Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.This is excerpted from a longer piece that Rosen wrote about wikileaks, which is actually worth reading. (Via Greenwald, by the way. However . . .
-Jay Rosen
"We're wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work." What do you mean, we? What do you mean, wasting? What do you mean, does not work?
Institutions, like organisms, seek survival for themselves and their descendants. One of the conceits at the heart of most theories of government, which has perhaps reached its apogee in this age of technocratic, managerial liberalism, is the idea that institutions are fundamentally instrumental. To an anarchist, this is a flatly silly proposition. (An analogue might be a Christian trying to get an atheist to concede that life has a "purpose.") Institutions aren't simple tools. Organizations aren't implements. And when a sufficient number of institutions coexist, they function like an ecosystem. They neither work nor do not work. They survive, reproduce, replace, predate, evolve, alter, consume, and grow. They are no more responsive to the individuals contained within than a person is to a single cell.
On a more practical note, I continue to be charmed by the base assumption that if the CIA (or whomever) says that their job is to gather information to protect the United States from its enemies, then this is so. Well, first of all, who are these enemies? Why are they enemies? Why should we assume the NSA (or whomever) is interested in whom they say they're interested in anyway?
So look. You have organizations that were constituted largely in secret for purposes that may, in fact, have little relationship to what Whitehousespokesperson or Undersecretaryofdefenseivewhatnot says they were, which, once constituted, proceeded quite heedless of what their ersatz original raisons d'être were, and which now constitute an ungovernable, boundless, self-sustaining, self-referring system of unimaginable complexity. So, you know, you can't fix it. I guess you can pray for a solar gamma burst or an asteroid.
60 comments:
So, you know, you can't fix it. I guess you can pray for a solar gamma burst or an asteroid.
Even though they tarry, still I wait every day for their coming.
It's true that every institution tries to perpetuate itself above all but this is not necessarily incompatible with an actual objective. I think the security apparatus is definitely being prepared for an anticipated uptick in social unrest. The oligarchs hatred of democracy increases as time goes on. The defense apparatus is about enlarging and protecting the assets of American corporations. Around all this is a layer of opportunists who just want to loot taxpayers. In the end, it's just really all about different layers of theft. To me this is so obvious that I am amazed that people who seem to be taking a close look still evaluate all these things on their official terms and talk about what a failed mission Afghanistan or Iraq is. Or how the security apparatus is too active to be useful. In fact, if these institutions were not successful on the terms for which they were established, they would be dismantled.
I see no evidence at all that the "oligarchs" hate democracy. It seems to suit their purposes admirably.
I see no evidence at all that the "oligarchs" hate democracy. It seems to suit their purposes admirably. Is this why, in a perverse and unintentional way, they testify to it's validity when they say, Oh, you have to vote, to share in our democracy. Then they put all the money in the Bank of Oligarchs & Plutocrats and hand us a satchel with whities for weight.
I see no evidence at all that the "oligarchs" hate democracy. It seems to suit their purposes admirably.
It depends on what you call democracy, guess. The thing that I mean they hate is people exerting genuine influence over their governance and having basic civil liberties.
indeed, democracy suits their purposes just fine. it's people (as in The People, the 'not them') they hate.
asteroids and whatnot are nice and all, but i'd rather to go out in style.
Cthulhu R'lyeh fhtagn!!!
Government: the last frontier of evolution.
I wouldn't agree that institutions are free of instrumental role. In the case of the army: it may be true constituents of the army itself want to keep it going for no reason other than to keep it going...but other institutions--ones vital to the army's existence--see an instrumental role for it therefore help sustain it.
In fact, CIA's existence has been controversial: supported by Liberals and suspected by Conservatives. Arguments re: this controversy are at least ostensibly instrumental.
An institution is not ten people conspiring to do evil. It is ten thousand people with no incentive to do good.
Gee, Haloscan works well...
Oh, for chrispiesake, I was trying to point out that IOZ is showing his 19-year-old stoner core here.
All organizations are cancer? The CIA is simply an organization that is especially cancerous on an intrinsic basis, without regard to its surrounding climate/organizations?
Balderdash. Capitalism is the controlling environment, and business corporations are the master. Private profit, not bureaucracy, is the main engine of death at present.
IOZ, for all his brilliance, denies this.
P.S. "This age of technocratic, managerial liberalism"???????
WTF??????
Are you Daniel Bell's grandson?
They are no more responsive to the individuals contained within than a person is to a single cell.
Then what exactly ARE organizations responsive to? Who/what is the "brain" in this analogy?
