The Birth of the Deep State: A History — Peter C. Earle

This is an excellent backgrounder.

But where did the American deep state come from? Has it always been there?In fact, the evolution of the deep state (and this choice of term, “evolution” as opposed to “creation”, will be explained later) is — some might say ironically — found in a nearly 140-year old anti-corruption “reform” measure; one that was explicitly focused upon depoliticizing the civilian component of the United States government....

The architects of the reform also failed to recognize that individuals who are hired are no less likely to have political inclinations than those awarded the same position out of sheer patronage. And where those who held positions in the spoils system were washed out of office in four years, a corps of (essentially) permanent bureaucrats facing the prospect of pensions and positions of greater influence amid zero public accountability are likely to be outwardly demure while no less political than their forebears.

The tremendous edifice that is the US civil bureaucracy — currently numbering somewhere around 2.85 million individuals — is, like any other huge organization, subject to both imposed and emergent orders. There are explicitly assigned executives and managers, labyrinthine organizational charts, job descriptions, pay grades, areas of responsibility, manuals of every sort, and every other standardization that informs (and hinders) the modern workplace.

But as the size of the bureaucracy has swelled it has also acquired a dissociated but consistent “consciousness”: a spontaneously-ordered, unstructured but undoubtedly focused and effective mechanism. Its major functions are to thwart political measures it collectively deems unpalatable, and to vigilantly protect the existence of the greater body within which it thrives.

No orders are issued, and there is no chain of command. It communicates by example: leaks reported in the news beget more leaks, anonymous tips spawn a rash of new tipsters. No lofty conspiracy theories are necessary; a massive army of bureaucrats in an era of free/highly affordable burner phones, file sharing services, and document scanning apps are more than sufficient to gum up the wheels of executive action.

There are no secret codes, no dead drops, and no shadowy agents meeting in parking garages in the dead of night: perhaps more dauntingly, the deep state coalesces from among a seemingly incalculable number of nondescript men and women with families and homes in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. It receives a salary every two weeks, drawn upon the United States Treasury. Its atomic elements — individuals — coach Little League, go to Zumba classes, and generally have mainstream opinions. Many, no doubt, dismiss the very notion of a deep state. Even when they send an anonymous email, shred a document intended for other eyes, or impishly pass a tip to someone with a second- or third-hand relationship in the media, most of them probably see the deep state as something larger, above and beyond themselves.

Yet they are the deep state.

The "deep state" is a combination of the intelligence services and the bureaucracy, which was famous as the siloviki and nomenklatura in the USSR, with roots in Tsarist Russia and which persists under the Putin administration. These people have affiliations, some of which are political (party) and economic (program patronage). And everyone has an ideology that shapes the worldview that they take to be reality.

In present day Russia, following the Yeltsin years and neoliberal shock therapy under the direction of US advisors, the oligarchs emerged from "cowboy capitalism," who Putin has been able only to modest bridle. They have an analog in the US in the 0.01% that provide the bulk of political contributions to federal and state politicians. The result is a group of people that live in a different world from the rest and enjoy a double standard of justice, allowing them great freedom to act.

Conspiracy is not the driving force behind the deep state but rather interest and protecting investment. There is no conscious conspiracy behind the deep state, although individuals may conspire in some instances. Moreover, owing to different interests and affiliation, there are different factions vying for place and power.

In short, the so-called deep state is not some aberration but rather one of the outcomes of political institutionalization in liberal democracies, similar to the palace court in imperial times, along with the upper echelon of the different centers of power — intelligence, military, etc.

This doesn't mean that the deep state is not real ("oh, it's just bureaucracy) or that the deep state is a conspiracy theory, as often charged or spun in the conventional narrative. The existence of the deep state makes a difference and that difference can be detected and described....

A bigger question is whether the deep state is, even as an unintended consequence of the Pendleton Act, a “feature” or a “bug”. Do unelected government employees play a critical role in restoring equilibrium even in a nominal democracy, or do they represent an insidious, potentially worrisome repository of accidental power?...

For a very long time, Americans have had the odd feeling that elections don’t matter nearly as much as the media hoopla surrounding them would imply. It’s true, and one reason why has everything to do with fundamental changes in the way we hire and fire within the federal bureaucracy. The emergence of the deep state is by design a buffer on democracy itself, with the cost of a less adaptable regime and growing public cynicism concerning who really is in charge.

