by James Petras / November 16th, 2013
Revelations about the long-term global, intrusive spying by the
US National Security Agency (NSA) and other allied intelligence
apparatuses have provoked widespread protests and indignation and
threatened ties between erstwhile imperial allies.
Allied regimes have uniformly condemned NSA espionage as a
violation of trust and sovereignty, a threat to their national and
economic security and to their citizens’ privacy.
In contrast, the Washington has responded in a
contradictory manner: on the one hand, US officials and intelligence
chiefs have acknowledged ‘some excesses and mistakes’, on the other
hand, they defend the entire surveillance program as necessary for US
national security.
Interpretations vary about the US global spy apparatus –
how it was built and why it was launched against hundreds of millions
of people. ‘Subjective’ and ‘objective’ explanations abound, evoking
psychological, social, economic, strategic and political considerations.
A multi-factorial explanation is required.
The Integrated Hypothesis of the Global Police State
One of the essential components of a police state is an
all-pervasive spy apparatus operating independently of any legal or
constitutional constraints. Spy operations include: 1) massive
surveillance over text, video and audio communications and 2) the
capacity to secretly record, store and use information secretly
collected. This information strengthens political and economic leaders
who, in turn, appoint and direct the spy chiefs. The political and
economic rulers control the spy-lords by setting the goals, means and
targets of the surveillance state. The US global spy apparatus is
neither ‘self-starting nor self-perpetuating’. It did not arise in a
vacuum and it has virtually no strategic autonomy. While there may be
intra-bureaucratic conflicts and rivalries, the institutions and groups
function within the overall ‘paradigm’ established and directed by the
political and economic elite.
The Global Spy Structure
The growth and expansion of the US spy apparatus has deep
roots in its history and is related to the colonial need to control
subjugated native and enslaved peoples. However, the global operations
emerged after the Second World War when the US replaced Europe as the
center of world imperialism. The US assumed the principal role in
preventing the spread of revolutionary and anti-colonial movements from
the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba to war and
crisis-burdened countries of Europe, North and Southeast Asia, and Latin
America. When the collectivist states fell apart in the 1990’s the US
became the sole superpower and a unipolar world emerged.
For the United States, ‘unipolarity’ meant (1) an impetus
toward total global domination; (2) a world-wide network of military
bases; (3) the subordination of capitalist competitors in other
industrial countries, (4) the destruction of nationalist adversaries and
(6) the unfettered pillage of resources from the former collectivist
regimes as they became vassal states. The last condition meant the
complete dismantling of the collectivist state and its public
institutions – education, health care and worker rights.
The opportunities for immense profits and supreme control
over this vast new empire were boundless while the risks seemed puny,
at least during the ‘golden period’, defined by the years immediately
after (1) the capitalist takeover of the ex-Soviet bloc, (2) the Chinese
transition to capitalism and (3) the conversion of many former African
and Asian nationalist regimes, parties and movements to ‘free-market’
capitalism.
Dazzled by their vision of a ‘new world to conquer’ the
United States set up an international state apparatus in order to
exploit this world-historical opportunity. Most top political leaders,
intelligence strategists, military officials and business elites quickly
realized that these easy initial conquests and the complicity of
pliable and kleptocratic post-Communist vassal rulers would not last.
The societies would eventually react and the lucrative plunder of
resources was not sustainable. Nationalist adversaries were bound to
arise and demand their own spheres of influence. The White House feared
their own capitalist allies would take on the role of imperialist
competitors seeking to grab ‘their share’ of the booty, taking over and
exploiting resources, public enterprises and cheap labor.
The new ‘unipolar world’ meant the shredding of the
fabric of social and political life. In the ‘transition’ to free market
capitalism, stable employment, access to health care, security,
education and civilized living standards disappeared. In the place of
once complex, advanced social systems, local tribal and ethnic wars
erupted. It would be ‘divide and conquer’ in an orgy of pillage for the
empire. But the vast majority of the people of the world suffered from
chaos and regression when the multi-polar world of collectivist,
nationalist, and imperialist regimes gave way to the unipolar empire.
For US imperialist strategists and their academic apologists the
transition to a unipolar imperial world was exhilarating and they dubbed
their unchallenged domination the New World Order (NWO). The US
imperial state then had the right and duty to maintain and police its
‘New World Order’ – by any means. Francis Fukiyama, among other academic
apologists celebrated the ‘end of history’ in a paroxysm of imperial
fever. Liberal-imperial academics, like Immanuel Wallerstein, sensed the
emerging challenges to the US Empire and advanced the view of a
Manichean world of ‘unipolarity’ (meaning ‘order’) versus ‘multipolar
chaos’ – as if the hundreds of millions of lives in scores of countries
devastated by the rise of the post-collectivist US empire did not have a
stake in liberating themselves from the yoke of a unipolar world.
By the end of its first decade, the unipolar empire
exhibited cracks and fissures. It had to confront adversarial
nationalist regimes in resource-rich countries, including Muammar
Gaddafi in Libya, Bashar Assad in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and
Khamenei in Iran. They challenged US supremacy in North Africa and the
Middle East. The Taliban in Afghanistan and nationalist Islamist
movements questioned US influence over the vassal rulers of Muslim
countries – especially the puppet monarchs in the Persian Gulf.
