flacaltenn
Diamond Member
If you're done snarking around. Lemme explain the Deep State. It's a term of art used by America's Intel agencies themselves. And EVERY Civil Libertarian (not many left outside the ACLU and the Libertarian Party) knows the DANGERS of that massive section of govt that flies under radar, has little or NO oversight, eats big CHUNKS of the DOD budget without even being mentioned by name. MOST CONGRESS critters can't trace the funding because it's classified at levels too high for them to investigate.
The employees in this section govt are not subject to the results of elections. And neither are their missions. They CONTINUE the same programs and operations REGARDLESS of who takes electoral power.
Don't take my word for it. Bill Moyers laid it out best. And Bill Moyers never was a conspiracy guy or a tin foil hat wearer.
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State | BillMoyers.com
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.
You morons on the left who have lost all FEAR of an omnipotent govt, laughed off Snowden. Called him a traitor. Attack whistleblowers who attack the govt you worship now. You have had your sense of self-preservation of Civil Liberties and control of your govt bred right the fuck out of you.
But what you've been arguing (badly in fact) about FISA courts and evidence from collection and archiving systems that get their rare chance to go public ---- IS the "Deep State" in action. Its behind 60% of this Russia Russia Russia thing. And you NOW HAVE Deep State star actors acting as "analysts" on your primary sources of information like CNN and MSNBC ---- arguing their asses off to avoid the cuffs and the perp walk. It's all front and center in front of your fact-checker damaged brains. And you STILL are yucking it all up as a conspiracy.
This, this, and this.
If you want to feel like you've fallen down the Rabbit Hole and emerged in some bizarre world, go on Twitter and witness harebrained leftists (pun intended) falling all over themselves to "thank the FBI for their service". Yes, the nation's most powerful COPS.
Dummies.
Everyone should be thanking the FBI. All this corrupt diddling with the election was conducted on JUST the HQ floor. The rank and file are angry. Many are gonna speak out. No way should this worse political scandal of our lifetime reflect on them.
I hope so. But the "rank and file" in DC are still in DC. The swamp protects itself first and foremost, so I'm not sure about that.
Field offices? Yes. Those folks live among the "great unwashed"--us. But DC is DC, after all.
It's those field offices for the FBI where probably 85% of them work. With their heads uncluttered by what goes on the "Comey floor" of the HQ building where all the political appointees operate. My neighbor is ex career FBI and is none too happy..
