populist reaction centered around immigration and the meaning of “Dutchness.”
So, that’s the diagnosis and then I’m continually suspicious of the “gifts” of liberal democracy, freedom and voting, which people seem to identify with democracy, which has never been particularly plausible to me. And, you know, talk of a liberal cosmopolitan order sort of makes me want to vomit. I’m also very suspicious of Obama and I’ve been critical of him since before he was elected and during the campaign, because he’s not what he appears to be to some people on the left.
AG: If you were an American citizen, would you have voted for him?
SC: It depends where I lived. That’s a local question.
AG: In New York?
SC: In New York? It’s also a question that largely doesn’t matter, because if the Democrats put up a goat as presidential candidate, it would probably get elected in New York State. [Laughter.] I think the US is the most unrepresentative representative democracy, because in a country of 300 million and perhaps 30 million illegal immigrants, there are 435 members of Congress and 100 senators. It’s pathetic. In Britain, which is hardly a beacon of democracy, there are nearly 700 members of parliament and about the same number of members of the House of Lords. The constitution of the American democracy was designed to prevent the people actually having power. That’s the way Madison crafted them, with great genius, at the end of the 18th century. So they were designed to prevent change, which Obama is discovering to his cost. China, as an authoritarian capitalist state, is much easier to change.
AG: That’s a very interesting point, but to return to the motivational deficit: you think what is needed to counter it is a new conception of ethics. Could you elaborate on that?
SC: If we’re living in a situation of general demotivation in the West, the question then becomes how we can provide motivation. The question of ethics can not be reduced to the manipulation of different theories – utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, etc. – or to issues of policy or voter intentions. They have to be linked back to something deeper, at the level of the ethical subject. “Infinitely Demanding” makes two claims. It claims that, at the core of any conception of morality, is an experience of a demand, which we approve, which ties us and which makes us ethical subjects of a certain kind.
The second claim is more normative. I propose a certain picture of the ethical subject, based on an infinite ethical demand. It is that which makes me the ethical subject that I am, but not in a way that is reducible to autonomy. It is something which continually exceeds my capacity to approve of it. So I’ve got this basic idea, which comes from Levinas initially, that morality has to be referred back to an idea of an ethical relation, a relationship between myself and another, a relationship of asymmetry, of inequality. It is that basic situation that I want to put at the core of this neo-anarchism.
AG: While you have high hopes for humor, you are much more skeptical when it comes to irony, especially of the cynical kind.
SC: I hate that – I hate cynical irony, the form of knowing irony that’s just a form of protection from any sort of engagement with the world.
AG: This would be the main weapon of the passive nihilist, wouldn’t it?
SC: Yes.
AG: In “Infinitely Demanding,” you make one brief, quite disparaging reference to Diogenes – “We approach ethical issues in a spirit of Diogenean cynicism rather than free commitment, a spirit in which, as Yeats writes, the best lack all conviction, whilst the worst are full of passionate intensity” (page 39) – but then I read something else you wrote, last year I guess, where you say we need exactly the sort of cynical approach of Diogenes …
SC: My views change, as you’ve discovered. [Laughter.] I wrote something last year for the New York Times, called “Cynicism You Can Believe In.” What happened was that after “Infinitely Demanding,” I wrote this thing called “The Book of Dead Philosophers,” which was a lot of hard work and a lot of fun. One of the things I did, was to really engage with ancient philosophy, in a way which I hadn’t done for a long time and cynicism in particular. Properly understood, cynicism isn’t cynical – it’s opposed to moral hypocrisy, pride, pretension, luxury and people who think that they know what they’re talking about. To that extent, I’m amenable to certain forms of cynicism.
AG: Let’s move on: instead of tragedy, we have humor and that might help enable political action.
SC: Yes, the link I try to make is humor as a way of sublimating the ethical demand and then I make a leap from there and into forms of political resistance, where humor was being used as a practice – a new language of civil disobedience: “Billionaires for Bush,” people dressing up as ballerinas and attacking the police with their wands. I think we’re now into a different period, but there was a moment between 1999 and up to a certain point a few years ago, when forms of comic subversion were used to advance a non-violent political resistance. That interested me, because it was very skilful, it was very intelligent. The point of politics at that moment was about the rendering visible of an opposition, an alliance, in the most colorful way and humor was a way of doing that.
