The Deep State (29 page)

A Tea Party–Progressive Coalition?

One should not, however, make too much of these symptoms as a predictor of future politics. Ralph Nader, after decades on the left-hand fringe of American political discourse, has had an epiphany and believes an antiestablishment Left-Right alliance has the potential to overcome the oligarchical rule of the establishment that has smothered American politics over the last three decades. In his book
Unstoppable,
Nader sees evidence that populist conservatives—just like progressives—abhor the too-big-to-fail banking system, distrust the surveillance state, and are weary of foreign adventurism. It is possible he also detects a faint cultural resemblance between Left and Right.

Ever since it formed, the Tea Party has struck me as a kind of weird generational echo, forty years on, of the young leftists of the late 1960s. The 1960s leftists, like the Tea Party now, had unrealistic goals and were hostile to compromise. Both saw themselves as cultural forces up against a shadowy establishment. Both treated politics as street theater and had a curious fondness for using violent rhetoric and making apocalyptic pronouncements. Generationally speaking, the 1960s Left and the Right of today are the same group. It was the trailing edge of the Silent Generation
and the leading edge of the Baby Boomers who overwhelmingly made up leftist organizations like Students for a Democratic Society. Circa 2015, the core demographic of the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News are those over the age of sixty—early Boomers and late Silents. Indeed, they may even be the same people! One has only to think of former liberal operatives like Pat Caddell and Bob Beckel, who have settled comfortably into their new role as resident right-wing cranks on Fox News. Erstwhile leftist bad boy David Horowitz is now a second-string neoconservative, and former civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz has since 9/11 advocated the imposition of legalized torture. If LSD was the gateway drug for the adolescent sixties Left, Fox News is the gateway drug for the senescent Right of the present day.

But Ralph Nader's belief that the populist Right in its present form could enter into a viable coalition that would enact the kinds of reforms that he advocates is wishful thinking. The populist American Right, particularly in its Tea Party incarnation, is too schizophrenic and deranged to make a reformist political coalition partner or engage in coherent governance, even if its theatrical behavior and brinkmanship have already disrupted some of the Deep State's operations. For all its histrionics about Wall Street banks, 95 percent of candidates whom Tea Party voters elect would never countenance a root-and-branch reform of the financial sector that would place compensation limits on executives and tax some of its operations. After all, the politicians chosen by a motivated Republican electorate have already voted en bloc against the tepid improvements of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

The Tea Party distrusts the surveillance state under the guidance of Barack Obama, but these same Patrick Henrys who wave the Gadsden flag showed no similar agitation over George W. Bush's depredations against the Constitution. Their weariness of endless war on foreign shores betrays a comparable partisan dynamic; it only takes one minor-league incident like the prisoner swap that released Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl for the populist Right to start snapping like rabid dogs (and for a few deranged individuals even to send death threats to Bergdahl's family).

Beyond the substantive issues of war, the economy, and civil liberties, the populist Right comes freighted with the baggage of the culture war: a mania for controlling people's private consensual relations as well as habitual conspiracy theorizing about death panels, birtherism, or whether the U.S. Army is trying to take over Texas. The spectacle of Tea Party members ranting against a bill to provide other Americans with health care makes Nader's dream of a Left-Right coalition achieving a single-payer health care system seem unrealistic.

The contemporary populist Right is a bastard child of corporate America, which has subsidized the Tea Party via front groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth ever since the movement's beginning on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Its real, as opposed to stated, purpose was to distract and channel the inchoate popular longing for a change in the status quo. That this movement has not always pleased its benefactors is one more example of the fact that corporate rollouts are not always successful: for every Apple iPhone that fully lives up to the expectations of marketing strategists, there is a New Coke.

Nothing could mask the shock of the Washington pundits when Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor lost his primary election to an underfunded, unknown Tea Party candidate. It was the electoral equivalent of Pearl Harbor, mainly because they failed to predict it. The following day, the
Wall Street Journal
at least partially attributed a 102-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average to Cantor's defeat.
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But did it materially change anything? One intransigent Republican was replaced by an even more intransigent one, albeit with less seniority. The successful challenger, David Brat, employed populist and antiestablishment themes for the same reason that wolves don sheep's clothing.