IOZ must have had a bad night.
It manages (pun intended) to say a raft of sophomoric crap in several directions.
Not least among the silly claims is that the CIA could not be closed down because of its internal power. That's just patently dumb, and dismissive of the institutions actual history, which is to function, as Chalmers Johnson argues, as a private White House army.
P.S. The CIA is secretive, but its purpose is hardly secret.
lulz, glad to people starting to finally ignore troll Dawson.
look at him grasping so hard at whatever he can, but alas, no one will pay attention so he posts four times in a row. HA!
Grasping at whatever I can? I presume that means you see something I missed.
Pray, tell... You see the world as a big general bureaucracy? You think the CIA could not ever possibly be shut down? You concur that Cub Scouts is an aspiring CIA? What?
Meanwhile, I'm not a troll pinhead. I'm a sympathetic comrade who seeks exchange. Dillwad.
Michael Dawson, I'll exchange.
"All organizations are cancer?"
That is not exactly what Ioz said, he is modelling organizations on organisms that are capable of growth, perpetuate themselves and remain alive. A group of organizations forms an ecosystem. His point is that these are not instruments that are prone to malfunctioning, which is at the heart of normative arguments such as the one he excerpted.
"The CIA is simply an organization that is especially cancerous on an intrinsic basis, without regard to its surrounding climate/organizations?"
"Not least among the silly claims is that the CIA could not be closed down because of its internal power."
That is not what Ioz said, he said that the CIA as an organization has agency and seeks to entrench itself as an institution without expiration, and to expand its power/domain whenever and wherever possible. The history of the organization, which you seem to be as aware of as I am with references to someone like Chalmers Johnson, confirms this.
Nowhere in what Ioz wrote is there a claim that the CIA could never be shut down.
I think people interpret your comments as trolling because you are responding to such a badly disfigured caricature that it seems like you are just trying to stir shit up through intentional misrepresentation of others.
can you outline a credible scenario where we could be rid of this despicable criminal organization in this millennium MD?
Justin, thanks. You say that IOZ nowhere says the CIA can't be shut down. IOZ says this about organizations "which now constitute an ungovernable, boundless, self-sustaining, self-referring system of unimaginable complexity. So, you know, you can't fix it. I guess you can pray for a solar gamma burst or an asteroid."
Either you're missing something, or I am. I wonder how you would explain how I am, given this quote, as well as the astounding one that equates all human organizations with all living organisms. One wonders how an amoeba or an asparagus "seeks" anything, just as much as one wonders how all schools are somehow the School of the Americas, supposedly despite their officers' intentions and their "overall" context.
Ran, the long odds against the required politics are hardly a sufficient proof of the institutional impossibility. It could be done by electing a president who heeded Johnson's advice. It could be done by having the general public learn the relevant facts. It could be done by imperial collapse.
The latter is likely. The former two are entirely possible, despite unthinking anarchist paranoia.
ahh Justin, you are a better man than I, actually explaining to MD where he went wrong, rather than just ignoring what he says and calling him a troll
If you want exchange, Dawson, then try actually responding to what IOZ and other commentors say... Like Justin said more eloquently than I, if you do troll-ish things and ask stupid questions ("You think the CIA could not ever possibly be shut down?") then you will be treated accordingly.
also, there was no reason to call me a pinhead. that's just rude.
OK, sans-culottes, or should I say Ox, where did I go wrong? Name it.
I did reply to what IOZ said, you douchebag.
re MD @1:47.
Just because something can't be fixed, doesn't mean it can't be destroyed.
IOZ is using something called 'hyperbole' here to make a point. The CIA can theoretically be dismantled, but given the present circumstances, it seems about as likely as a fuckin asteroid.
If I jumped the gun by calling you a troll, my bad, but it wasn't really that hard to see the point IOZ was making here.
ok, pinhead and douchebag are one thing...... but now you call me Oxtrot?
now you crossed the line. go fuck yourself.
I'm with alleged 'troll' Dawson on just about everything except his sunny hopes for change. Accepting that the CIA does exist for a purpose other than sustaining itself and considering that that purpose is completely at odds with the first two of MD's 3 scenarios all hope if any lies with imperial collapse or that asteroid.