On the other side of the imperial coin, the domestic
economic foundations of the NWO were weakened by a series of speculative
crises undermining the support of the US public as well as sectors of
the elite. Meanwhile European and Japanese allies, as well as emerging
Chinese capitalists, were beginning to compete for markets.
Within the US an ultra-militarist group of political
ideologues, public officials and policy advisers, embracing a doctrine
combining a domestic police state with foreign military intervention,
took power in Washington. ‘Conservatives’ in the Bush, Sr. regime,
‘liberals’ in the Clinton administration and ‘neo-conservatives’ in the
Bush, Jr. administration all sought and secured the power to launch wars
in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans, to expand and consolidate the
unipolar empire.
Maintaining and expanding the unipolar empire became the
trigger for the White House’s global police state apparatus. As new
regimes were added to Washington’s orbit, more and more surveillance was
needed to make sure they did not drift into a competitor’s sphere of
influence.
The year 2000 was critical for the global police state.
First there was the dot-com crash in the financial sector. The
speculative collapse caused massive but unorganized disaffection among
the domestic population. Arab resistance re-emerged in the Middle East.
The cosmically corrupt Boris Yeltsin vassal state fell and a
nationalist, Russian President Vladimir Putin took power. The willing
accomplices to the disintegration of the former USSR had taken their
billions and fled to New York, London and Israel. Russia was on the road
to recovery as a unified nuclear-armed nation state with regional
ambitions. The period of unchallenged unipolar imperial expansion had
ended.
The election of President Bush Jr., opened the executive
branch to police state ideologues and civilian warlords, many linked to
the state of Israel, who were determined to destroy secular Arab
nationalist and Muslim adversaries in the Middle East. The steady
growth of the global police state had been ‘too slow’ for them. The
newly ascendant warlords and the proponents of the global police state
wanted to take advantage of their golden opportunity to make US/Israeli
supremacy in the Middle East irreversible and unquestioned via the
application of overwhelming force (‘shock and awe’).
Their primary political problem in expanding global
military power was the lack of a fully dominant domestic police state
capable of demobilizing American public opinion largely opposed to any
new wars. ‘Disaster ideologues’ like Phillip Zelikow and Condoleezza
Rice understood the need for a new Pearl Harbor to occur and threaten
domestic security and thereby terrify the public into war. They lamented
the fact that no credible regimes were left in the Middle East to cast
as the ‘armed aggressor’ and as a threat to US national security. Such
an enemy was vital to the launching of new wars. And new wars were
necessary to justify the scale and scope of the new global spy apparatus
and emergency police state edicts the warlords and neoconservatives had
in mind. Absent a credible ‘state-based adversary’, the militarists
settled for an act of terror (or the appearance of one) to ‘shock and
awe’ the US public into accepting its project for imperial wars, the
imposition of a domestic police state and the establishment of a vast
global spy apparatus.
The September 11, 2001 explosions at the World Trade
Center in New York City and the plane crash into a wing (mostly vacant
for repairs) of the Pentagon in Washington, DC were the triggers for a
vast political and bureaucratic transformation of the US imperial state.
The entire state apparatus became a police state operation. All
constitutional guarantees were suspended. The neo-conservatives seized
power, the civilian warlords ruled. A huge body of police state
legislation suddenly appeared, as if from nowhere, the Patriot Act. The
Zionists in office set the objectives and influenced military policies
to focus on Israel’s regional interests and the destruction of Israel’s
Arab adversaries who had opposed its annexation of Palestine. War was
declared against Afghanistan without any evidence that the ruling
Taliban was involved or aware of the September 11 attack of the US.
Despite massive civilian and even some military dissent, the civilian
warlords and Zionist officials blatantly fabricated a series of pretexts
to justify an unprovoked war against the secular nationalist regime in
Iraq, the most advanced of all Arab countries. Europe was divided over
the war. Countries in Asia and Latin America joined Germany and France
in refusing to support the invasion. The United Kingdom, under a
‘Labor’ government, eagerly joined forces with the US hoping to regain
some of its former colonial holdings in the Gulf.
At home, hundreds of billions of tax dollars were
diverted from social programs to fund a vast army of police state
operatives. The ideologues of war and the legal eagles for torture and
the police state shifted into high gear. Those who opposed the wars were
identified, monitored and the details of their lives were ‘filed away’
in a vast database. Soon millions came to be labeled as ‘persons of
interest’ if they were connected in any way to anyone who was ‘suspect’,
i.e. opposed to the Global War on Terror. Eventually even more tenuous
links were made to everyone…family members, classmates and employers.
Over 1.5 million ‘security cleared’ monitors were contracted by the
government to spy on hundreds of millions of citizens. The spy state
spread domestically and internationally. For a global empire, based on a
unipolar state, the best defense was judged to be a massive global
surveillance apparatus operating independently of any other government –
including the closest allies.
The slogan, Global War on Terror became an open-ended
formula for the civilian warlords, militarists and Zionists to expand
the scope and duration of overt and covert warfare and espionage.