Brat's previous job was teaching Ayn Rand–style economics at Randolph-Macon College. The position was endowed by the “charitable” foundation of a bank, BB&T, whose former CEO, John A. Allison IV, set up the endowment expressly to propagandize in favor of extreme laissez-faire ideology. Allison's philosophy is exemplified by his comment that merely requiring corporations to disclose the ratio between the
compensation of their CEO and their median employee would be “an attack on the very productive.”
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If Tea Partyer Brat is a populist insurgent, I wonder what a reactionary would look like.

The Recurring American Cycle of Right-Wing Movements

Democratic pundits console themselves with the belief that the Tea Party's extremism has driven the GOP so far to the right, and made it so captive of an older, angrier voting demographic whose antics repel independents, that the Republican Party has locked itself into a death spiral. But a quick look at history suggests that their thesis is flawed.

Since World War II, America has seen a series of backlash populist movements—McCarthyism, the New Right that propelled Goldwater's 1964 candidacy, the backlash against the civil rights movement and campus disorders that gave birth to Nixon's Southern Strategy. And after Senator Joseph McCarthy's censure, Goldwater's election debacle, and Watergate, the wise men of the op-ed pages saw the right wing of the Republican Party as an electoral dead end and opined that the GOP must become a moderate, centrist party or face electoral suicide. And each time, the right wing of the party recovered with surprising speed and won elections, always on some sham populist platform opposing whichever elitist bogeyman the party's spin doctors had manufactured for that election cycle.

The external enemies might have changed from communists to Muslims, and the internal enemies from Nixon's campus protesters to Romney's 47 percent of Americans who were allegedly “takers,” but from election to election the underlying dynamic has been strikingly similar. According to their narrative, the billionaire and the shoe clerk always have the same interests because both are taxpayers, and both are menaced by the same parasitic, un-American forces that use the government to prey equally on the billionaire and the shoe clerk. The Tea Party is a particularly well organized and heavily funded manifestation of this recurring theme, and neither it nor the Republican Party is going away anytime
soon. Some quirk in the American psyche made up of nostalgia, resentment, anti-intellectualism, and fear makes backlash populism an abiding presence on the national political scene. It appeals, as Corey Robin writes in
The Reactionary Mind,
to people motivated by “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”

The Tea Party cannot topple the Deep State both because it is a financial dependency of wealthy donors and AstroTurfed Washington organizations, and because it is incapable of coherent governance either alone or in coalition. Speaker of the House John Boehner's resignation vividly illustrates the irrational and cannibalistic nature of the movement. He was a staunch conservative by any objective standard, but also a politician who accepted the necessity of compromise in a divided government. Yet Tea Party extremists in the House drove Boehner out of power, demonstrating their implacable hostility not only toward liberals and moderates but toward anyone who refuses to swallow their exotic flavor of Kool-Aid.

Like Frankenstein's monster, the Tea Party is not entirely amenable to the will of its creator: the dangerously insane candidacy of Donald Trump, which infuriated the GOP establishment, was merely the logical culmination not only of the Tea Party's toxic ideology but of deep-seated trends in the broader Republican Party. To be sure, the Tea Party is a repository of discontent with the status quo, but there is little that it can do other than intermittently disrupt and inconvenience the Deep State.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.

—Robert F. Kennedy, address at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 6, 1966

Is Congress Getting a Backbone?

In certain quarters there have been a few green shoots of pushback to the Deep State and its demands. When Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's collection of sensitive data on U.S. citizens, I suspected that it would be at most a two-week story, like the disclosure of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or James Risen's exposé in the
New York Times
of the complicity of the telecoms in NSA spying. Yet Snowden's disclosure continued to build, gain resonance with the public, and even stir a somnolent Congress. Barely a month afterward, the House of Representatives narrowly failed to agree to an amendment that would have defunded the NSA's warrantless collection of data.

A month after that, the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East (this time in Syria), met with overwhelming public rejection. As Reuters reported on August 24, 2013, “Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict even if reports that Syria's government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed. . . . About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria's civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should
act.”
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Even if the government were to produce proof that Syrian government forces had used chemical weapons, just one in four Americans favored intervention. Obama could obviously read public opinion polls and the congressional mood, and he quickly changed the subject and grasped at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by Vladimir Putin (of all people) and changed the subject. While over the next two years the administration continued to push around the edges of involvement in Syria, the idea of a full-dress military campaign to depose the regime appeared to be off the table.

Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison and Jefferson, containing a Congress that is actually responsible to voters, finally begun to reassert itself? Yes, to some extent, although the debate about ISIS that unfolded in the summer of 2014 showed much of the same reflexive hysteria that has characterized the whole period since 9/11. Still, the scope of the NSA's warrantless surveillance is so vast that even habitual apologists have begun to backpedal from their knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to awaken from the fearful and suggestible mental state induced by 9/11, it is possible that the Deep State's decade-old tactic of crying “Terrorism!” each time it faces resistance will no longer elicit the same Pavlovian response.

The CIA Versus the Senate

On March 11, 2014, Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, delivered one of the more consequential congressional speeches of the last decade. She was addressing the committee's investigation into allegations of torture by the CIA. A report on the findings, running to over 6,300 pages, had been completed more than a year earlier. Her floor speech amounted to a bill of indictment of the spy agency, which had been holding up the report's release on the pretext of a declassification review. Floor speeches by members of Congress condemning this agency or that program are routine, but this one was a blistering attack on the CIA—albeit in lawyerly language and maintaining
every institutional decorum—by a senator who had long been a reflexive defender of the intelligence community. Here are the most significant points that we can tease out of her speech:

• Torture, as practiced by the CIA, was worse than the conventional Beltway wisdom had believed. Her purpose in exposing it was to bring to light the “horrible details of a CIA program that never, never should have existed,” so as to prevent torture from ever again becoming American policy.
  
• The agency misrepresented the results of its interrogations. The CIA claimed that “enhanced interrogation” (in ordinary English, torture) had extracted information from detainees, when in many cases the prisoners had already supplied the same information before being tortured.
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• The torture was conducted in “black sites” (unacknowledged facilities) in several countries. The Intelligence Committee redacted the names of the countries so as not to embarrass those governments, but given what went on at those sites, it is reasonable to believe that the host governments know certain things that the Intelligence Committee was unable to discover. Those governments now have leverage over a United States government that is not eager to see further details disclosed.
  
• The CIA spied on a congressional committee that was lawfully engaged in oversight of it, making the agency in violation of the statutory prohibition on domestic spying.
  
• Private contractors not only had access to secret documents to which the Intelligence Committee was not privy, they were actually in
  charge of vetting what the committee was permitted to see. The CIA thus granted more access to private contractors than to its own constitutional overseers, and gave them veto power over what Congress could know.
  
• To compound it all, the CIA was considering prosecution of Senate committee staffers for the “crime” of carrying out legitimate constitutional oversight.
  

What are we to make of all this? First let us consider the gravity of the issues at stake. Despite claims that torture was necessary to protect Americans, in reality it became a recruiting tool for terrorists and endangered the lives of U.S. soldiers. We do not need to rely on statements by senators operating from the comfort of their well-appointed offices that torture was counterproductive: Matthew Alexander, a veteran of U.S. Air Force counterintelligence who served as an interrogator in Iraq, reports that torture was the principle motivator for foreign jihadists to come to Iraq and fight Americans. He also says, “What I saw in Iraq still rattles me—both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.” Alexander found that old-fashioned police techniques like building rapport with detainees brought much better information than physical duress.
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The most important point is one that Feinstein never addressed. She said that the White House had supported her committee's probe of the CIA. It is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that Obama or one of his aides would have suggested as much while tolerating, or even encouraging, CIA obstruction. But suppose the president did support the committee's probe. That would suggest that the White House does not really control the CIA. In either case, whether from obstruction or lack of control, the situation merits Senator Feinstein's description as a constitutional crisis.

Our elected representatives were fighting an uphill battle, with every advantage in the hands of the CIA. The vast majority of the rules governing classification are generated by the executive branch rather than
Congress, but they bind Congress as well—a potential breach of separation of powers. In order to make a declassified summary of the report public, the committee would thus have to submit it to the Obama administration for declassification. The government's security classification regime is daunting: in a single year, it makes about 183,000 original classification decisions.

It also classifies material referred to in newly classified files. This is called “derivative classification.” In 2009, in its first year as the most open and transparent administration in history, the Obama administration took about 55 million derivative classification decisions.
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The process by which material is classified was convoluted even during the cold war, but after 9/11 it morphed into a wilderness of mirrors. The rules for declassification are incoherent and contradictory, and can be arbitrarily twisted so that classifying material more often becomes a means of advancing the executive branch's political agenda or of suppressing embarrassing or downright criminal information.

