10/22/14 – Michael Glennon – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott Horton here.
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So now I can go on to our next interview today.
It's Michael J.
Glennon.
He is a professor of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and he's got this brand new book.
It's national security and double government.
And boy, is it got a blurb from all the best guys on the back there.
And he's got an interview that you can read in the Boston Globe.
Vote all you want.
The secret government won't change.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Michael?
Very well, Scott.
How are you?
Thank you for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
I'm doing good.
I appreciate you joining us.
And so as the person interviewing you here kind of gets to the point to this sounds like the kind of thing that a conspiracy theorist says, oh, there's a secret government and it decides not the democracy.
And yet you're a professor of great stature.
And so the question is, what exactly do you mean or how far off the deep end have you gone or something along these lines?
What do you say?
Well, let me just reassure your listeners at the outset that I am not suggesting that there's any conspiracy or seven days in May coup or deep state or invisible government that has taken over the operation of American national security policy.
Double government, in fact, is a concept that goes back to an English constitutional theorist named Walter Badgett.
He used it in the 1860s to describe the evolution of the British government.
And essentially it works this way.
Government in this dual form is organized around two sets of institutions.
One is for show.
It generates legitimacy.
The other concealed institution actually runs the government.
So there's no conspiracy involved here.
And the suggestion of national security and double government is that the United States has made no conscious choice to have a double government.
We just drifted into it since 1952 and the creation of the national security apparatus by President Harry Truman.
All right.
So then, well, I'm going to try to put this in other words and see if I got you right.
You're saying that I mean, obviously, it's not that you're denying the existence of arms manufacturers or their lobbies of bankers, of foreign governments and their interests in what our government's interests are overseas and these kinds of things.
You're just saying that it's the government institutions responsible for carrying out the policies themselves carry the most weight of all.
And so it's not so much the deep state as it is simply the appointed leaders and their subordinates at these executive branch institutions, the intelligence agencies in the Pentagon.
Is that what you're saying?
It's the directorate, the managerial elite that runs the intelligence, law enforcement and military departments and agencies of the government who are responsible for the formulation and execution of national security policy.
The public believes that national security policy is made by Congress, the president and the courts.
That's largely an illusion, and it has increasingly become an illusion since the early 1950s.
And that explains the amazing continuity in national security policy from one administration to the next, most notably from the Bush administration to the Obama administration, even though Obama forcefully and eloquently campaigned against many of these policies, such as drone strikes and offensive cyber weapons, whistleblower prosecutions, NSA surveillance, CIA covert operations, the list goes on and on.
There is an amazing continuity in American national security policy, and there are a number of explanations for it.
But I think a significant explanation is double government.
Well, now, on the Obama thing, I might quibble with you there.
I don't know if I disagree with your thesis.
I don't think I do.
In fact, I tend to think that, you know, specifically the generals at the Pentagon probably have the most say of any lobbyists in all of D.C., that kind of thing.
But on the Obama issue, it occurs to me and I'm a libertarian, so this isn't like a fight within factions of liberals or progressives or anything like that.
I'm observing it from the outside.
And it looked to me in 07, like you had Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich, who were, you know, basically a couple of American citizens trying to stop this madness up there.
And then you had the other three, Hillary, Obama and Edwards up there on the stage.
And they were all Hillary.
And there was just no doubt that they were the candidates of the national security state, of the consensus.
Obama could talk a little bit sweeter of an anti-war game, but as somebody who never believed in him for a moment, I never believed in him for a moment.
And he clearly, if you ask Dennis Kucinich, is Barack Obama down the line with you on restoring sanity and peace to American foreign policy, he would have laughed in your face and said, no, Obama is Hillary Clinton.
That's all he is.
Right.
Well, so maybe maybe in other words, maybe this is really what he wanted all along, not that the institutions made him do it.
I hate to say this, but I think the explanation is somewhat more troubling than that.
And the point of my book is that even if one assumes Obama's sincerity, and you may be correct in your hypothesis, it may be that Obama was in effect on these issues in empty suit.
Maybe he had no enduring deep seated beliefs about the need to change the sorts of policies I've just described.
The point of the book is that even if he did, it is highly improbable that he would have been able to effect the hairpin turn that his followers expected, and in many cases voted for in American national security policy.
And the reason gets back to your point, the leadership of the military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies play a much, much more dominant role in the formation of his policy than the leadership of Congress and federal judges, or even senior appointed officials in the executive branch.
That's what's meant by double government.
Right?