Activist Post
The Birth of the Deep State: A History

Peter C. Earle, MA in Applied Economics from American University, an MBA (Finance), and a BS in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point

David Stockman — How the Deep State Really Works

If you take away the Korean threat, if you recognize the Iranians aren’t a threat, if you see that Russia is a tiny little country that’s not going to invade Western Europe and crash through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and so forth—

All of a sudden somebody is going to do the math as we get into the coming fiscal crisis and say, “We can’t afford all this defense that we don’t need. Let’s cut it back dramatically.”

They don’t want this to happen. And so, they have to keep these hot spots burning and these threats maintained or inflated, because they know if the real truth of the world were considered by Congress, the defense budget would be slashed dramatically.…

The president of the United States should be leading the great global disarmament conference of 2021, and yet that won’t even come up. It’s not even on the radar screen.

It’s not even mentioned [in the campaign] because, as I say, the Warfare State machinery essentially squelches any kind of debate, suffocates any kind of thought that at all deviates from the status quo.

The big issue in the world today is war and peace, and we’re facing a campaign in 2020 where it won’t even be mentioned.

We knew this already but here is former US budget director telling us how it works in the warfare state versus the welfare state. Follow the money.

International Man
David Stockman on How the Deep State Really Works
David Stockman

Antony C Black — Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance … Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia [Book Review]

What your "deep state" has been up to. No good.

Can Paul L. Williams be believed? On one hand, he has academic credentials. On the other hand, he has been criticized as a conspiracy theorist for alarmist writings on the threat of Islamic terrorism in the US. His book is available for download at Internet Archive here. He provides documentation for his claims, but I have not checked out the sources.

Off Guardian
Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance …… Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia (2015)Overview of Paul L Williams” book
Antony C Black

Related

Peter Radford reviews Walter Scheidel’s “The Great Leveler”, "which gives us a very long period perspective on inequality."

This is a good article on the limitations that academic economics imposes on itself that limit its scope to idealizations about the operation of markets based on stylized facts rather than investigating the actual facts, which extend beyond this scope and are determinative of outcomes that cannot be understood without investigation of the influence of politics and power. Perhaps I am influence by confirmation bias, since I have saying this for a long time here at MNE and it bears me out.

The Radford Free Press
Power: Take Two
Peter Radford

Tony Kevin— Maria Butina Endgame

It seems she was not physically tortured in the strict sense of the word but her prolonged harsh and vindictive treatment waiting over five months for her repeatedly delayed trial amounted to ‘torture’. We do not know what interrogation techniques were used. We will be told one day.

She was and is a political prisoner and has been treated like a terrorist. Politically aware Russians will remember this case with particular rage. No American imprisoned in Russia on whatever charge has ever thus been treated by the Government of Russia.
This case has done great damage to prospects for improved Russia-US relations. What has been gained by the US ? Nothing.

I have to disagree. Of course, this was physical torture as well as psychological. This is not confined to Ms. Butina. It is standard US practice in the "criminal justice" system.

Trump is just as acquiescent as Obama to the power of the deep state (including military). It recalls, Sen Schumer's remark at the outset of the Trump presidency to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

"Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

Butina is pawn in a plan to effect a soft coup in the US by weakening and if possible, removing, the elected president. I am not a fan the president and certainly did not vote for him (or HRC either). However, this attack by the deep state on the democratic process is not only un-American, it won't end well either. It's another step toward fascism.

OffGuardian
Maria Butina Endgame

Tony Kevin, Former Australian diplomat

See also

AlterNet
Former FBI special agent explains the one big reason Marina Butina’s conservative contacts should be very worried

Alex Henderson

Yanis Varoufakis — On the Deep State – an audio essay in seven parts

Is there a Deep State in our western liberal democracies? If so, is it a conspiracy or something more ‘interesting’ than that? These are questions that the Left has been traditionally engaged with, especially when facing undercover campaigns to prevent progressives from winning power or, on occasion, to unseat or destabilise left-wing governments. However, more recently, the Alt-Right has begun waging a war of words against the Deep State, with Donald Trump and his supporters doing so most boisterously.

Is this a figment of the imagination on those on the extremities of the political spectrum (left and right), as this BBC Radio 4 program ends up concluding? Or is the Deep State something real, tangible – a clear and present danger for democracy? In this audio essay I argue that the Deep State is inevitable in contemporary, corporate, financialised capitalism and constitutes democracy’s greatest foe.

