— by Odysseus
Although former CIA contractor Edward Snowden revealed nothing of a specific nature to imperil an individual or to expose a human source, what he did do was to expose the extent and the intent of the United States’ intelligence-gathering capabilities. Many intelligence professionals seethe with anger over his revelation and consider him the worst sort of traitor, whom they believe immeasurably damaged American intelligence gathering capabilities, and, therefore, endangered America’s national security. Many other people view his actions as heroic — even a modern form of martyrdom — since he willingly and knowingly suffered and sacrificed the life that he knew to follow through on his moral convictions. This wide difference in viewpoint is interesting in and of itself, but the answer tells us much more about the evolving relationship between the United States government and the citizens that it purports to serve.
If Edward Snowden had made his revelations during the Cold War, he would not have enjoyed the widespread public support he does in today’s culture. The recent film Bridge of Spies accurately portrays the strong anti-Soviet, anti-spy attitude of the Cold War years. People then felt differently about their government’s right to keep secrets, to conduct surveillance, to monitor, investigate, and infiltrate threats to national security. They felt that way because the United States government was locked in a struggle with its counterparts in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This battle was waged immediately following the struggle between the United States government and the respective governments of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Here that we find the crux of the matter. It seems fair when the massive powers of our government are deployed against the massive powers of other governments. It does not seem fair when the massive power of the government is brought to bear on mere individuals.
The Mad Magazine cartoons of Spy v. Spy, where the spy in black perpetually staged ruses to visit horrible injuries on the spy in white were amusing precisely because the spy in white was perpetually doing the same. They were equally matched. Would the cartoon strip have been at all popular if the spies successfully targeted a person innocently walking his dog? Would it have been amusing if they dropped bombs on a non-spy who was innocently watching television in his living room? Spying and the full panoply of dirty tricks are only morally acceptable when the target is an opponent government that is playing the same game.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the United States was left with a gargantuan, sophisticated, and powerful intelligence apparatus with no worthy opponent. Further, this intelligence apparatus was an institutional bureaucracy that was filled with government employees who had a vested interest in protecting their intelligence budget, their vast powers and perks, their positions, and, as Mel Brooks said, their suddenly phony baloney jobs.
Without a Soviet Union posing a nuclear existential threat to the United States, the baleful eye of the intelligence apparatus had to find a new reason to exist. It had to identify and focus on the next threat. It was, during this period and under the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, that the many eyes, ears, and hands of the United States intelligence apparatus stopped being the protectors of the American people, and, instead, became the protectors of the American government. They correctly identified that the only remaining substantial threat to the United States government came not from any existing foreign power, but, rather, from its own citizenry. Although We The People did not know it at the time, We The People became the target of the United States government.
President George Herbert Walker Bush was a lifelong apparatchik of the United States government and lifelong member of the elites and inside-the-beltway community that mistakes the “Government of the United States” for the actual United States. Son of patrician United States Senator Prescott Bush, the elder Bush was a Yale graduate, a 1948 member of its elite Skull and Bones society, a member of the United States House of Representatives, Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the Republican National Committee during the Watergate scandal, and head of the CIA before he was foisted upon President Ronald Reagan as his Vice-President. It was George Herbert Walker Bush, the ultimate Washington, D.C. scion and beltway insider, who announced the “War on Drugs”, which unleashed the post-Cold War intelligence community and military forces onto the citizenry and tasked them with intervening in issues that had heretofore been considered the sole province of the domestic law enforcement community.
This author has no personal knowledge, and, therefore, cannot know if this ominous transition was a knowing one or if it was simply a product of bureaucratic mission creep. The need to justify government budgets, jobs, and equipment caused the intelligence apparatus to focus on the “drug trade”. It seemed unreasonable at the time to the post-Cold War apparatus that, if the drug trade was a significant problem and the American government had these fantastic capabilities developed for intelligence work, why it should not deploy them against drug traffickers. They did not believe that they should limit themselves to the traditional techniques of “law enforcement”. Initially, internal arguments were made and accepted that the targeted drug traffickers and their apparatus were “foreign nationals” and, therefore, they were not protected by the civil rights afforded to criminal defendants by the United States Constitution. As foreigners, who were deemed to be operating against the interests of the United States, the United States government believed that it could treat these drug traffickers as it had treated any Soviet sponsored operation or individual.
The moral hazard came with the success the intelligence apparatus enjoyed. The techniques and technology that were now deployed against individual civilian targets, rather than against other nation-states are well documented in Mark Bowden’s book Killing Pablo. This book documents the early 1990s assassination of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar.
These covert government operations that utilize sophisticated intelligence and military methods to target annoying civilians were so successful that the government apparatus wanted to deploy them in ever greater projects against new targets. They apparently forgot or wanted to forget that “criminal defendants” are not synonymous with “enemy combatants” whose purpose is to destroy the country. They forgot that a criminal defendant is merely someone who was accused of violating one or more rules of our government, not someone who wanted to bring down the government. They forgot or conveniently ignored that cops should not be soldiers and soldiers should not be cops. Soldiers and cops have always served different purposes, and, therefore, they have operated under different rules. The same goes for spies.