Well, you know, it is true that he does seem to talk about himself in the third person or about the US executive branch in the third person kind of a way, not in a senile Bob Dole kind of ridiculous way, but but in a way where it's, you know, like he really is one of us spectators out here and go, you know, he, he does what he can, in a way he would have us believe, but it really is kind of out of his control.
I would say that the President, at least President Obama is much more presider than decider.
Yeah, he has, he has, as you say, increasingly been an observer.
And I think that John Kerry's term, which he applied to the NSA surveillance of Angela Merkel's phone, he said it's on autopilot, right?
Meaning that we've in the White House, my staff, we've just deferred to the leadership of the NSA in Fort Meade, to allow these programs to continue without any interference.
All right, we got to stop right there.
We got to stop right there, Michael.
I'm sorry.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Michael Glennon.
National Security and Double Government is the book.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And man, if you could see my to-read pile of books right now, you would start crying.
And I'm going to add this book to it.
I don't know when I'll ever get a chance to read the dang thing, but I love this kind of stuff.
Fascinating to me, the difference between the way they teach it, the fourth grade version of who's got the power in America and the real deal and how it's described, too.
This is a different take than, say, C. Wright Mills or something like that, although it has a lot to do with it.
But I think he focused a little bit more on the money out of power, the rise of the new right and the military industrial complex money, not the specific government agencies, but the Lockheeds of the world and their associated banks and that kind of stuff.
But anyway, so I think we all also, too, don't we, Michael, like to imagine sometimes, well, if I was a president, I would do this or that, or I would at least make them stop doing this or that kind of thing.
And it makes us wonder just how much ability we would have to do that.
I think this is a true quote.
Maybe you could correct me if I'm wrong.
But in Oliver Stone movie of Richard Nixon, the young girl at the Lincoln Memorial tells Nixon, you can't stop the war, can you?
It's not even up to you.
You're like nothing but Dick Nixon up here.
And he kind of has to concede that it's out of his hands.
And I think that was actually one of the actual exchanges that happened there.
Well, you know, I don't know whether that was an actual statement that was made, but it is amazing how many presidents have said something similar.
President Bush, the second President Bush, just before he left office, was asked by one of his aides, what's the most surprising thing that you've encountered as president?
And his answer was, how little power I actually have.
Harry Truman said after Eisenhower was elected, before Truman left office, that Eisenhower coming from the army is going to be so surprised he's going to snap his fingers and say, do this, do that, and nothing will happen.
Nothing will happen.
He'll be amazed.
It'll be nothing like the army.
And I think you mentioned C. Wright Mills.
Mills is one of the scholars who really put his finger on this.
And Mills, of course, indirectly inspired Eisenhower's military industrial complex speech, which was written by a very prominent political scientist named Malcolm Moose, who was clearly familiar with C. Wright Mills's work, which was written only a few years before The Power Elite.
It's an important book.
I'm sure many of your readers are familiar with it.
In fact, I was hoping, betting on black, but red came up during the break there.
I was hoping it would play.
It's kind of on random, you know, but I have a commercial for another book by my friend Michael Swanson called The War State.
And it's about how Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy were stuck with this thing.
And of course, they did their parts in making it worse to a great degree.
But they also fought against it in certain ways.
And it's important to see how much power they had when they came up against it.
And Eisenhower really had the most success out of all of them.
And of course, I guess it doesn't really matter exactly what happened to Kennedy.
The point still could be made that so many people believe, never mind, you know, whatever the Freemasons or the whoever, like crazy stuff.
But so many people just believe, well, the military killed him.
He got in the way of the CIA and the military killed the president because he dared to limit their power.
And the fact that so many people believe that still just goes to show what they whether that's actually technically correct or not.
And I don't claim to know the fact that everybody believes that goes to show that everybody understands just how powerful the military and the CIA are compared to the president.
And it's sort of this is the kind of thing people would say to each other over their dinner table that like, well, of course, if Obama stepped if Obama stepped out of line too far, they'd squash him president or not.
You know, I think that Kennedy is another example of a president who was surprised by the power of the military.
Right after he took office, just a few weeks after President Eisenhower's famous farewell address was given warning of the power of the military industrial complex.
This story that I'm about to relate occurred and it's it's it's told in in national security and double government.
The chief of naval operations, Ali Burke, proposed to give a speech in which he would recommend a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.
This came to the White House, President Kennedy, of course, said, I don't think we should do this.
I don't think we should say this.
The speech was killed.
Burke leaked this story to the New York Times, whereupon Kennedy asked his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, you know, I think maybe we should get a copy of their nuclear plans.
And so McGeorge Bundy called the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a copy of what's known as the SIOP, the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan.
And the general, he said he was calling on behalf of the president.
He'd like a copy of it.