After exploring the space between markets and formal state institutions in which the Deep State ‘lives’ as a Private-Public Technocracy, I outline the four manufacturing ‘processes’ that constitute it:

• Manufacturing prices (i.e. subverting the very market mechanism that capitalism is supposed to rely on)

• Manufacturing desires

• Manufacturing money (e.g. the black magic by which central and private banks conjure up the supply of money)

• Manufacturing consent

Touching upon the great misconception of the establishment’s liberal individualist political philosophy regarding the limits of the state (and what it means to be an autonomous individual), I define the Deep State as a conspiracy without conspirators, as a grand design without a designer (i.e. not too dissimilar to the manner in which Darwinian evolution produces complex systems without a grand designer, or how – according to Adam Smith – a market regulates supply and demand without any human actually regulating them).

Finally, I return to the 1920s and 1930s, in order to highlight the manner in which Donald Trump and the new Nationalist-Fascist International is copying Goebbels and Mussolini in attacking the Deep State only in order to take it over and use it against those whose votes and attention they seek to appropriate.

 Lastly, I put forward a radical idea of what to do about the Deep State: Nothing! Progressives must simply fight for democracy, reason and humanism and, as long as we manage to unite across countries and to break down antiquated party-political divisions, the Deep State will recede.

Yanis Varoufakis

On the Deep State – an audio essay in seven parts

Robert Paul Wolff — The Deep State

Robert Paul Wolff is largely correct here, but "the deep state" cannot be equated with bureaucracy as a political factor ensuring constancy and stability, as Max Weber described.

He apparently did not so a search on the term "deep state," which seems to have originated with respect to Turkish state and intelligence services and senior administration under Kemal Ataturk. In Russia is this is known as the siloviki (senior career intelligence and military) and nomenklatura (senior administrative bureaucracy). In China, the deep state is the senior level of the CCP. 

These are special cases of a state within a state as the locus of power in a nation-state, and not all deep states resemble each other closely. However, the family resemblance is arguably close enough to provide a context for at least a semi-analytical the use of the concept of a deep state in political science. However, the meaning should be carefully specified to avoid ambiguity, conflation, and confusion.

In the US the "deep state" has several meanings, given by different analysts. The most restricted is the senior career intelligence, military, and government service that persists across administrations. It also means those that control the military-intelligence-industrial-financial-government apparatus that is based on the revolving door that provides continuity between the public and private sectors insuring effective control by unelected elites. NGOs such as think tanks but not limited to them constitute another factor mediating the connection of public and private, state and non-state, government and shadow government.

The post describes something that is related to the these factors but is not coterminous with it. The US government bureaucracy is huge since it includes all the civil servants. The deep state is something different. It is partially a subset of the bureaucracy but not limited to it, and the revolving door makes it dynamic, uniting the public and private sectors.

US deep state is also more amorphous than the government bureaucracy, since it is a shadow organization rather than one with institutional arrangements, including a foundation in law. Because it lacks institutional arrangements, many deny its existence as an entity. And that is the way the deep state likes it.

But RPW's point that bureaucracies provide continuity that can inhibit change, including reform, owing to the iron law of oligarchy, is well-taken. A deep state can be viewed as a aspect of bureaucracy that is concentrated and entrenched at the top, providing elite control.

The deep state is also a subset of the Establishment, but also different from it. The Establishment is made up of the entrenched elite and their cronies and minions. The deep state is a concentrated subset of the Establishment, characterized by occupying positions of power and influence.

The Philosopher's Stone
The Deep State
Robert Paul Wolff | Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Tyler Durden — Clapper Busted Leaking Dossier Details To CNN's Jake Tapper, Lying To Congress About It

Now both Comey and Clapper caught out for leading classified information of a political nature.

Zero Hedge
Clapper Busted Leaking Dossier Details To CNN's Jake Tapper, Lying To Congress About It

Tyler Durden

Mike Whitney — John Brennan’s Police State USA

John Brennan in the spotlight again.

This is a deliberate mischaracterization of what Brennan was actually doing. He was spying on the members of the rival party to gain a political advantage. This is how police state operates.

Whatever the facts, and there are very few reliable facts based on evidence on the table so far, it's clear that Russiagate is political.

According to a recent CBS Poll, a majority of Americans (57%) now believe that “Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.” In contrast, only 34 percent of Americans don’t believe there was any Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

What the numbers don’t explain, however, is how one’s own political ideology shapes the results. For example, 71 percent of Democrats believe that Russia interfered, while a mere 18 percent of Republicans agree. In other words, one’s own prejudices (about Trump and Russia) have a much greater impact on one’s opinion than either facts or evidence. Propaganda campaigns try to exploit public bias to effectively manipulate perceptions. The CBS polling data shows that they have succeeded in that regard.