AG: As you’ve previously mentioned, you’re inspired by Ernesto Laclau and one of his main points is that, as long as it’s no longer possible to believe in a proletariat that’s ontologically destined to become the leaders of the revolution, you in fact have to create that actor through a “chaining together of equivalences.” Do you think humor can play a part in creating such a collective out of previously separated individuals and groups?
SC: That’s precisely the issue. It’s about how a political subject is formed and there’s always been a sort of comic deficit on the left, which has a tendency of taking itself far too seriously, particularly forms of leftist avant-gardism. You know: dressing in black and wearing ski-masks, attacking the police. These are forms of political heroism which I’m suspicious of. On the other hand, the performance of powerlessness in these comic forms of subversion I thought was really compelling, because what are you going to do? Are you going to shoot these people wearing ballerina outfits? Are you going to mow down naked bicycle protestors with machine guns?
AG: But couldn’t you say that these forms of carnivalesque, nonviolent protests work way better in Western societies of today, where one suffers under the oak of “repressive tolerance,” as Herbert Marcuse would put it, than in societies where you have good, old, direct repression?
SC: Sure. It’s a point Slavoj Žižek’s made against me, that nothing changes with such strategies, but I disagree with that. Change is a difficult thing to measure. The effects of the anti-war protests of 2003 are still unfolding, people haven’t forgotten, they’re still angry. Maybe they will have their day. Resistance isn’t one thing. There are different contexts for resistance and there are places like the US where civil disobedience – going back to Thoreau, to the opposition to Britain, the revolution and the founding of the Republic – is enshrined as a practice. It’s not the case in China. There’s not a one size fits all approach to resistance. It seems to me that the people with the guns and the sticks are usually going to win. So do you take up your own guns and sticks against them, or do you try to outwit them in some other way? I’m reluctant to heroize revolutionary violence.
AG: I thought we could talk a little bit about the place of aesthetic works in political projects. You have a very interesting footnote in “Infinitely Demanding”: “Although this is work that I hope to pursue separately, it is here that politics and poetry begins to collide in a potentially fructive way” (page 159). I was wondering if you could give us a little teaser …
SC: Sometimes you write footnotes because you haven’t got a clue how to solve a problem and there are examples of that in “Infinitely Demanding.” I won’t say what they are, because that would be too embarrassing. But I have tried to pursue that one. The next book – “The Faith of the Faithless” – is in part a response to that question, where I try to look at whether the category of fiction can be mobilized politically. I make this argument that politics is about fiction, so politics is aesthetic in that sense, it is about the construction of fictions. So the opinions which govern political space are fictions. Might there then be what Wallace Stevens calls a “supreme fiction” and might that be conceivable in relation to politics? I try and raise this question as part of a really long enquiry into the relationship between politics and religion in Rousseau’s work. That’s the first 100 pages of the book that I’m writing at present. So yes, I’m trying to think about the connections between politics and poetry. There’s an awful lot you could say here. Also, it’s a really complicated issue because to the work of people like Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, showing the connections between certain ideas of the poetic, myth and national socialism. It’s not that poetry is automatically a good thing, right? Poetics is a form of poesis, a form of production-construction, but there might be ways of conceiving of that in a much more interesting manner. That’s what I’m thinking about at the moment.
AG: Perhaps you could say something about the notion of a distance to the state, which is important to you. Why is such a distance necessary – why not just take power, for example?
SC: Let me start with this thought: there is no distance from the state. The state is far from having withered away, as Marx hoped for or as certain libertarians imagine. If we could do away with the state in the manner of classical anarchism, maybe that would be great and maybe that is conceivable in certain contexts, but I would argue that the time is not necessarily ripe for that now. On the contrary, the state has become much more pervasive, in terms of its political and bio-political regulation of human life. This is a fact. The linking of that to corporate capitalism is a fact. In a sense, there is no distance – every space is visible and controlled. Therefore, distance is not something you can take or take up, it has to be created. So the idea I have here, is that in a state form that is oppressive, political creation or imagination should be mobilized in a way that allows some new space to become visible. In “Infinitely Demanding,” I talk about the politics of the sans-papiers in France, as well as Mexican indigenous people, because there you have groups which comes into visibility through a certain act of political articulation. They come into visibility as something that is at a distance to the state, actually has rights enshrined by a labor convention, but those rights are not recognized and then a political struggle begins. I think politics is at its most noble about the articulation of this interstitial distance. The civil rights movement in the US was another example of that, where something obscene or invisible enters into visibility in a new way that exerts a pressure on the state, which forces recognition. That’s the business of politics, as I see it.