And general who answered at the end of the line said, I'm sorry, but we don't release that to anyone.
Right.
And this is at the end of the argument.
They won.
They wouldn't.
I think I think President Kennedy subsequently got a copy of it, but it just goes to show you the environment within which this dynamic occurs.
The military is not a group that is subservient to the president that clicks its heels and responds.
And Bob Woodward and Mark Mazzetti have just written very illuminating accounts of of the way in which Barack Obama was boxed in by the military on the issue of Afghanistan troop searches.
Right.
Yeah.
In 2009.
Although, you know, again, I have to say and because especially we have Ron Paul as the counterfactual here, Ron Paul, he hopefully would have stayed out of motorcades, but he would have told General Petraeus to go to hell.
If you don't like it, you're fired, like Truman told MacArthur.
No, we're not going to surge into Afghanistan.
In fact, a Valley Nasser.
No, no, no.
Pardon me.
I'm confusing my sources.
The guy whose name I can't pronounce at The Washington Post, who wrote the book Little America, said that reported that the CIA wrote a report to Obama saying don't bother surging in Afghanistan.
It won't work.
And he knew it said that.
And he did it anyway.
He refused to read the report as his plausible deniability.
And he went ahead and caved in to Petraeus.
But still, he's the president.
And if he had given a speech saying American people, I just don't believe in the Afghan war and escalating it because it just makes no sense.
The surge won't accomplish anything.
Everybody knew that back then anyway.
And so, you know, tough luck.
The people would have sided with the president over the generals on that.
He didn't have to give in to them on that.
Ron Paul sure wouldn't have.
You know, there are lots of it was up to him, wasn't it?
There are lots of areas where the president could and should have been more forceful in dealing with Clapper and Brennan and their lies and spying on the United States Senate Intelligence Committee, Oversight Committee, failing to prosecute the crime of perjury, possible violations of the Wiretap Act by the CIA and spying on the committee.
But I think, unfortunately, the president can be boxed in.
And Mark Mazzetti's book describes that very well, how the military repeatedly gave Obama only three options on Afghanistan troop surges, two of which were utterly unreasonable.
And so the option in the middle, the one that the military favored, was, in effect, the only option that the president had on the table over and over and over again.
The decision making process works like that.
And the president is boxed in.
And if he goes up against the military, he's confronted, as Mazzetti and Woodward's books point out, with the possibility of mass resignations in the military.
And the president just can't afford that politically.
So he believes anyway.
Right.
Yeah, it's really too bad.
I can definitely see how that would work.
I'm sure if by some miracle it had been Ron Paul, he would have been a one-term president because he would have had a hell of a lot of angry resignations.
They would have said whatever they could about him.
But, you know, they asked him one time, you know, what would you do your first day in office?
And quite candidly, he said, well, the first thing I would do is tell the Navy to back away from Iran.
We have no business picking a fight with them.
That was his entire attitude.
The first thing he would do is start bossing the military around, moving troops, moving them home.
And I can can you imagine that if that had really happened?
A president hell bent on abolishing the entire empire in the Pacific, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa, in South America, on the oceans everywhere.
Come on home.
What would have happened?
What would have happened?
Well, I think the prevailing model is quite the opposite.
There's this kind of symbiotic relationship that's developed between the presidency and the military and intelligence agencies so that the president and his staff go out of the way to reinforce the illusion that the president is in charge because the whole legitimacy of the entire double government structure would collapse if it became clear that the show is, in effect, being run by military intelligence and law enforcement agencies and not the elected representatives of the people.
That's double government.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
You have all the marble statues and all the elected the parts of the Constitution that are still in play, basically, the regular elections and everybody meet in that strip of land between Virginia and Maryland and all that kind of stuff.
That's the ceremonial government that everybody sees on TV and learns about in school.
But, you know, I think honestly, I think the point is getting made in more and more ways and to greater and greater segments of society.
And clearly this book is going to do a great part in advancing this understanding among the American people.
And I do still have a little bit of hope, because after all, there's 300 million of us and we all really do believe in liberty if we have a choice.
Right.
And so it could be all right if if we understand what's going on.
So I thank you very much for your work and your time on the show.
Thank you, Scott.
It's a pleasure being with you.
All right.
So that is Michael J. Glennon.
He's a professor of international law at Tufts University.
And according to Amazon dot com, the entry for his book, National Security and Double Government.
This thing is endorsed by Mearsheimer and Walt, by Leslie Gelb, by Andrew Bacevich, Vali Nasser, who I just mentioned there out of context accidentally.
But anyway, must be a great one.
National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon.
And I'm overtime, but we'll be right back.
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