Whitney sees trouble ahead.

The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda (In 2013, Obama gutted the Smith Mundt Act “unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts.” (Foreign Policy Magazine)

In 2016, Obama paved the way for more domestic propaganda by passing the Orwellian-named “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act” as part of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Ostensibly, the bill lays the groundwork for responding to “fake news” overseas, but in reality, it marks “a further curtailment of press freedom” and an ambitious attempt to suppress accurate, independent information.)

The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda coupled with the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology, create the perfect conditions for the full implementation of an American police state.

But what is more concerning, is that the primary levers of state power are no longer controlled by elected officials but by factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people. That can only lead to trouble.

Counterpunch
John Brennan’s Police State USA

Mike Whitney

Moon of Alabama — How The Military Defeated Trump's Insurgency

Trump's success as the "Not-Hillary" candidate was based on an anti-establishment insurgency. Representatives of that insurgency, Flynn, Bannon and the MAGA voters, drove him through his first months in office. An intense media campaign was launched to counter them and the military took control of the White House. The anti-establishment insurgents were fired. Trump is now reduced to public figure head of a stratocracy - a military junta which nominally follows the rule of law....

The soft coup is in effect complete. If Donald Trump is a good boy, he will be allowed to stay.

This is no longer a Coup Waiting to Happen The coup has happened with few noticing it and ever fewer concerned about it. Everything of importance now passes through the Junta's hands….

POTUS has been put in a bubble and relegated to the position of twitterer-in-chief.

Other countries noticed how the game has changed. The real decisions are made by the generals, Trump is ignored as a mere figurehead:

Asked whether he was predicting war [with North Korea], [former defence minister of Japan, Satoshi] Morimoto said: "I think Washington has not decided ... The final decision-maker is [US Defence Secretary] Mr Mattis ... Not the president."

Where I disagree with b is over this:

It is doubtful that Trump will be able to resist the policies imposed on him. Any flicker of resistance will be smashed. The outside insurgency which enabled his election is left without a figurehead, It will likely disperse. The system won.

No doubt the system has won, but I do very much doubt that the insurgency is over and will just disperse. The question is, as I said some time ago, who will be the next figurehead. It could be someone like Bernie Sanders but it is just as likely and perhaps more likely that it could be someone like David Duke.

Incidentally, Ravi Batra predicted the rise of the warrior class in America around this time in The New Golden Age: A Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos. But so far, the manifestation is not in line with Batra's prediction of the result.

In 2008 [Batra] published his book, The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos, where he analyzes the present day economic downturn and the forces behind it. After some significant struggle, Batra predicts a "swift and stunning" revival of American ideals based on true democratic principles that will quickly spread around the world:

The United States does not export much, but it does export ideas, which today mainly emit hedonism and materialism. A new standard exalting martial qualities and magnanimity will soon replace the currently dominant American ethos. It will also sound the death knell for tricklism which is creating poverty around the world. America's revolutionary ideas will quickly captivate the globe; they will spread like wildfire and eradicate poverty within a generation. The internet will make sure that the renaissance spreads its fragrance all over the planet. Verily, for the first time in history, there will be a Golden Age.(Pg. 204)[16] — Wikipedia

Moon of Alabama
How The Military Defeated Trump's Insurgency

b

Todd E. Pierce — The Criminal ‘Laws’ of Counterinsurgency

A new book traces how the CIA and U.S. counterinsurgency warfare operatives adopted lessons from the Nazis’ fight against the partisans and evolved into a dangerous law onto themselves, writes retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce.

Douglas Valentine has once again added to the store of knowledge necessary for American citizens to understand how the U.S. government actually works today, in his most recent book entitled The CIA As Organized Crime. (Valentine previously wrote The Phoenix Program, which should be read with the current book.)

The U.S. “deep state” – of which the CIA is an integral part – is an open secret now and the Phoenix Program (assassinations, death squads, torture, mass detentions, exploitation of information) has been its means of controlling populations. Consequently, knowing the deep state’s methods is the only hope of building a democratic opposition to the deep state and to restore as much as possible the Constitutional system we had in previous centuries, as imperfect as it was.

