Obama’s National Security State

Tuesday, December 17, 2013
By Paul Martin

Norman Pollack
RINF Alternative News
Dec 17, 2013

The militarization of intelligence is not a new development. That had always been its primary if not also integral function from the start. E.g., the CIA did not and does not, to my knowledge, focus its resources on, or preoccupy itself with, compiling baseball stats or tables of comparative annual rainfall, but rather, has proven its adeptness at assassination, the broader range of regime-change activities, and now, with JSOC forces and private contractors, it fulfills, under Obama‘s aegis, an enlarged operational role beyond strict intelligence of planning and executing drone killings (even possessing its own fleet of drones).

To this obviously military dimension, especially of foreign policy, along with that of the intelligence sections of the individual military-service branches, in what amounts to a holding pattern of business as usual, one finds something new and, I believe, more sinister, added under his watch. Obama has raised the military-factor in the intelligence realm a significant notch over even that of his predecessors by means of combining its military and civilian aspects under a unified command structure.

This auspicious move, as reported by David Sanger and Thom Shanker in their New York Times article, “Obama to Keep Security Agency and Cyberwarfare Under a Single Commander,” Dec. 13, represents a militarization not only of intelligence, but also of government itself. It is the concentration of such power via fusing, under one “military official,” the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s cyberwarfare division, which (a) brings the intelligence community under military leadership, and directs its operational role into more aggressively oriented functions, and (b) with this military emphasis, serves both to enlarge Executive Power and inscribe a geopolitical strategy at its heart, as in Obama‘s war-prone Pacific-first strategy vis-à-vis China.

With Obama, so much becomes interconnected, and, from the standpoint of government transparency, as befitting a democratic society, utterly impenetrable, so that the militarization of government itself has as its leading edge the massive surveillance of the American people falling increasingly within the military orbit—a double whammy leading through the backdoor to a stronger, less responsible, more remote presidency.

The Rest…HERE

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