Also, rights are not things that are given in the heavens. Rather, they are levers for political articulations, which enables what was previously invisible to become visible. You know, things are invisible, even though we aren’t aware of the fact. All we can do is point to history. For example, I had a friend who grew up in apartheid South Africa and she was visited by a friend from England. This was, say, 40 years ago. They were walking down a city street and it was full of people, mainly black, but also some white people. The friend from England said “Oh, what a lot of people!,” to which my friend replied: “A lot of people? What do you mean? I don’t see that many.” Because the people, they weren’t really people. They were black, so they weren’t visible as people. Political subjects emerge into visibility in this way and this would be a constant activity of struggle around general claims of equality.
Please join Truthout in Chicago for a conversation with philosopher Simon Critchley.
Friday May 28 at 7:00 p.m.
Mess Hall, 6932 N. Glenwood, Chicago
Danny Postel (contributing editor of Logos, editorial board member of The Common Review and soon-to-be blogger for Truthout) will interview Critchley, with a particular focus on religion, “post-secularism,” the age of Obama, the Tea Party movement and the future of progressive politics.
© Truthout.org
Image source: http://nees.oregonstate.edu/killer_wave/characteristics.htm
What’s Next from Israel: Entropy or Outrage?
By Jeff Gates
What’s Next from Israel: Entropy or Outrage?
Israeli war-planners face a dilemma. After more than six decades of duplicitous behavior, their playbook is pretty well played out. Not that Tel Aviv will not deceive again. Or at least try. Odds are we’ll see another round of either entropy or outrage or some lethal combination.
Their outrage tactics are well understood. This serial agent provocateur has long shaped events from the shadows by provoking well-profiled targets to respond to well-planned provocations.
With in-depth profiling, the response becomes a matter of probabilities. Thus Israel’s well-deserved reputation as the master of mental manipulation based on their use of game theory algorithms that anticipate reactions to provocations along with the reactions to those reactions.
Control enough of the variables and the desired outcome becomes foreseeable – within an acceptable range of probabilities. Therein lies the genius (others say the psychopathy) of those for whom conflicts serve as a profitable sideline while they pursue broader geopolitical goals.
In game theory war planning, the reaction of “the mark” emerges in the foreground while the agent provocateur disappears into the background. The response to that reaction then enables the provocateur to slip even deeper into the shadows, further obscuring the genius of the instigator.
Game theory modeling is a useful skill for a nation that built much of its economy on arms sales. Much of the rest is reliant on information technology. Those technologies enable Israelis to operate undetected in that invisible domain where data is the most critical form of capital. That includes financial markets where timely information has long been the most valuable asset.
Game Theory and 911
When provoked by a mass murder on American soil, we had elected to office a president with a known array of easily profiled dysfunctions. With phony intelligence, he was induced to order the U.S. military to invade a nation that had no hand in that event. From a game theory perspective, that is genuine genius.
Consistent with game theory war planning, that invasion advanced an Israeli strategy for “securing the realm” while expanding its sphere of influence well beyond its borders.
Not only was the U.S. induced to discredit itself by that (easily modeled) reaction, our response over-extended our military, destroyed our credibility and further weakened our already debt-weakened economy. All these effects are consistent with game theory modeling.
Even a cursory review of history confirms that debt is always the prize for those skilled at catalyzing serial conflicts. Some commentators might call that financial genius.
According to Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, the fiscal cost may reach $3 trillion, all of it borrowed – a first. At the end of WWII, the U.S. had half the world’s productive power.
That financial strength ensured our bonds would remain dominant for at least two generations. Look at us now. The interest expense alone for this conflict could cost us $700 billion.
These game theory-foreseeable results suggest how war can be waged on a nation from within that nation – while the instigators fade into the mist. That too is a form of genius.
