By Jay Janson:
What does the CIA have in store for Egypt? What chores will it assign its agents, both American and Egyptian?
Has it managed to infiltrate military factions, political organizations and revolutionary groups to make some arrangements for some “spontaneous’ events take place?
These are obvious questions Americans of decent mind toward Egyptians should, at the very least, be asking themselves.
Seems that progressives and even socialists in the U.S. are overly cooperative with mainstream media and Congress in hardly ever asking after our secret CIA shadow government.
But then why would one expect focus on the CIA from American progressive journalists. Have they promoted public interest in the ghastly revelations of the many files the CIA was forced to make public by the efforts of dedicated groups taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Law?
These released documents are devastating to read for anyone harboring affection for JFK or Ike. The horrible tales of the CIA protection and employment of Nazi war criminals; of CIA building a world market poppy growing industry again in Afghanistan after the Taliban had eliminated the CIA’s first decade long lucrative secret operation; of CIA involvement in murderous drug running in Colombia and previously in Panama with agent Noriega; these all added to the fully expected corroboration of assumptions that CIA homicides were ordered by “tricky Dick’ and Kissinger, along with the infinitely greater ones ordered by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Yet, these revelations have been allowed to slip into insignificance in non-corporate funded publications.
Years ago, New Yorker published investigative reporter Seymour Hersh tried to awaken interest in what the CIA was doing all these years in Iraq during the massive amount of sectarian violence that U.S. government spokespersons and subservient media constantly pointed to as the reason “we have to stay in Iraq.’ Almost no one took up this topic in alternative media. Why? For decades CIA has sponsored, provoked, initiated, and or prepared overt invasion and involvement in civil wars in Greece, Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Columbia, but become of higher notoriety for its incredibly amazing success in arranging murderous factional fighting to look unprovoked by outside forces. The motive always being to prevent unified independent nations capable of negotiating for their own trade and prosperity.
Associated Press is carrying almost daily reports of furious CIA activity, usually deadly, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but in progressive journalism there is much more debate regarding the words and proposals of the current U.S. president, who surely must be taking orders from, and not giving orders to Robert Gates and the Central Intelligence Agency. A CIA that is by law connected up solely and secretly to the chief executive is in itself a glaring contradiction to claims of democracy in the U.S., but this also goes largely unaddressed even on the progressive sites of the Internet.
Naturally the Network talk shows are, in the wake of Egyptian uprising, all featuring discussions from the farcical point of view that the business interests oriented American government is capable of being occasionally in favor of democracy in nations with U.S. backed dictatorship governments. These discussions swirl around the problem of keeping these nations aligned with a U.S foreign policy of protecting and expanding American investment throughout the world. For anchor and commentators it is what the U.S. president will say, or do, that is supposed to be of paramount interest, not what the awkward-to-speak-of CIA might accomplish.
When Egypt or any other overseas issue is discussed in commercial media, there seems little reason to ask about CIA. The CIA, is considered part of American democracy, understood as merely one of many agencies of a freely elected government. Since it’s operations and activities are secret, what is the use of discussing them?
For the business world, nicely ordered formal democracy is working well in the British and American homes of empire. Imperialism is unchallenged in the U.S.A. It’s out there among the natives in the neo-colonized nations of the former colonially military occupied third world that democracy is more than worrisome. Democracy is inimical to subjugation and undermining for imperialism.
Here is the way some of us see the ruling hierarchy in U.S. imperialism in functioning order of power.
1
At the top, is the business interest consensus led by a cabal of the most important investment bankers.
2
Next would be the CIA pursuing an agenda as seen necessary by the above mentioned and including, under it’s operational umbrella, the Pentagon.
3 and 4
Third in influence and importance depending on current conditions, situations, developments and any sudden uncontrolled and unexpected events, would alternately be either the power of conglomerate owned media penetrating down into schools and up into all the institutions of society, or, the three branches of government owned , as FDR once wrote in confidence, “by a financial element since the days of Andrew Jackson.” *
Both these alternating third and fourth ranking power bases will be prosecuting an ideological agenda in tandem with activities of the CIA-Pentagon, but in much more general, flexible, fluctuating and less defined progression.
Today, CIA operatives stationed in every country in the world are the commandos penetrating and preparing political, financial and where necessary military domination. Its four billion dollar base legal budget is known, and its mammoth financial empire fueled by corporate donations and funding and far flung net of banks, enterprises, publications, media outlets and infiltrated agencies within U.S. and foreign governments has been researched, documented and much of it can be found on line. CIA exploits of assassinations,
overthrowing elected government and hiring goons to support U.S. business friendly dictatorships is legendary.
If #2 (CIA-Pentagon) comes to dominate #1 (the requirements for the accumulation of private capital), things could get even more dangerous, more unstable, cause more suffering internationally and domestically.
But in such a development there is also a not so remote possibility of more rationality and less of ongoing insanity of material over human progress. For if human beings, even in the military, were in charge, instead of automatons managing accumulation of capital for its owners and using the military amorally, some speck of human compassion might halt the drive toward the use of our WMD in another world conflict just to make a whole lot of money.
Ralph Waldo Emerson warned well over a hundred years ago that “Things are in the saddle and ride herd over men.” Seems that right now the revolution in Egypt is counting on Egypt’s military to take over from their erstwhile amoral international capital serving wealthy minority.
This hierarchy of power in place for centuries in almost the entire planet since the time of previous empires will inevitably be seen by aroused individuals, such as those who are leading revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, as a house of cards built on the assumption that the great mass of wonderfully ordinary people at its base will continue to believe themselves to be powerless.
In the meantime, #3 (media) will continue to keep the focus away from #2 (CIA) and #1 (capital accumulation) and on #4 (U.S. President, Congress and Supreme Court), with a perhaps unintended but still disappointing concurrence in critical progressive Internet media.
[* “The real truth of the matter is, as you, and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a letter to Colonel Edward House, October 34, 1933]
Author’s Bio: Archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.