Princeton University political theorist Sheldon Wolin described the U.S. political system in place by 2003 as “inverted totalitarianism.”...

This is post is about the history of the CIA and focuses on Vietnam, but the same can be said for other areas, such as Latin American.

Now that the US has the Patriot Act that suspends constitutional liberties, a Department of Homeland Security, and integrated intelligence services all that this needed for a national security police state is in place, including total surveillance.

But "it can't happen here."

Consortium News
The Criminal ‘Laws’ of Counterinsurgency

Todd E. Pierce

Matthew Wills — The Turkish Origins of the “Deep State”

The Turkish phrase derin devlet literally means “deep state.” According to historian Ryan Gingeras, the term “generally refers to a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.

This concept of a deep state, Gingeras continues, is used to “explain why and how agents employed by the state execute policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.” Breaking the law, of course, often means employing criminals. Gingeras, a specialist in organized crime in Turkey, looks at the underbelly of the Turkish deep state to examine how alliances between generals, statesmen and “narcotic traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists, and other criminals” are formed. (Elsewhere, Gingeras traces the heroin connection, noting that the Turkish deep state itself is riven by factional rivalries.)

JSTOR Daily
The Turkish Origins of the “Deep State”
Matthew Wills

Washington's Blog — The President Who Created the CIA Came to Regret It … Said the CIA Was a “Government All Its Own” Which Was Destroying Democracy

Harry Truman.

Washington's Blog
The President Who Created the CIA Came to Regret It … Said the CIA Was a “Government All Its Own” Which Was Destroying Democracy … “Something the Founding Fathers Didn’t Have In Mind”
WashingtonsBlog

Daniel Lazare — How the Press Serves the Deep State

The New York Times has made it official. In a Sunday front-page article entitled “Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story,” the paper gloats that Donald Trump has proved powerless to stop a flood of leaks threatening to capsize his administration.

As reporters Glenn Thrush and Michael M. Grynbaum put it: “This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.”

Thrush and Grynbaum add a few paragraphs later that Trump “is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn – that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.”

Iron triangle? Permanent government? In its tale of how Trump went from being a favorite of the New York Post and Daily News to fodder for the big-time Washington news media, the Times seems to be going out of its way to confirm dark paranoid fears of a “deep state” lurking behind the scenes and dictating what political leaders can and cannot do. “Too powerful to bully” by a “write-your-own-rules president” is another way of saying that the permanent government wants to do things its way and will not put up with a president telling it to take a different approach.

Entrenched interests are nothing new, of course. But a major news outlet bragging about collaborating with such elements in order to cripple a legally established government is. The Times was beside itself with outrage when top White House adviser Steve Bannon described the media as “the opposition party.” But one can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about since an alliance aimed at hamstringing a presidency is nothing if not oppositional....

Consortium News
How the Press Serves the Deep State
Daniel Lazare

Lambert Strether — The Term “Deep State” in Focus: Usage Examples, Definition, and Phrasebook

Lambert assembles different views about the US "deep state."

In my view, the deep state is chiefly a bureaucratic structure that maintains the continuity of US policy across administrations and takes on a life of its own separate from the administration that it purportedly serves. 

Some would limit the deep state to the intelligence services comparable to the siloviki in Russia. This would include the 17 intelligence department in the US, e.g.,  NSA, CIA,DIA. 

Others would extend it to the top level non-intelligence government bureaucracy, called nomenklatura in Russia. For example, the top level bureaucracy of the US State Department called "the 7th floor" and "the shadow government," that incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson just fired. They would constitute "moles" in the Trump administration.

Others would extend it to the operational arm of the dominant faction of the ruling elite that maintains their position.. Even when out of favor in a particular administration, this operational arm works to maintain policy constants as a "fifth column," and it is planted "deeply" to ensure this. Presidents find it difficult to replace people in droves and some are protected by having government service jobs that were isolated from "the spoils system."

The outer level of the deep state is the support apparatus like think tanks, policy journals and operatives in the media that form the domestic propaganda arm of the deep state. For example, the innermost layers of the Council on Foreign Relation is part of the deep state, whereas the outer layers are comprised of experts that give the organization public credibility.

This is only a "conspiracy" in that like-minded people that can be relied upon are selected and they bring others along so that the system self-perpetuates. The revolving door is also operative, linking government and the private sector

The problem here is that a Weberian bureaucratic state is required to direct modern governments, but the state is subject to capture ideologically and politically through the bureaucracy.