Entropy and Presidential Longevity
The next step in this game theory warfare may involve an entropy operation. Though less well known than run-of-the-mill provocations, this component also suggests applied genius.
As with the source of the outrage from provocations, the instigators of entropy strategies seek refuge in the shadows. That era may soon come to a close as “the mark” (the American public) grasps the regularity – and the lengthy premeditation – with which such duplicity is deployed.
For instance, 47 years ago, President John F. Kennedy sought to halt in its infancy a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. In June 1963, he wrote the last in a series of insistent letters to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Each of those letters sought what Israel now demands of Iran: international inspections of its nuclear facilities.
The key difference: JFK knew for certain that Israeli officials, while insisting the Zionist enclave was a loyal friend and ally, lied to him about their nuclear weapons program at the Dimona reactor facility in the Negev Desert. We now know the Israelis were then secretly shipping highly enriched uranium to Dimona from at least one U.S. nuclear facility in Pennsylvania.
Best estimates date to sometime between 1962 and 1964 when Israel produced its first weapon. Their nuclear arsenal is now estimated at 200-600 warheads plus possibly hundreds of “dirty” devices and other nuclear-related weaponry.
Kennedy’s letter to Ben-Gurion was not cordial. The words chosen were drawn not from diplomacy but from the instructions that a judge provides a jury to assess criminal culpability.
In that brusque letter, a U.S. commander-in-chief demanded proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Zionists were not developing nuclear weapons. His insistence left no room for this purported ally to maneuver – except to deploy entropy as a means to avoid accountability.
The day after that June 15th letter was cabled to Tel Aviv for delivery by the U.S. ambassador, Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned citing undisclosed personal reasons. Because his resignation was announced before the cabled letter could be physically delivered, Israeli authors claim that Kennedy’s message failed to reach Ben-Gurion.
That interpretative gloss ignores what we now know about Israeli operations inside serial U.S. presidencies. And about Tel Aviv’s routine intercept of White House communications, particularly those most critical to our national security.
That duplicity has only rarely been made public. Typical was the behavior of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard who provided Tel Aviv more than one million pages of classified materials. This Israeli operation – run from inside our government – compromised the entirety of our national security apparatus in which U.S. taxpayers had invested trillions of dollars.
When Ben-Gurion deprived President Kennedy of an Israeli government with which to negotiate, the resulting entropy denied the U.S. a critical strategic advantage. That entropy also set in motion the nuclear dynamics that JFK and his advisers feared a half-century ago.
When assessing the cost of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, what cost in dollars, lives and foregone opportunities should Americans put on this trans-generational deceit?
The consistency of Israel’s duplicitous conduct raises difficult questions about the ability to hold such religious extremists accountable – particularly a nuclear-armed enclave that considers its people Chosen by God and accountable only to God.
The Khazars vs. the Kennedys
During this same 1962-63 period, Senator William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, convened hearings on the legal status of the American Zionist Council. The AZC received funds from the Jewish Agency, the predecessor to the state of Israel.
As a recipient of U.S. funds, the Agency used those funds to lobby for more funds. Under U.S. law, that conduct required the AZC to register as a foreign agent.
In seeking that registration, Fulbright was joined by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Their effort was delayed by the fledgling Israel lobby and then ended with JFK’s assassination.
Concerns about Zionist influence on U.S. policy continued to grow among well-informed legislators. By 1973, Senator Fulbright could announce with confidence: “Israel controls the U.S. Senate.” In 1974, he lost his Senate seat.
Fast-forward to today and imagine a Middle East without an enclave of nuclear-armed Zionist extremists. The threat that JFK posed to their arsenal – and to their geopolitical goals – was resolved five months after Ben-Gurion’s resignation.
When Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as Kennedy’s successor, he immediately increased the U.S. budget for arms to Israel.
Imagine the Zionist influence on U.S. policy had Fulbright and the Kennedys succeeded in requiring that the lobby register as what it was and remains: a foreign agent.
See: “<a href="http://www.sott.net/articles/show/189424-How-Israel-Lobby-took-control-of-US-foreign-policy">How the Israel Lobby Took Control of U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Following John Kennedy’s removal in November 1963, Johnson appointed Nicholas Katzenbach as his Attorney General to replace Robert Kennedy who LBJ loathed. Soon thereafter, the AZC evaded registration as it morphed into the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and began the pretense, still ongoing, that AIPAC operates in the U.S. as a domestic lobby.
