The Threat From Within

There's a concise assessment of what the US faces in the near future going around the web. Much of it includes talk of the Starussian Neocons and Others. I found this very perceptive piece at a blog that that Col Lang linked to:

The GULAGs, secret prisons, suspension of habeus corpus, wiretaps, eviscerating FISA and the FISA Court, the unleashing of uncontrolled FBI powers and abusive NSLs, the fear, castrating Congress and the courts, these are all the components of — the necessary components — for literally re-creating the American version of a Counterintelligence State that Dziak diagnosed. You may laugh, but this is deadly serious and explains precisely why Cheney's people stamped TOP SECRET/SCI on Talking Points to be given to the press. And the proliferation of new “classes” of information “Sensitive but not Classified”, etc. The American CI Community and Threat Merchant Contractors have not had it this good EVER. And not surprisingly, the policies that emerged from this embryonic American Counterintelligence State also paralleled its predecessor. Not all the fault, dear Brutus, lies at AEI.

In a Counterintelligence State, the annointed few (however defined) elevate and use the intelligence and security organizations above traditional social entities and civil society. Rule of Law by necessity must be ignored. All is justified by the threat - whether of Western imperialism or alleged elite Albanian pizza delivery commandos ready to strike here. Ironically, however, by their very bellicose, furtive and aggressive nature, Counterintelligence States eventually will summon into place all the threats and more that they perceive — or at least facsimiles thereof.

It appears that the threats are real and the people of the US just sit back and simply turn a blind eye to what's happening. Why is that?

Also take a look at this promising book, Black Mass:

Gray writes a controlled, clean and unfussy prose, but here and there his anger and contempt knock flashes from the steely sheen of his reserve. He harbours a special animus towards American neoconservative theorists, the heirs of Karl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, such as Albert Wohlstetter, Irving Kristol and, Gray's favourite dunce, Francis Fukuyama, who in 1989 famously announced the end of history and the triumph of western, liberal, market-driven democracy.

These zealots, whose "thinking is a mix of crackpot realism and chiliastic fantasy" and whose "catastrophic optimism" has wrought so much mischief in the world since the end of the cold war, hold to the Straussian view that the political high consistory must proceed according to "a modern variation of Plato's noble lie: while philosophers may know the truth they also know that truth is deadly to the mass of humankind". Thus George Bush and Tony Blair, when they present false evidence to support the invasion of Iraq, are not exactly lying, merely realigning the truth in accordance with their higher aims. "For these seers," Gray writes, "victory was the same as truth - not truth of the ordinary kind, to be sure, but the esoteric truth that is concealed in the deceiving mirror of fact."

Gray's critique of the war on Iraq, and especially of Blair's part in it, is devastating. His contempt is palpable in these measured and meticulously argued pages. As usual, it is the details that snag in the mind's fabric. British security firms, he writes, are reported to have some 48,000 personnel in Iraq, "outnumbering British troops by a factor of six to one". The war has been privatised, and "the ragtag army of crooks and shysters that followed in the wake of American troops is not greatly different from that which trailed behind the colonial armies of earlier times".