During the eight years of the Clinton administration, the intelligence apparatus was further turned away from focusing on foreign targets. The ideology of the Clinton administration, like all the post Viet Nam leftists, did not want to view foreigners (especially non-Western foreigners) as “bad guys”. During their youth in the counter-culture, they believed they had seen the enemy, and the enemy was us. They de-emphasized traditional intelligence targeting, and instead focused the apparatus on domestic persons involved with potentially criminal activities, such as the drug trade, minor weapons violations, or groups that they deemed to have anti-government sentiments. Since they were the government, anti-government sentiments meant anything that did not align with their progressive counter-culture agenda. Whereas J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI might focus on Communists or Anarchists, the Clinton FBI focused on the John Birch Society or the Daughters of the Confederacy. This appealed to the younger apparatchiks in the intelligence bureaucracy, who were typically graduates of a select few ivy league universities, with a uniformly left wing, progressive curriculum. For the eight Clinton years, political correctness was encouraged, and the more traditional minded intelligence officers, who focused on foreign threat, were encouraged to retire. Increasingly, the intelligence apparatus focused inward, and they began seeing themselves a policemen, serving the government, rather than as soldiers standing watch against a foreign threat. The strong push by the security apparatus for the Clinton era “Banking Know Your Customer” law, which was defeated by the Republican congress on privacy grounds, is ample evidence of the change. The events of September 11, 2001 were in part the inevitable result of this change in focus.
The George W. Bush administration once again turned the focus outward, targeting hostile Islamic groups, but the buy-in by the rank and file of the intelligence community was never complete. The progressive, anti-western ivy league graduates were still reluctant to view benighted third worlders as a hated enemy. They had been educated and trained to see them as Rousseau’s “noble savages”. The intelligence community split, and those with a military pedigree enthusiastically went after the new foreign targets, while the college whiz kids had difficulty balancing the intelligence needs, with their desire to do the job with sufficient cultural sensitivity. The arrival of the Obama administration, and it’s desire to refocus the apparatus on Americans again, was a welcome relief to that side, as the shackles went on the counter-foreign-terrorism efforts. The post 9/11 Patriot Act, and the tearing down of the walls that had previously separated law-enforcement from intelligence gathering, destroyed the post WWII shield that had been put in place to protect American civil liberties from the vast power of the modern espionage engines. No longer were the dirty tricks department of the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, and the other secret organizations, off limits to DEA, FBI, and the Treasury Agents. Now with information sharing, the great sweeping electronic and signal intelligence was to be passed around. Satellite images, drones, computer intrusion, and bank account monitoring were going to be given to people with badges right here in the Continental United States. Planting of agents who would pretend to be friends for years, just like the old KGB methods, came home to the US as a regular tool of domestic spying. The recent Wired Magazine serial article on the take-down of The Silk Road anonymous Internet sales service and the arrest of its founder who went by the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts” are a perfect example. By 2015, it was not merely large scale Federal law enforcement that was relying on domestic spying, even local law enforcement was getting in on the act. The domestic spies are now sharing their secretly acquired information with local law enforcement agencies, and instructing them as to both the need and the methods to hide their source of information from the courts, who might view these intrusions as illegal. The local officers are told how to pretend that the illegal activity came to their attention through ordinary means, such as a random traffic stop, or a confidential informant, while in reality it was a tip off from a spy agency. There are now confirming accounts of these acts in Florida, Texas, and Arizona, that have turned up in news stories, where the evidence and witnesses originating with spy agencies, were hidden from the courts and the accused.
Once the capabilities that were developed for either cold or hot war came to be applied against mere drug traffickers, the slippery slope was inevitable. Next would be the child pornographers, then the money launderers, and, eventually, the tax evaders. Strategic clarity was lost with the ever-expansive use of the overly simplistic term “bad guy” with new “bad guys” replacing the old “bad guys”. Now, each different government bureau and its employees internally believe that their objectives mandate targeting their “bad guys” with war zone weapons and spy tactics. This is true even if that government agency is the National Park Service and its “bad guys” are Americans who litter forests.
Anyone and anything that currently offends the sensibilities of the government is fair game to this new, unlimited government. The United States is on the fast track to having a Soviet attitude towards “law enforcement” and may soon be joining the USSR in adopting the same policies that underly the 1940 assassination of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico after he had fallen out of favor. Now, in 2015, anyone can be designated an “enemy of the state”– even a United States citizen on American soil — and can be targeted for a lethal drone strike, without a grand jury indictment, much less a conviction by a jury of his peers.