[AIPAC and dozens of affiliate organizations coordinate a transnational network of pro-Israeli political operations commonly known as “the Israel lobby.”]
The Kennedy-Fulbright threat to the Zionists’ geopolitical goals reemerged five years later when Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency during the height of an unpopular war. That war was vastly expanded under Johnson’s leadership.
Resolving the Kennedy Problem
From a game theory perspective, a second Kennedy presidency presented Tel Aviv with at least four troubling variables to manage.
First, Robert Kennedy’s peace candidacy offered the possibility of a speedy end to the war in Vietnam. Less war meant not only less debt but also less ability to arm Israel with U.S. weapons.
Second, his election so soon after the Six-Day War presented the possibility that a U.S. commander-in-chief might inquire into the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 Americans dead and 175 wounded. Covered up by Johnson with the help of Admiral John McCain, Jr., an open inquiry threatened the carefully orchestrated perception that Israel was a victim rather than an aggressor in taking land that fueled outrage throughout the region.
Third, RFK’s global perspective on peace suggested that he might pursue his brother’s agenda and target Israel’s nuclear arsenal in order to preclude a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Fourth, with Fulbright still wielding substantial influence on U.S. foreign policy, a second Kennedy administration revived concerns about renewed restrictions on the domestic activities of the expansive Israel lobby.
When this charismatic presidential contender surged in nationwide political polls, those strategic variables were transformed from possibilities into probabilities. All four were resolved on June 5, 1968 at a campaign event held in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Robert Kennedy’s death at the hand of Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian émigré, coincided with the first anniversary of the Six-Day War.
The assassin later cited as his motive Kennedy’s campaign pledge to provide more fighter jets to Israel. That claim was used by Tel Aviv to argue its case for more U.S. arms.
With that second high-profile murder, the road to the presidency was cleared for former Vice-President Richard Nixon. When lobbied by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, he agreed to embrace the “ambiguous” status that the Zionists sought for their nuclear arsenal.
When waging game theory warfare, uncertainty is often a powerful persuader and a force multiplier.
Were these assassinations part of an entropy strategy? Was murder used to manage variables that posed a threat to a non-transparent geopolitical goals? Though the evidence remains murky, the outcome is consistent with an oft-recurring game theory modus operandi.
Neither U.S. national security nor federal law enforcement recovered from that entropy. The Israeli nuclear arsenal has grown steadily larger and far more lethal while the Israel lobby has grown steadily larger and far more influential.
Precluding Peace at Any Price
Entropy often emerges as part of a broader game theory strategy. After the failed Camp David agreements in 2000, President Bill Clinton realized the terms that he and Israel offered the Palestinians were unacceptable. In December, he proposed “parameters” that both sides accepted with reservations.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators then met in Taba, Egypt in January 2001 to resolve their differences. As progress was being made, Tel Aviv canceled the negotiations, ending official progress. Unofficial discussions led to the Geneva Accord in 2003 that Israel rejected.
Were these developments part of an entropy strategy that remains ongoing?
As progress became detectable on the Road Map to Peace [proposed by the Quartet comprised of the U.S., the European Union, Russia and the U.N.], the coalition government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert collapsed citing a long-brewing scandal that brought his resignation in July 2008.
After negotiations were put on hold for eight months, the right-wing coalition government of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promptly disavowed even the tentative progress made by the Olmert government. That stance not only ensured more delay, that entropy ensured an opportunity to stage more provocations and catalyst more conflict.
Should the Netanyahu government detect that progress toward peace is possible, watch for the collapse of yet another Israeli coalition. One possible scenario: the Shas Party will withdraw citing its unhappiness that the status of Jerusalem is raised as part of a final agreement.
Of course everyone knows that Jerusalem must be at the center of any final status agreement. The Shas Pary stance suggests a pending entropy maneuver. Note also that the possibility of this next game theory tactic makes transparent a critical element in game theory math.
The math enables those who are few in numbers to operate with a force-multiplier that remains opaque to analysts unfamiliar with how Zionist warfare is waged “by way of deception.” That’s the motto of the Israeli Mossad, Israel’s intelligence and foreign operations directorate.