Naked Capitalism
The Term “Deep State” in Focus: Usage Examples, Definition, and Phrasebook

Lambert Strether

Pepe Escobar — The Swamp Strikes Back

The tawdry Michael Flynn soap opera boils down to the CIA hemorrhaging leaks to the company town newspaper, leading to the desired endgame: a resounding victory for hardcore neocon/neoliberalcon US Deep State factions in one particular battle. But the war is not over; in fact it’s just beginning....

Pepe parses it for us.

Sputnik International
The Swamp Strikes Back

Pepe Escobar

See also

Washington Free Beacon
Former Obama Officials, Loyalists Waged Secret Campaign to Oust Flynn

Adam Kredo

The Duran
How General Flynn’s accusers broke the law ‘behaved like police state’
Alexander Mercouris

Reuters
Trump blasts 'criminal' leaks by intelligence agencies, calls Flynn 'wonderful'

Counterpunch
Flynn, Russia and the World of Conspiracy Thinking

Melvin A. Goodman | senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst

Counterpunch
A Chat with Joshua Frank on Trump, Russia and US Intel: “The Goal of Impeachment”

Andrew Smolski interviews Joshua Frank. managing editor of CounterPunch

Damon Linker — America's spies anonymously took down Michael Flynn. That is deeply worrying.

This is the real issue that is largely being missed in the media.

The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn's ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function....

Those cheering the deep state torpedoing of Flynn are saying, in effect, that a police state is perfectly fine so long as it helps to bring down Trump.…

Down that path lies the end of democracy in America.

Sorry to break it to  you. Democracy in America ended some time ago. The United States has been a police officiallly since the post 9/11 legislation suspending constitutional liberties, "total information awareness," and the militarization of the domestic security force.

The Week
America's spies anonymously took down Michael Flynn. That is deeply worrying.
Damon Linker

Zero Hedge Mike Flynn May Face Felony Charges For Lying To The FBI [& More]

For now the focus shifts on the pressing issue at hand - Flynn's immediate replacement: as discussed this afternoon, after Flynn quit, the White House said Trump had named retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, a decorated Vietnam war veteran who was serving as a director on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to be interim national security advisor. However, as both WaPo and the NYT reports, the person who has emerged as the leading candidate to replace Flynn is Vice Admiral Robert Harward, a senior naval officer who served under President Donald Trump's Defense Secretary James Mattis.

Harward is the Chief Executive Officer for Lockheed Martin in the UAE - in which this role "he is responsible for all aspects of the company’s business interests in the UAE, including strategy, operations, growth and execution of Lockheed Martin programs."

Rubbing it in.

Zero Hedge
Mike Flynn May Face Felony Charges For Lying To The FBI

Tyler Durden

The Saker — The anti-Flynn ‘deep state’ coup – spelling it out in the clearest way possible

THIS IS NOT ABOUT FLYNN. Let me repeat that once more. THIS IS NOT ABOUT FLYNN!!! Please don’t come and tell me that Flynn was wrong on Iran, on Islam or on China. I agree. But,==>>THIS IS NOT ABOUT FLYNN!!!<<=THIS IS ABOUT POWER. 

As in, who is boss? Who is number one? Who is the alpha dog? The President or the ‘deep state’? That is what this is all about – showing everybody who is in charge....

As I said, it’s over. Not because of Flynn’s views on Iran or Islam. But because Trump has caved in, he has been broken and now all that’s left is a painful 4 year long agony. That’s assuming that the Neocons don’t impeach him just to bask in their arrogance and sense of supremacy.…

It took the Neocons and the US deep state less than a month to overturn the results of the Presidential election.

"Nice revolution you have there. Be a shame if anything happened to it."

The Vineyard of the Saker
The anti-Flynn ‘deep state’ coup – spelling it out in the clearest way possible
The Saker

Adam Garrie — After Flynn’s resignation, White House says Crimea should be ‘returned’ to Ukraine

Trump looks to be caving heavily. Was he a paper tiger?

Under enormous pressure from the Deep State, on his third week in office, Trump is being forced to cave on Russia in order to avoid further setbacks on domestic policies.

The Duran
After Flynn’s resignation, White House says Crimea should be ‘returned’ to Ukraine
Adam Garrie

Robert Parry — Trump Caves on Flynn’s Resignation

Robert Parry summarizes the script to date.

Consortium News
Trump Caves on Flynn’s Resignation
Robert Parry