Sans, the point that IOZ is making here is NOT that the CIA is beyond the reach of reform at present. Read the motherfucking content of the motherfucking post:
"Institutions, like organisms, seek survival for themselves and their descendants. One of the conceits at the heart of most theories of government, which has perhaps reached its apogee in this age of technocratic, managerial liberalism, is the idea that institutions are fundamentally instrumental. To an anarchist, this is a flatly silly proposition. (An analogue might be a Christian trying to get an atheist to concede that life has a "purpose.") Institutions aren't simple tools. Organizations aren't implements. And when a sufficient number of institutions coexist, they function like an ecosystem. They neither work nor do not work. They survive, reproduce, replace, predate, evolve, alter, consume, and grow. They are no more responsive to the individuals contained within than a person is to a single cell.
"On a more practical note, I continue to be charmed by the base assumption that if the CIA (or whomever) says that their job is to gather information to protect the United States from its enemies, then this is so. Well, first of all, who are these enemies? Why are they enemies? Why should we assume the NSA (or whomever) is interested in whom they say they're interested in anyway?
"So look. You have organizations that were constituted largely in secret for purposes that may, in fact, have little relationship to what Whitehousespokesperson or Undersecretaryofdefenseivewhatnot says they were, which, once constituted, proceeded quite heedless of what their ersatz original raisons d'être were, and which now constitute an ungovernable, boundless, self-sustaining, self-referring system of unimaginable complexity. So, you know, you can't fix it. I guess you can pray for a solar gamma burst or an asteroid."
Pass that around to your technically literate friend and ask them what the thesis is. The thesis is that the CIA is a rogue organization like all organizations, as any anarchist could tell you. Of course the CIA lies. All organizations lie.
IOZ either had a bad night, or tipped his hand, as I suggested at the outset. I suspect the former. He had a Pittsburgh evening, came home, and crapped one out. I think he's actually smarter than what he says in this dumbass post.
Mike, I never said I thought it likely. Quite the contrary. But possibility and likelihood are two very different things. It's extremely depressing to see how this elementary fact continues to flummox what passes for the left...
- If I've said it once, I'm saying it now for the second time: Life is a disease from which we all die. We haven't managed to kill ourselves off yet, so I don't imagine any organization we've given birth to to meet their demise until we all do. Hence summoning a solar gamma burst (though I think the preferred nomenclature is Endfart).
That's certainly as promising as "having the general public learn the relevant facts." Now that's a knee slapper. How about splintering the CIA into a thousand pieces and scattering it to the winds?
-I don't know oligarchs from Cheetos, but I can't imagine anything more anti-democratic than the idea that everything would be just dandy if that other party were banned to the basement. Maybe the oligarchs perpetuate this sentiment. If so, it would seem that they are anti-democratic, but love to play democracy. Or maybe Cheetos. You ever notice how no matter how long you go without eating them, they remain on the shelves, awaiting you next purchase?
Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducting more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms A little Burroughs to clarify something besides the butter.
The thesis is that the CIA is a rogue organization like all organizations, as any anarchist could tell you.
The word "rogue" here is redundant, but I think you know that, so no big.
Consider IOZ's post as a response to a line in Rosen's post. Rosen complains that the "intelligence system" - let's say by this he means the whole National Intelligence apparatus: the CIA, the NSA, military intelligence, whoever the embassy drinks with at MI5, etc - "does not work." IOZ's contention is that the apparatus works just fine - at "seek[ing] survival for themselves and their descendants."
I've said the same thing for years. Maybe I'm tunnel-visioned, but I don't know what's contestable about that assertion. An institution, like the NS/CIA, is not a Hobbesian leviathan. It is not an instrument of democratic will. It's thousands of different people with thousands of different agendas. Some of them want to discover what's really going on in the world. Some of them want to assassinate dark people. Some of them want to pad their resumes. Some of them want to mark time until pension. But all of them need the NS/CIA's continued existence to achieve these goals. Therefore, the collective effect of these thousands of different agendas will be a slow, sturdy bureaucracy - an institution that will seek survival for itself and its descendants.
If I differ with our host in any way, it's that this theory has "perhaps reached its apogee in this age of technocratic, managerial liberalism." We're still living in the apogee. We have been for a few hundred years and may for a few hundred more.
Shorter Michael Dawson: "I'll see your e.g., and raise you an i.e."
On a note of pure housekeeping, however: please try to restrain yourself from copy-and-pasting the entire top post in its own comments thread. The men's room is on the other side of the bar. The guests don't need your directions.
On a more practical note, I continue to be charmed by the base assumption that if the CIA (or whomever) says that their job is to gather information to protect the United States from its enemies, then this is so.
Valerie Plame said so, and SHE'S A PURTY LADY!
"If only the right people were in charge, they could clean this up in a jiffy." /snark
Mmmm,
As I always say, nothing more Christian than purpose, covenant, and apple pie!