To succeed, deception must be hidden in plain sight. In this case, the central deceit is Israel’s “special relationship” with the U.S. For this duplicity to work, the U.S.-Israeli relationship must be sustained.
Over the past two weeks, pressure applied by the Israel lobby resulted in letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from four-fifths of the U.S. Congress. Those letters urged that the Obama administration restate an “unbreakable bond” between the U.S. and Israel.
That entangled relationship enables the game theory math that becomes the force-multiplier. By that bond, the U.S. agrees to maintain an Israeli government with which to negotiate. If another Israeli government collapses, progress toward peace stalls – to the detriment of our interests. Thus it becomes in our interest to keep the coalition intact – regardless of its policies.
That bond provides Israel with strategic leverage because even the potential for entropy is a force-multiplier in the hands of savvy game theory strategists. The relationship itself provides Tel Aviv with the indirect power it deploys to shape U.S. foreign policy.
When framed in game theory terms, who controls our policy in the region? At present, does the U.S. commitment to sustain this relationship (an unbreakable bond) enable the Shas Party to shape our options?
Who wields the real influence in this relationship? Who has the leverage – a U.S. president residing in Washington or Zionist extremists and religious fundamentalists living in Israel?
In practical effect, is U.S. foreign policy dominated by the goals of the most right-wing element of the most right-wing coalition in the most consistently right-wing government that the world community has endured since the defeat of WWII fascism?
Guilt By Association
By proclaiming an “unbreakable bond’ with this extremist enclave, American legislators enabled the very forces that undermine our security and endangered our troops in the region.
Note that the Israel lobby did not ask that the Knesset pledge its allegiance to us. In this special relationship, loyalty flows in only one direction. If Israelis were loyal to us, why would their lobby insist on a loyalty oath from us?
U.S. diplomats have long defended Israel’s indefensible and lawless behavior. And we have done so in the world’s most high profile legal forum: the United Nations. By associating America’s goodwill with Zionism’s geopolitical goals, we enabled others to portray us as a fascist state.
By our own choice, we branded and discredited ourselves. There lies the genius in game theory.
Game theory warfare succeeds in plain sight. To betray, one must first befriend. To defraud, one must create a relationship based on trust. The relationship itself induced us to freely embrace the very forces that now jeopardize our freedom – from the inside out.
That’s why such deceit can only proceed in plain sight. And can only survive through a committed relationship – an “unbreakable bond” that the target freely chooses.
The challenge for Israel has suddenly turned deadly serious. Its trans-generational duplicity has become transparent not only to U.S. officials but also to a long-deceived American public. The Zionist state teeters on the brink of losing not only U.S. support but also its legitimacy as a state.
The U.S. Military vs. Zionism
Here’s the Big Question: what happens when the U.S. military grasps how their senior officers were deceived to wage war in Iraq? Obliged by a sworn oath to defend the nation from all enemies – both foreign and domestic – what conduct accompanies that oath of office?
From Tel Aviv’s perspective, what happens to Israel’s credibility as the “Jewish state” as this duplicity becomes transparent to the broader Jewish community? What happens when Jews grasp that they too were deceived? What conduct accompanies that realization?
Like many naïve Americans, naive Jews believed their interests were aligned with Israel. Yet since well before its founding Zionists consistently advanced what the Joint Chiefs in 1948 portrayed as “fanatical concepts.” Those concepts include efforts – still ongoing – to exert what the Pentagon then described as “military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.”
That assessment remains accurate. Thus the need for a U.S.-Israeli “bond” founded on deception. With applied game theory duplicity, our military could be induced to wage Zionist wars.
What happens when U.S. military leaders realize that the people in their command were put in harm’s way pursue the fanatical concepts of religious extremists?
Who then does their oath of office require them to obey in the chain of command?
Who then becomes the enemy?
Zionist fanatics duped commander-in-chief Harry Truman into extending to them the nation state status that Israeli operatives have since deployed to catalyze serial conflicts in plain sight. That duplicity includes waging war on the very nation that enabled this deceit.
The perception of nation state legitimacy was critical to the game theory-enabled warfare that can now be drawn to a close.
