Tom Engelhardt — The Fourth Branch — The Rise to Power of the National Security State

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That’s bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it’s just not so.

During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved. It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach. Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power.

Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington. Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.…

Keep in mind again that we’re still only talking about the overwhelming sense of power of one of the 17 agencies that make up the Intelligence Community, which itself is but part of the far vaster national security state. Just one.…

The Totalitarian State is here as the contemporary Leviathan, the guarantor of "law and order" through extra-constitutional means. This could not happen without the consent of the president and President Obama has just expressed full confidence in CIA chief John Brennan.

TomDispatch
The Fourth Branch — The Rise to Power of the National Security State
Tom Engelhardt
Widely crossposted

See also Conor Friedersdorf, Does John Brennan Know Too Much for Obama to Fire Him?