Now no president—other maybe than Richard Nixon—would be so brazen as to issue an executive order instructing his agencies to classify documents to cover up a crime. And sure enough, the current top-level directive, titled “Executive Order 13526: Classified National Security Information,” dated December 29, 2009, states the following:

SEC. 1.7. CLASSIFICATION PROHIBITIONS AND LIMITATIONS.

(a) In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;

(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;

(3) restrain competition; or

(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.

This all sounds perfectly innocent, but any document disclosing illegal acts can still be classified by asserting that it contains information
relevant to national security. It can then be redacted so as to conceal the crime. Recently declassified documents about events that took place decades ago often have so many blacked-out passages they look like player-piano rolls. It is often impossible to gain a coherent picture of the document's subject matter. To challenge the administration's classification decision, the Senate would have to know the details of what was being withheld and also contest the administration's decisions on classification, something the legislative branch has traditionally been reluctant to do. Even then, the CIA, the agency originating the material on which the report is based, would have the first cut at deciding what to reveal and what to keep classified—a clear conflict of interest when the issue is the legality of its own conduct.

As it happened, the CIA made its own referral to the Justice Department for potential prosecution—not against employees who may have hacked into Senate-controlled computers, but against the very Senate staffers who were the hacking targets, for supposedly accessing CIA documents they were not authorized to see. In Pontius Pilate fashion, the Justice Department decided to wash its hands of the whole issue, closing the case on July 9, 2014, without finding sufficient evidence either that the CIA had hacked the Senate's computers or that the Senate staffers had accessed forbidden documents. Later that same month, the CIA's own inspector general issued a report confirming that the agency's employees had engaged in hacking, and explaining that its lawyer, Robert Eatinger, had based his referral letter on inaccurate information.

John Brennan, the CIA director, who had earlier said that any senator who dared accuse the CIA of malfeasance would regret it, was forced to issue a rare personal apology to Dianne Feinstein and her Republican counterpart on the Senate Intelligence Committee. President Obama then expressed his full confidence in Brennan, despite calls from some senators for his resignation. This was only to be expected from a president who has smoothed Brennan's career path at every opportunity since taking office in 2009. Obama's statement did contain one mild surprise—a clear admission that the government had in fact used torture: “My hope
is that this report reminds us once again that the character of our country has to be remembered in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard. And when we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe to be torture, we crossed a line.”
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Perhaps in some breezy, sunlit alternate universe, Obama would actually allow the American people to read all the facts in the full report and judge for themselves what the government—the government he nominally leads—did in their name, but the president's statement did not quite put an end to the intelligence community's gamesmanship. The intelligence community was not going to give up without a fight. The next struggle predictably occurred over the agency's redactions of classified material in the report. While the CIA claimed it had redacted only 15 percent of its content, Intelligence Committee members complained that it was precisely the 15 percent that was key to understanding both the extent of the torture and the insignificance of its results. Committee member Mark Udall of Colorado complained that although the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, “may be technically correct that the document has been 85 percent declassified, it is also true that strategically placed redactions can make a narrative incomprehensible.”
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Finally, in December 2014, still reeling from the midterm elections that had swept the Democrats from their Senate majority, the Obama administration cleared for release a 525-page summary of the torture report. Even this carefully redacted fragment told a story of deception, incompetence, and ultimate futility. The summary said that the CIA had outsourced the program to two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. The two had never witnessed a real interrogation before and had no other relevant experience. At $2 million per interrogation, the program they oversaw had produced negligible intelligence of any value and many false leads.

Classified Foul-ups

My first serious professional brush with the puzzle of runaway classification came in 1988, after three B-1 bombers were written off in fatal crashes shortly after the $280 million aircraft entered service. Two of these accidents were later found to have been caused by poor design of the fuel and hydraulic lines near hot engine components, a dangerous flaw. My boss, John Kasich, represented a congressional district heavily involved in the manufacture of the plane, and he was naturally concerned by the accidents. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, he assumed he would be granted access to the Air Force's accident investigation reports as a matter of course. He guessed wrong: the reports were not available to Congress. It soon became evident that needless secrecy surrounded the crash reports: the services hid the details even from Armed Services Committee members with the requisite clearances and an obvious need to know what had happened. Why the secrecy?