For those long deceived by this sophisticated treachery, it is difficult to imagine that such a devious mindset can survive in the Age of Transparency. In truth, it cannot.
Ensuring the earliest possible end to this treachery is the goal of these analyses: to sound the death knell for a trans-generational enterprise that never merited recognition as a state.
Israel has no place in a community of nations committed to the rule of law. Only an enemy within would suggest an “unbreakable bond” that undermines our national security. Though this form of treason remains ongoing, the forces are now coalescing to expose it and drive it out.
As both an enabler and a target of game theory warfare, Americans must grasp the mindset of those complicit. We must also acknowledge that this treachery is not traceable to a people; this is the work of an aberrant few within a broader community. Note the descriptors in bold:
psychopathy n. A mental disorder roughly equivalent to antisocial personality disorder, but with emphasis on affective and interpersonal traits such as superficial charm, pathological lying, egocentricity, lack of remorse, and callousness that have traditionally been regarded by clinicians as characteristic of psychopaths, rather than social deviance traits such as need for stimulation, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral controls, impulsivity, and irresponsibility that are prototypical of antisocial personality disorder. Whether psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder share a common referent is an open question.
The Lethal Combination
The facts and analyses required to restore national security are available. If our analysts are on top of their game (in game theory terms), they are monitoring how events are staged in real-time to advance a non-transparent agenda by deploying both entropy and outrage.
Tel Aviv just leaked intelligence suggesting that Syria transferred Scud missiles to Iran-backed Hezbollah. Intelligence agencies, including ours, doubt the reliability of Israeli intelligence.
Nevertheless, this story injected into the geopolitical mind space a combination of both outrage (“How dare they?”) and entropy as Israel continues its efforts to expand this latest conflict from Iraq to Iran as the next in a series of “plausible” Evil Doers.
Consistent with an attempt to gain traction for this latest Evil Doer narrative, Haaretz published an article on April 30th with the title, “Syria’s provocations may plunge Middle East into war.”
Note the “associative” component that indicts Iran due to its support of Hezbollah. The story also challenges Iran’s credibility as a partner for peace, at least among those who ascribe credibility to Israeli intelligence. Such reports often appear in the Israeli press and spread from there into mainstream media.
Rare are reports that challenge the prevailing narrative. Despite their relevance, almost no media outlet reported the off-the-cuff comment of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, in a February 14th forum in Doha, Qatar, conceded “[Iran] doesn’t directly threaten the United States.”
Yet this game theory fact remains: if Tel Aviv can catalyze a conflict in Iran, the resulting entropy will help obscure the facts confirming who catalyzed the conflict in Iraq.
Note throughout the motivation for the Israel lobby to pressure Congress for a statement avowing an “unbreakable bond” while also promoting a conflict with Iran (or Pakistan) as the next Evil Doer.
Note too the April 29th statement of Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin. In the course of urging a dramatic shift in focus for Israel-Palestine peace talks, Rivlin conceded that he saw no point in Israel signing a peace agreement. Instead he proposed making Israeli citizens of the Palestinians rather than dividing Israel and the West Bank as part of a two-state solution to peace.
Is this a sincere step in the direction of a one-state solution? With each passing day, more analysts realize that a single state is the only solution consistent with sustainable peace and a genuine democracy.
Or is this yet another entropy strategy to delay yet again resolution of the Israeli occupation while game theorists stage yet another provocation to evoke more outrage?
The manipulations continue in plain sight. In March, the Netanyahu government announced plans to build 1,600 housing units in an ultra-orthodox neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Several analysts argue that peace talks have actually regressed over the past eight years.
Should the next round of negotiations gain traction, look for them to be disrupted either by violence or by another decision by Israel to build more housing on contested land.
With the tools for seeing how game theory works, those targeted by this duplicity can see for themselves who and why. With transparency will come accountability. With accountability will come the peace and stability that Zionist war planners must preclude – at any price.
Sustainable peace will come only when the nuclear arsenal now in the hands of religious fanatics is secured and when those responsible for this deceit are held accountable. Until then, both peace and the Palestinians will continue to be held hostage by those chronicled in this account.
Image source: http://www.erichufschmid.net/TFC/Deguello-Report.html
Jericho Rendezvous 