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Why is the new boss the same as the old boss?
Friday, May 6th, 2011I just finished watching the 2009 movie, “The Most Dangerous Man in America” about Daniel Ellsberg and the release of the Pentagon Papers, a 7000 page top secret history of the Vietnam War. It is an excellent movie and of particular interest to those of us who witnessed, first hand, the Vietnam era anti-war movement.
One of the points made clear in the Pentagon Papers is that the American war effort in Vietnam started, not with Kennedy, but with Truman underwriting the French war to control the country. Another fact exposed by the Papers is that five U.S. Presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon) actively lied to the American public about the war. It’s noteworthy that three of those were Democrats and two were Republicans. The culture of political deception is not party specific.
What Ellsberg suggests is that advisors to the President were of two varieties: those who were privy to super secret information and those who weren’t. Those who were privileged to know the truth were listened to, but those who weren’t, weren’t. Why? Because the advice of someone who doesn’t know the facts is not likely to be particularly useful to someone who deals with reality.
I think something similar happens happens when a new President takes over and inexplicably seems to perpetuate the very policies he railed against as a candidate. Why? Because as a candidate his rhetoric was based only on the limited facts available to him, but once elected, he is suddenly confronted with a reality he previously had no knowledge of. If you’re wondering how divergent those two sets of facts can be, the answer is very.
When I complain about the government having no credibility it is, in fact, because the government actually has no credibility. The history of war in the U.S. is a history deception. It’s death and destruction justified by false pretenses. The government doesn’t suddenly become more honest or less secretive when a new President takes over. All Presidents prefer secrecy because it frees them to act on their own without criticism. People behave differently if they think no one will find out what they’re doing.
If you think you know what is going on in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya (or any number of other countries), you have intentionally chosen to ignore history and convinced yourself that, this time, it’s different. Don’t delude yourself. It is not different (or if it is, it’s worse).
[Posted by Dave Krueger]
So what is the argument here in the context of Obama? He didn’t know enough facts when he was campaigning? Now that he’s in office, he knows Bush was right and the wars must continue?
Or is it that he didn’t know that the undercurrent of big bankers, corporatists, and the war lobby was too hard to oppose? Were the interests of powerful people too hard to ignore, once you’re at the helm?
I don’t get it.
I would just offer that 99 out of 100 times- the truth is generally out there. In vetted stories. Published in reputable places. By actual journos.
Now, if you read anything at all, you knew Colin Powell was slinging shit when he talked of WMDs. If you dig around when you can, you’d have known damn good and well about the computer in the closet that the NSA was using, many years before it was officially acknowledged. If you had a few friends in Silicon Valley, you knew years ago that Narus was working on (and delivering) web tools that make that ‘carnivore’ program look like a joke.
The NSA has been capturing absolutely everything that happens on the web for years. Thankfully they still don’t know actually deal with all that data, but they’re getting there.
Front page stuff? Nope. In real, mainstream news outlets?
I guess all I’m saying is that this stuff is pretty readily available, but you have to to a bit of work on a regular basis, and apply the correct filters to suss out the wheat from the chaff.
My point is not that Bush was right and Obama is wrong. If you ask me, they are both just as wrong as the five presidents who perpetuated the senseless slaughter of 58,000 Americans during the Vietnam war.
My point is that the candidate has no clue how big the ship is until he gets to see the whole thing from the bridge. Suddenly he realizes that there are a myriad of forces and influences at work that he never knew existed. You just don’t flip a switch and change course. I also believe that ordinary citizens are completely ignorant of the extent to which corruption factors into what happens in both the Congress and the White House.
A transformation occurred when Obama the candidate became Obama the President.
I’d maybe give you 10 out of 100. Definitely not more than 20.
I’ll rent this tomorrow. Luis Granados lays out a vatican connection to Viet Nam, also.
Good job!
But certainly, the fact that such forces and influences exist wouldn’t stop a decent person from keeping campaign promises. If Obama found out that he wouldn’t get re-elected if he stopped bombing Afghanistan or if he approved of investigations of the Bush administration’s torture program, he could easily decide that sticking to what’s right was more important than getting re-elected.
I don’t think so much that they don’t know how it really works until they get into office. I think they just decide to go along with it.
This was Julian Assange’s essential insight: secrecy destroys an organization’s decision-making ability, by compartmenting information and creating groups read-in to the secrets and those excluded. Vast energy must be expended to maintain this information partition. Ultimately, secret-keeping overwhelms decision-making.
@1, how about Option 3) Obama lied to get elected (like nearly all politicians) and the idiot masses fell for it once again — this assumes that all votes were counted completely and accurately.
I don’t think this is even national leader specific, though that’s the most obvious and alarming example.
I think in general people look at areas they are not professionally informed in and think ‘I can see the problems there, so how hard can they be to solve?’. What people rarely realise outside the areas that they are actually professionally tasked with solving is that the world is not a series of gaping problems sitting there waiting for heroic individuals to come along and point everyone in the right direction.