There is an inherent imbalance of power between mere individuals and the overwhelming power of any government. All modern concepts of civil rights descend from a recognition of this imbalance. The king always had the arbitrary power to send his troops to seize citizens from their beds and have them boiled in oil. However, Western civilization developed the enlightened belief that no king or government should be afforded the authority to do so without trial and proof of guilt. This is the basis for our Constitution, laws, and common law customs, and, to protect ourselves, we limited the powers of the government and laid down rules for its exercise of its powers. This is the source of our conviction that we have a right to privacy in our communications, in our homes, in our readings, writings, and thoughts. Although the king certainly has always had the power to put spies at our doors, open our mail, and examine the contents of our homes and pockets, our Constitution and laws provide that he should not be permitted to do so without showing a damned good cause. He must have a good, legally-recognized reason and sufficient evidence to support it that an impartial judge would give him a search warrant to do so. We also limited the king or government from engaging in many other types of sneaky, duplicitous behavior toward his own citizens or subjects. The inherent imbalance of power between any government and a mere individual lends itself to tyranny because no mere individual has the money, the manpower or the resources to protect himself against an unjust or unfair government that is dedicated to ruining him.
At present, there is a fundamental confusion that oddly emanates from both those who think of themselves as the Democrat Left and the Republican Right. The Democrat Left believes that American soldiers and spies must behave like police officers when dealing with foreigners who pose an existential threat to the citizens of the United States. The Left absurdly demands that the concepts of constitutional rights which have been created to protect American citizens from their own government be applied to foreign combatants in the middle of a war as if the Marines at Guadalcanal should have been required to shout “stop or I’ll shoot” before each trigger pull on a Japanese soldier.
To the Democrat Left, each foreign, life, liberty, and dignity is as precious as an American life and they mistakenly seek to bestow American rights on foreigners. They fail to recognize that governments are based on a social contract between citizens and their own government. Foreigners are not parties to this social contract and, except as obligated by treaties, they can expect no obligation to them by the United States government as they have neither rights nor responsibilities. Only when a foreign follower of Osama Bin Laden begins annually filling out an IRS 1040 form, registers to vote and for selective service, and has a green card, can he expect to be the beneficiary of constitutional rights reserved to citizens, including the right to trial by jury and to counsel at the American taxpayers’ expense, but not before. Our soldiers and spies are neither the police nor detectives for the world and cannot be expected to give the Miranda warning to every terrorist.
Conversely, those who believe themselves to be members of the Republican Right see the effectiveness of the soldier or spy when used against foreign combatants and mistakenly think that these war zone techniques can be a legitimate “law and order” tool to be used against domestic “bad guys”. We hear them pontificate with great indignation that We The People should not object to the government randomly sifting and sorting our metaphorical underwear drawer if we have nothing to hide. At worst, it is as though We The People are not American citizens who are entitled to our constitutional rights because “bad guys” are the same as terrorists. At best, they view We The People as subjects to be treated as children or adjudicated incompetents, with Uncle Sam as our designated guardian. Although they pretend to be conservatives and defenders of traditional constitutional values, they are apologists and defenders of government tyranny.
Either these two camps of political ideologues are composed of simplistic-minded ignoramuses who are poorly educated in the philosophical basis of “just war” and “natural rights”, “social contract theory”, and thousands of years of human history that led to the distinctions between war fighting and police peacekeeping, or they are simply amoral opportunists who make knowingly specious arguments to advance a hidden agenda. In the case of the Democratic Left, that hidden purpose is to undermine and secure the defeat of the United States and western civilization because they secretly mourn the loss of Soviet Communism. On the Republican Right, the hidden purpose is rooted in a hatred of the constitutional protections afforded to the citizenry and their worship of Thomas Hobbes’ unlimited Leviathan government power to enforce social conformity.
Because of their ignorance or their perfidy, both Republicans and Democrats have corrupted the moral basis for the United States intelligence apparatus. For different reasons but with an alliance of convenience, they have turned our intelligence apparatus from serving as an instrument of our protection into the instrument of our imprisonment in this new Panopticon society. The Left adores the spy apparatus so that it can identify intellectual opponents of the glorious progressive socialist vision and target them for blackmail, prosecution, and possibly even the Trotsky treatment. Meanwhile, the badge-kissing Right is so infatuated with the all-powerful king and his darling soldiers and so contemptuous of any who dare non-conformity that it will worshipfully provide law enforcement with any power, any technology, and any means that its immaculate angels of vengeance can possibly desire, means, and will forgive absolutely any abuse with never a stray thought cast to such unworthy intangibles as the mere “liberty” or “human dignity” of American citizens.
This foundational corruption of the once-vaunted intelligence and security apparatus which protected the West during the Cold War is the core reason that Edward Snowden is seen alternately as hero or villain. Many people cannot even begin to articulate the underlying reasons for their views of Snowden, but their views are deeply felt and often at odds with the rest of their other ideological positions. This is because of their innate misunderstanding of the legitimate use of power, which should be defined not by the nature of the action itself, but by the target of that action. This crucial distinction desperately needs to be especially elevated to refocus intelligence assets, sources, and methods to protect American citizens from external threats.
Just as the average East German citizen did not look to the Stasi Secret Police which spied on him to be his savior or protector, neither do American citizens look kindly upon America’s intelligence apparatus when its all-seeing eye is focused inwards and spying on its own people. We at The Cassandra Times hope that our military, intelligence, and justice professionals have a greater fidelity to the ideals of the Constitution and have a higher aspiration for themselves and for their perception by the American people than sharing the legacy of the Stasi. If they do not act decisively to change their behavior soon, they and their masters may share the fate of the Stasi and its masters as well.