Moyers: This is a difficult subject to talk about. It would be easier if it were a conspiracy you're describing. But that's not the case, is it?
Lofgren: No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. This is not some cabal that was hatched in the dark of night. This is something that hides in plain sight. It's something we know about. But we can't connect the dots. Or most people don't connect the dots. It's kind of a natural evolution when so much money and political control is at stake in the most powerful country in the world. This has evolved over time.
Moyers: And you call it the real power in the country.Lofgren: Correct. It is a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state. Everyone knows what the military industrial complex is. Since Eisenhower talked about it in his farewell address.
Here's a telling 2+ minute segment from the Moyers-Lofgren session:
A follow-up essay, "Anatomy of the Deep State," which contains a cogent critique of then-president Obama's executive order-driven domestic and foreign policies, and their tie-in to the Deep State, is also worth a parsing.
If we consider the Deep State as a continuity of government, it doesn't take on that totem-and-taboo boogie-woogie that keeps the MSM from doing their jobs as journalists, and prevents We, the People from fulfilling our obligations as informed Demos for fear of being called conspiracy theorists, which could lead to our credit ratings plummeting overnight (snark, ;-)). There is a Deep State and, what's more, a Dark State. One can get a 'taste' of its dimensions through the quite popular streaming series, The Blacklist, starring James Spader. You could get a taste of it, too, and maybe should do to further your education about how things work (and don't) when you ain't looking, by installing a virtual machine on your desktop and importing a Linux distribution.
Ed Snowden took us to the next level of understanding about the hidden activities of the Deep State, which may at times reach out into the darkness to find its way. Snowden wasn't a 'theorist,' he was an insider. What he revealed was serious sh*t going down. He started out as a patriot out to avenge the atrocities of 9/11, he says in his memoir, Permanent Record, but ends up clinically disillusioned by the shadowy shenanigans of a governance no longer in the public domain or working the public's mandate.
Snowden writes that he was originally outraged, and inspired, by the quashing by the NYT of Pulitzer Prize-winning James Risen and Eric Lichtblau's piece on StellarWind in October 2004. Nine years later, Snowden opened the vault of secrets to reveal extraordinary techniques of surveillance on all of us by the State, its collections, its dossier-building fusion databases, and operating with the intolerable impunity that Frank Church had warned us about back in 1975. Now, says Snowden, They have dossiers on all of us. It would have been called 'conspiracy theory' if he hadn't ruined it by providing a deluge of proof.
In Chapter 11 of his memoir, "The System," Snowden describes the deep state as a class that his own parents worked for. He writes:
"[N]obler ages have called [it] the federal civil service or the public sector, but which our own time tends to refer to as the deep state or the shadow government. None of those epithets, however, really captures what it is: a class of career officials (incidentally, perhaps one of the last functional middle classes in American life) who""non-elected and non-appointed""serve or work in government, either at one of the independent agencies (from the CIA and NSA to the IRS, the FCC, and so on) or at one of the executive departments (State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, and the like).
This loose definition of the non-partisan deep state sounds in the ballpark of how Moyers and Lofgren describe it; it's about continuity. But there's more.
Snowden goes on to bring in how it all changes as the result of the introduction of advanced electronic technology to governance. Especially the Internet (devised by the military and later gifted to us, the public). In the next chapter, "Indoc," Snowden's tone starts to grow testicular and we can hear the creep of potentially tragic arrogance as he describes his milieu and mates. Of the indoctrination into the CIA ("wearing contractor badges as green and crisp as new hundred-dollar bills") he writes:
"So this is the Deep State," one guy said"I'd been expecting a group of normie civil service types who resembled younger versions of my parents. Instead, we were all computer dudes""and yes, almost uniformly dudes""who were clearly wearing "business casual" for the first time in our lives"We certainly didn't look like a hermetic power-mad cabal that controlled the actions of America's elected officials from shadowy subterranean cubicles"Indoctrination, and its entire point was to convince us that we were the elite, that we were special, that we had been chosen to be privy to the mysteries of state and to the truths that the rest of the country""and, at times, even its Congress and courts""couldn't handle"I couldn't help but think while I sat through this Indoc that the presenters were preaching to the choir. You don't need to tell a bunch of computer whizzes that they possess superior knowledge and skills that uniquely qualify them to act independently and make decisions on behalf of their fellow citizens without any oversight or review. Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism. [pp.111-112]
This, as I read it, scarily recalls for me the rhetorical query Henry Kissinger is said to have made about Chile in June 1970, just months before the presidential election: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." Instead, Kissinger helped arrange for Salvador Allende's ouster by coup on 9/11 1973.
The arrogance baked into the facades of these "computer whizzes" with feelings of impunity is described in disturbing detail in another memoir chapter, titled "LOVEINT." Snowden owns up to being part of something illegal and immoral. He writes,
analysts used the agency's programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection...reading their emails, listening in on their phone calls, and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only the dumbest analysts were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in any type of surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade, no one in the agency's history had been sentenced to even a day in prison for the crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly prosecute them, because you can't exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you refuse to admit the existence of the system itself.
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