Any apparently egregious and obvious to solve problem is the way it is because of the balance of hidden interests which don’t want to publicise their interest but which can pull powerful levers behind the scenes to prevent apparently straightforward reform.
Anyone who has seen ‘Yes Minister’ will have a clear understanding of why newly elected officials never get anything done. The entire government body is set up with levers to reward good presidential behaviour (meaning that behaviour which perpetuates government) and to subtly punish bad presidential behaviour (any attempt at reform) while working behind the scenes to ensure the reform fails.
The documentary is available on Netflx streaming. I’ll have to check it out.
I’d argue that things are slightly better now than, say, 20 years ago. The internet has allowed for the dissemination of information (like, say, wikileaks) that we never would have seen before. However, much of that is months or years after the fact. But at least we now know for sure we were being lied to, instead of knowing it but having no proof (and generally being called a wild conspiracy theorist for thinking it)
I gather from your statement that you are one of the people who have the facts that the rest of us don’t possess, including political candidates.
How did you obtain these facts when candidates for the nation’s highest political office and their advisors can’t obtain them?
I believe you are presenting an incomplete or biased reading of history as a basis for your claim.
Please tell me what is the truth about Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya that you know and the rest of us don’t. Is there a grand conspiracy afoot involving at the least hundreds of people, yet not a word of it is leaked?
No. And my post doesn’t even begin to suggest that.
My point is that, historically, government has been caught lying so often that you would have to be a complete friggin’ idiot to take anything they say at face value. It’s not that I know something no one else knows, it’s that none of us can know the real picture because of their record of secrecy and lies.
But, you’re free to believe that the lies that have been uncovered about our involvement in past wars are merely a rare anomaly and be content that government is your friend, confiding in you as much as possible. After all, that is definitely the position taken by most of the public (and that many people can’t be wrong, right?).
You can read a lot of Ellsberg’s book, “Secrets: a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” on the Google Scholar website: http://goo.gl/walWi
Search for “secrets” and then read pages 43 and 44 for some statements about how effectively Ellsberg says the executive could keep information from the public, the press and from Congress. Hint: very effectively.
Also, search for the word “limitations” and read p. 238:
Same material copied from another website:
“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.
My husband says that he believes that as soon as a new president is elected, he’s taken into a secret room by “a guy with a binder” who acquaints him with everything he didn’t know before, but has to before inauguration.
That’s pretty much the only explanation (other than the Illuminati or pod-people replacement) why all presidents since World War II end up acting not-very-different from one another once they’re in office.
It’s partly a result of your system. In others, where the executive is not separate from the legislature, opposition leaders are briefed on secret and security matters on a regular basis.
Heck, the UK’s National Security Council has just been extended to include the leader of the opposition on a regular basis.
My point is that, historically, government has been caught lying so often that you would have to be a complete friggin’ idiot to take anything they say at face value. It’s not that I know something no one else knows, it’s that none of us can know the real picture because of their record of secrecy and lies.
Dave,
That the government manipulates the truth for its own ends should have been part of high school freshman history. Or civics. Point being, you don’t really still think (post 8th grade) that unlike every other government since the dawn of effen time, that somehow, this one is different?
Governments and large corporations are much like any other organism – they will generally do and say whatever they perceive necessary to survive and thrive.
If you don’t immediately look at any ‘news’ within the context of what furthers the agenda of the propagator of said ‘news’, then you are setting yourself up to lead a very disillusioned life.
Any half-assed student of history can cite the reams of evidence that the sinking of the Lusitania was hardly an unexpected event. We knew it carried weapons, the Germans knew it carried weapons, the divers who have been down to the wreck confirmed the weapons….
Did the Royal Navy use the wreck for depth charge practice? Of course. Did the Royal Navy attempt to deny anyone the right to dive the wreck out of, get this, respect for the dead? Natch.
Do the UK and US governments still deny what any 5th grader can figure out to be true? You betcha.
War is a business. Sometimes a little more, but never anything less. The Lusitania was allowed to be sunk as a business decision. The only way to get the US citizens interested in participating in WWI was to drive them in.
If one confined their literacy to the front page, or the top of the audio/visual airwaves at the time they may have consumed the kool-aid. But, if they read beyond the front pages and the manipulated headlines, the truth of what happened was there. If they read any of the multiple Congressional Hearings on the matter, you knew what really happened.
The people manipulating the truth count on the fact that the average person will believe whatever the headline tells him to, regardless of the self-evident facts to the contrary until you beat them over the head with it.
You’ve also missed out on the idea that it isn’t ALWAYS that the new person of power suddenly meets unforeseen circumstances and therefore must act in accordance, but that he will inevitably believe that he is truly more capable of handling the situation better than the old guy, because now the “right people” are in charge.
Never underestimate the power of hubris.