‘Homeland Security’ departments, operating at both the Federal and State
levels, were consolidated and expanded with massive budgets for
incarceration and repression. Constitutional protections and the Writ
of Habeas Corpus were ‘rendered quaint vestiges of history’. The
National Security Agency doubled its personnel and budget with a mandate
to distrust and monitor allies and vassal states. The targets piled
upon targets, far beyond traditional adversaries, sweeping up the public
and private communications of all political, military and economic
leaders , institutions, and citizenry.
The Global War on Terror provided the ideological
framework for a police state based on the totalitarian conception that
‘everybody and everything is connected to each other’ in a ‘global
system’ threatening the state. This ‘totalistic view’ informs the logic
of the expanded NSA, linking enemies, adversaries, competitors and
allies. ‘Enemies’ were defined as anti-imperialist states or regimes
with consistently critical independent foreign and domestic policies.
‘Adversaries’ occasionally sided with ‘enemies’, or tolerated
policymakers who would not always conform to imperial policies.
‘Competitors’ supported the empire but had the capacity and opportunity
to make lucrative trade deals with adversaries or enemies – Allies were
states and leaders who generally supported imperial wars but might
provide a forum condemning imperial war crimes (torture and drone
attacks). In addition allies could undermine US imperial market shares
and accumulate favorable trade balances.
The logic of the NSA required spying on the allies to
root out any links, trade, cultural or scientific relations with
adversaries and enemies, which might have spillover consequences. The
NSA feared that associations in one sphere might ‘overlap’ with
adversaries operating in strategic policy areas and undermine ally
loyalty to the empire.
The spy logic had a multiplier effect – who gets to ‘spy
on the spies?’ The NSA might collaborate with overseas allied
intelligence agencies and officials – but American spymasters would
always question their reliability, their inclination to withhold vital
information, the potential for shifting loyalties. ‘Do our allies spy on
us? How do we know our own spies are not colluding with allied spies
who might then be colluding with adversarial spies?’ This justified the
establishment of a huge national vacuum cleaner to suck up all
transactions and communications – justified by the notion that a wide
net scooping up everything might catch that big fish!
The NSA regards all ‘threats to the unipolar empire’ as
national security threats. No country or agency within or without the
reach of the empire was excluded as a ‘potential threat’.
The ‘lead imperial state’ requires the most efficient and
overarching spy technology with the furthest and deepest reach.
Overseas allies appear relatively inefficient, vulnerable to
infiltration, infected with the residua of a long-standing suspect
‘leftist culture’ and unable to confront the threat of new dangerous
adversaries. The imperial logic regards surveillance of ‘allies’ as
‘protecting allied interests’ because the allies lack the will and
capacity to deal with enemy infiltration.
There is a circular logic to the surveillance state.
When an allied leader starts to question how imperial espionage protects
allied interest, it is time to intensify spying on the ally. Any
foreign ally who questions NSA surveillance over its citizens raises
deep suspicions. Washington believes that questioning imperial
surveillance undermines political loyalties.
Secret Police Spying as a “Process of Accumulation”
Like capitalism, which needs to constantly expand and
accumulate capital, secret police bureaucracies require more spies to
discover new areas, institutions and people to monitor. Leaders,
followers, citizens, immigrants, members of ethnic, religious, civic and
political groups and individuals – all are subject to surveillance.
This requires vast armies of data managers and analysts, operatives,
programmers, software developers and supervisors – an empire of IT. The
ever-advancing technology needs an ever-expanding base of operation.
The spy-masters move from local to regional to global
operations. Facing exposure and condemnation of its global chain of
spying, the NSA calls for a new ‘defensive ideology’. To formulate the
ideology, a small army of academic hacks is trotted out to announce the
phony alternatives of a ‘unipolar police state or terror and chaos’.
The public is presented with a fabricated choice of its perpetual,
‘well-managed and hi-tech’, imperial wars versus the fragmentation and
collapse of the entire world into a global war of ‘all against all’.
Academic ideologues studiously avoid mentioning that small wars by small
powers end more quickly and have fewer casualties.
The ever-expanding technology of spying strengthens the
police state. The list of targets is endless and bizarre. Nothing and
no one will be missed!
As under capitalism, the growth of the spy state triggers
crisis. With the inevitable rise of opposition, whistleblowers come
forward to denounce the surveillance state. At its peak, spy-state
over-reach leads to exposure, public scandals and threats from allies,
competitors and adversaries. The rise of cyber-imperialism raises the
specter of cyber-anti-imperialism. New conceptions of inter-state
relations and global configurations are debated and considered. World
public opinion increasingly rejects the ‘necessity’ of police states.
Popular disgust and reason exposes the evil logic of the spy-state based
on empire and promotes a plural world of peaceful rival countries,
functioning under co-operative policies – systems without empire,
without spymasters and spies.
This article was posted on Saturday, November 16th, 2013 at 1:58pm and is filed under
Capitalism,
Cyber attacks,
Economy/Economics,
Empire,
Espionage/"Intelligence",
Imperialism,
Markets,
NSA,
Police,
Statism,
Whistleblowing.