Capt'n Obvious
I have lived most of my adult life on the fringes of the 'intel community'. My spouse, my sibling, many friends work for NSA and/or various military intelligence services. I think IOZ is talking about the total bureacratic structure in his post; the CIA is a convenient shorthand. And with regard to the total structure, I agree with IOZ. It would be next to impossible to change it.
The people I know who work for intel generally came into the work because they had wonderful language learning capabilities with no real opportunities elsewhere in the American economy. Seriously, that does seem to me to be the story of almost all the people I know who are analysts, intel reporters, etc. I'm old, so the cohort of people I know are Vietnam era; the situation might be different now for intel hires.
The thing is that many of these people work in good faith, hoping they are helping keep America safe or whatever. Even when they discover their work is being misused or abused, they can't quite believe it. Those people who do quit, like the person whose work Colin Powell so twisted in his UN speech, usually find themselves ignored. Or, like poor Bradley Manning, the kid who leaked the video of the US helicopter guncrew shooting down the Reuters reporters in Baghdad, or Joseph Darby, the brave kid who leaked the pictures of Abu Ghraib, they find themselves either in jail or living a weird witness protection type existence.
The refrain that the Wikileaks show nothing new -- not only the media but the commenters to articles in the Guardian and elsewhere say this over and over again -- is part of the inertia that stonewalls change.
What would it take to change this? Well, I guess it would be, for starters, taking the word of the lowly worker at face value instead of claiming that he or she doesn't have the Big Picture in mind or is not patriotic or just has some personal ax to grind. Which last, of course, no general or WH staffer or CIA chief ever has. Of course not. Those people are all serving their country.
Sorry -- got carried away and wrote too much.
I guess you can pray for a solar gamma burst or an asteroid.
SEND IN THE BUS
Jerome Bettis?
Dawson, the thesis is clearly "institutions are thought to exist in order to serve some purpose, but their existence becomes (or remains) a purpose in itself." I wish I knew what you were driving at here; you've written so much and I'm still a little confused.
I dunno. what size crater would he leave?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2wryXWLNCo
"L'avenir n'est pas dans les mains des poetes; il est dans les mains des flics."
-Louis Aragon
Maybe we change the 'poetes' to 'blawgs' to make it apply now?
MD,
Either you're missing something, or I am. I wonder how you would explain how I am, given this quote, as well as the astounding one that equates all human organizations with all living organisms. One wonders how an amoeba or an asparagus "seeks" anything
Well, what IOZ is saying is that it is not likely that elites in power will dismantle these institutions because they are 'malfunctioning' - moreover, they are not malfunctioning at all, that perception is based in an observor's, like Jay Rosen, projections about how and why they exist at all.
You are right, theoretically, these institutions can be taken apart. I really don't see how Ioz is saying that is an impossibility, just unlikely given the current context within which they exist. It's also not impossible that humans might actually respond to the science on climate change and dramatically reduce their use of fossil fuels, end world hunger, and end war.
I'm pretty sure at this point it's next to impossible to do away with comparatively minor, transparently antiquated facets of our government's structure, like lifetime terms for federal judges or the electoral college. Dismantling the White House's personal secret death squad? Good luck.
Which isn't to say it'll take an apocalypse to do away with the national security apparatus - just imperial or civilizational collapse, which I expect isn't too far off at any rate.
Now Dawson, it doesn't serve you well to say that "sans-culottes" is me.
I post under only two forms of the same monniker: either Charles F. Oxtrot or CF Oxtrot.
I'm not among the frilly blouse brigade, so "sans-culottes" wouldn't be a name I'd choose. Besides, I have no reason to hide behind another name when picking on you. And in this thread, there is no reason to pick on you, because you are embarrassing yourself handily, without anyone pointing at your mis-reads.
But I'll admit, Justin's doing an admirable job of walking you down the aisle, steadying your hobbling feeble gait. When you get near the dais and have to give away your daughter the bride-to-be, try to not punch the groom-to-be in the face.
Aunt Deb: good read. As one whose pappy was a cryptographer, I agree with your take on the origins of most of the work-a-day "intel" employees. However, given that my brother fairly recently started a new job with Booz Allen helping Homeland Security spy on us regular folks, I'll add a corrective which says modern "intel" employees have other options -- my brother left a perfectly good job to go work for Booz Allen. I think his patriotism, such as it may be, got the better of him. And I'd define "patriotism" here as the intersection of personal greed and a misunderstanding of what is "security."
indeed, democracy suits their purposes just fine. it's people (as in The People, the 'not them') they hate.
Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducting more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised.
I don't know oligarchs from Cheetos, but I can't imagine anything more anti-democratic than the idea that everything would be just dandy if that other party were banned to the basement. Maybe the oligarchs perpetuate this sentiment. If so, it would seem that they are anti-democratic, but love to play democracy
I guess I don't know what yinz mean by democracy It's sure not what I mean.
Michael,
they are jabs at what passes for democracy in the US. not the fiction we learn in HS Civics class of gubment of the people, by the people and for the people.
they are jabs at what passes for democracy in the US. not the fiction we learn in HS Civics class of gubment of the people, by the people and for the people.
Oh, I see. So it was a pissing contest, since we are in agreement that the big people don't like the little people influencing government, which is clearly what I meant.
Misread what IOZ wrote if you must, Justin. If what he meant to say is that the power elite is not about to give up the CIA, then he had a mighty confusing way of saying that. The plain fact is that IOZ said that the CIA is a rogue organization, like all organizations, that can't be controlled, because organizations are like that.
Anyhow, nuff said. We're all clear about where we are vis-a-vis this post.
...big people don't like the little people influencing government, which is clearly what I meant.
My perhaps superfluous reminder was that an awful lot of little people dream of a democracy of the Donk or the Phant exclusively. You see, they think the other guy is the big people.
Michael Dawson, I must admit that I admire your tenacity in the face of being a genuine dunce.
Oh, I see. So it was a pissing contest, since we are in agreement that the big people don't like the little people influencing government, which is clearly what I meant.
the big people are the government, silly. so as for "little people influencing government," cf. every human interaction in the history of ever. and if California looks like what a Direct (or More Direct) Democracy should look like, well, then, el oh el.
the presumption that this is not what it should look like, that this is not how it should be, is fine and dandy, but as anyone within a five cube radius here at the cube farm would easily attest to, it is what it is.
@ Oxtrot:
culottes are breeches, not blouses, you blithering idiot.
and what the hell is the frilly blouse brigade? is that like a disguised jab at IOZ and whoever else is gay around here?
seriously....
Has nothing to do with blouse in translation, nor with being gay.
The term "frilly blouse brigade" is a jest at those who seem to put style/fashion ahead of other concerns, not a jab or jape toward which gender one prefers to screw.
Pardon me for making fun of something. I didn't realize it was such a tender subject, the question of what "culotte" means, or whether a frilly blouse is superior to a more functional t-shirt.
"Frilly blouse" really refers to those comic shirts that some of the guys wore to the prom my senior year of HS, the ones with the ruffles etc. Has nothing to do with "blouse" indicating feminine clothing.
And anyway, why are you without a culotte?
PS to ls-c:
sorta like this:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rwWcLd88X0I/SZIE8IbRO0I/AAAAAAAAAH8/IA6sBGeNkIA/s400/il_430xN_39280152.jpg
They survive, reproduce, replace, predate, evolve, alter, consume, and grow. They are no more responsive to the individuals contained within than a person is to a single cell.
Like, a zygote?
Concerns about me considering this some kind of "oh look it's all ok and life is fine after all" zinger should be placed in the nearest trash bin. But, you know, if the analogy is accurate (and I suspect that it might be) then lack of responsiveness is not evidence of complete division between the organism and every single component. Ectopic pregnancy will still fuck your shit up, yo. See also: how to crash a bank.
And anyway, why are you without a culotte?
understandable that you don't recognize the term; it's an obscure reference familiar only to effete snobs, e.g. any literate human who ever had to study the French Revolution or read A Sale of Two Titties in high school
Ah yes, so forgetting what I studied about the French Revolution 30 years ago, that makes me a dunce, especially when the detail forgotten is the phrase sans-culottes.
I hear you loud and clear. What you determine is important about the French Revolution is the phrase sans-culottes, and anyone who forgets its meaning, or never learned its meaning -- sub-human.
Gotcha.
Well done. You may admit yourself into the Frilly Blouse Brigade, and thereby further enhance your elevated status. Careful, the air's thin up there!
OH SNAP.
no, breaking balls on the internet when you can't handle yours being broken makes you a dunce, Charlie Chan.
I didn't realize someone crushed my cojones. What I witnessed was someone impressed with the snarkiness of his own cryptic post, which he thought was a snappy put-down of the comic variety.
That's a far cry from trouncing my testes, bubba. But please don't let me disturb your fantastic self-impression. I'd hate to see you cry all over that frilly blouse.
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