So the idea is that the new President is suddenly given all these new ‘facts’ (secret to us) that he didn’t know before, which changes his position. I think this is wildly optimistic. Given the incentives of the existing power structure, it seems far more likely that the President is presented with an extremely convincing and credible illusion which will encourage him to continue existing policies. Most of the people involved probably also believe the ‘facts’ as filtered through the CIA, NSA and whoever else, even as confirmation bias and systemic bias and self-interest serve to make sure that the information given is actually *worse* than what the man on the street can get (with effort). Worse because it has the seamless appearance of credibility granted by heavy TOP SECRET NOFORN dossiers, serious 4-star generals, and an entire enterprise of genuinely intelligent people. Remember, they actually *need* to deceive the President, whereas most likely no one important really gives a shit what the average politically interested person thinks.
It’s like the bureacrats that wield the real power behind Kings. I think Washington has developed more and more over time this sort of entrenched bureacracy. It almost seems like when Obama got elected the CIA and military set him down and told him how foreign policy was going to be done. Then the pharmceutical, insurance and oil lobbies all came in and tole how domestic policy was going to go. Maybe part of that is because Obama is a weak leader and maybe part of it is because like nearly all American politicians he has no philosophy for governing, no principles just pragmatism. Don’t worry about the constitution or even acknowledge that the executive branch has any limits now that you’re the executive.
Huh? Optimistic?
Nothing I’ve said implies that a new President is faced with facts that suddenly make him believe that the status quo is right and just. Nor have I suggested that the state of affairs that the President is suddenly confronted with is anything but corrupt. In fact, I’m arguing that it is, in fact, very corrupt and it gets that way because of the influences and egos at work and the secrecy that permits them to operate in the shadows.
So, after the new president takes office he suddenly becomes the only one without all the facts. Now who’s being optimistic?
Again, using the Vietnam war as an example, the Pentagon Papers make crystal clear that these five presidents were very much in the thick of it and were fully aware of what was going on, while intentionally and systematically lying to the public about what they were doing and what their intentions were. They were anything but naive patsies. The biggest problem they faced was that, the harder they tried to secretly turn the war around, the worse it got and the more they had to lie.
“…but once elected, he is suddenly confronted with a reality he previously had no knowledge of. If you’re wondering how divergent those two sets of facts can be, the answer is very.”
There’s a secret room in the White House where a box is kept. The President is taken to this room to view the contents of this box. When opened, an otherworldly golden light shines from inside. The box is closed as quickly as it was opened. The President walks out of the secret room with a bit of grey hair he didn’t previously have. Or something like that.
I think the problem is actually more pernicious than that. At the end of the day it’s all about budgets, and ensuring that next year’s allocation for your agency is at least x% larger than this year’s (and NEVER smaller). The major intel agencies, DIA, CIA, NSA, NGA, the MAJCOM J2s, etc. all have a vested interest in keeping their piece of the pie “safe” from all the others. It’s my opinion that slashing the intel budget drastically would actually result in substantially better intelligence overall because it would free up the individual agencies from competing with each other over the same turf allowing them instead to focus on the things they’re actually good at.
Much ink was spilled after 9-11 about the systemic roadblocks that prevented the sharing of resources between agencies which prompted the creation of the DNI in ’05. The problem is that those roadblocks weren’t even remotely technical… they were operational and managerial. Some agencies simply refused to recognize a security clearance granted by another agency despite the fact that the same commercial organization conducts the background checks for most of these agencies. It all came down to protecting your agency’s turf/budget.
Dave-
Thanks for reminding me about the Ellsberg documentary. I keep meaning to rent that. Also, for any Agitator readers who haven’t seen it, I would also recommend the “Why We Fight.” This film was released after the invasion of Iraq and was directed by Eugene Jarecki.
#22 Scott: “The major intel agencies, DIA, CIA, NSA, NGA, the MAJCOM J2s, etc. all have a vested interest in keeping their piece of the pie “safe” from all the others. It’s my opinion that slashing the intel budget drastically would actually result in substantially better intelligence overall because it would free up the individual agencies from competing with each other over the same turf allowing them instead to focus on the things they’re actually good at.”
That is an excellent point. It is amazing how bloated the intelligence apparatus is in the U.S. I think on the operational (field) side, intelligence operations should probably be handled by the Department of Defense. In other words, intelligence officers also be soldiers, not only because of their training, but because they can be held to the standards of the Geneva Convention and to the Military Code of Justice. Obviously, operatives of the (civillian) CIA have not been held to these standards throughout that agency’s existence. Just my opinion, but I think that, and a hell of a lot more accountability, might make a difference.
I think it’s at least as plausible to think in terms of incentives. While running for office, a candidate has to keep the voters and donors happy. When governing, a candidate has to keep the entrenched powers in and around government (the intelligence services, the civil service, the military, the media) happy. The candidate’s incentives shift, and magically, so do his actions.