07/29/08 – Chalmers Johnson – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our guest today is Chalmers Johnson.
He's the author of the extremely important, frankly indispensable, blowback trilogy, Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic.
He's a former CIA analyst and a professor.
He runs something called the Japan Policy Research Institute and has a new article for Tom Dispatch, which is also in Tom Englehart's archives at antiwar.com, The Military Industrial Complex.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Johnson.
Thank you very much.
A pleasure to be here.
Well, it's very good to have you here, and I guess I'll start with your note to the readers that this current essay focuses on the new book by Tim Shorrock, Spies for a Hire, The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, and he's the guy who just wrote that new article for Salon.com, following up on Christopher Ketchum's work in Radar Magazine about the main core database and the total information awareness program.
Right, which maybe is still going, as far as we can tell.
Well, yeah, and that's something that you bring up in this article, and I guess, well, let's just go ahead and skip right to that.
They had this total information awareness thought up by DARPA under Admiral Poindexter from Iran-Contra fame.
When it came out, they tried to rename it the Terrorism Information Awareness, but then Congress, I believe, told the President he wasn't allowed to spend money on that anymore, but you say in your article, it looks like they just turned it over to a so-called private company.
The National Security Agency decided to continue it anyway, gave it to both Haviland-Allen and FAIC Corporation to continue, and as far as we know, Choroff has dug up some new information.
It's still going on.
And with this kind of data mining, it seems like, if I remember right, this is some of the sort of stuff that John Ashcroft and John Mueller almost resigned over, right, was these widespread phishing expeditions.
Oh, it's pretty close to German totalitarianism, to the Gestapo or the Stasi, just collecting every known bit of information you can, from every purchase to every telephone call made, every email sent, every ticket purchased, every vacation taken, put all that together and see if you can't find a pattern that somebody in Washington says looks like terrorism.
Well, Dr. Johnson, what do you know about the Stasi?
Well, I know just the history of the secret police in former East Germany, in which they were famous for their files and collecting enormous amounts of data on every citizen of the country.
Well, I know that you used to be an ardent Cold War, but I guess your focus has always been on the Pacific, right?
More than on Europe, yes.
And in fact, well, let's go back to that for a second.
I remember when I first learned about you, the first thing I heard you say was that you were a former spear-carrier for empire.
What does that mean, and what changed you to a former one from a current one?
Well, I was certainly a Cold Warrior.
I did believe that the Soviet Union was a menace.
I still believe that it was, and that it was proper to try and counter it in various ways.
The thing that I guess led me to reconsider my position in the 1990s was precisely the collapse of the Soviet Union, and of the Cold War, and of the raison d'etre for America's global empire.
One of the things that truly astonished me about it was how fast the United States turned to a search for a replacement enemy.
Anything.
China, terrorism, immigration issues, even instability.
It became apparent that the critical thing here was not defense of the United States, but financing of the military-industrial complex.
That, as John Maynard Keynes once said, when somebody accused him of being inconsistent, when I get new information, I change my position.
He then added, what, sir, do you do with new information?
Ah, well, we all just disregard it.
No, so when you realize that, hey, the empire was supposed to fall apart.
Its job was containing communism, not being a world empire, and when it didn't fall apart, and they went searching for new enemies in the George Bush senior administration, did that make you kind of revisit the Cold War policy itself?
No question.
That is, whether or not, in fact, the Cold War could be reduced to something more fundamental, namely the replacement of the global British empire with an American empire after World War II, very much an empire, as Andrew Bacevich has called it in his new book, an empire of consumption, an empire devoted to ensuring that countries like the United States and Britain consume enormous amounts larger than their contributions to the world of our natural resources and things of that sort.
Doesn't that go straight back to that famous George Kennan National Security Council directive or something like that, to maintain our standard of living, we're going to have to wage war against the earth?
Well, something like that.
I mean, Kennan was certainly prescient in what we were getting into, and did not kid himself that it was a benign and happy activity.
Now one thing here is the contradiction between, I think, the myth that war is good for the economy, when in fact it's the destruction of wealth and mass.
We've replaced whatever economy we used to have with a warfare economy, so it's always good for the people who are involved in providing services to the warfare state, but it seems like it's really bad for the rest of us.
No question about it.
I mean, that is to say, an industrial capitalist economy does not run off of producing goods that contribute nothing to either consumption or production, that are not investment goods.
There's nothing ultimately more wasteful than the purchase of munitions and other things that no one ever uses.
Of course we do use them, we've gone to war a good deal, but for example, we spent well over five trillion dollars throughout the Cold War on nuclear weapons.
Of course we say, thank God they were never used, but they're a classic example of what military Keynesianism means, the manufacture of something, the make-work, the very comfortable living for a lot of people making these things, of something that was worthless.
Over time it diverts resources from the civilian economy, from our ability to compete, from the creation of jobs in this country that people want.
It leads to exactly the kind of economic difficulties we face in the world at the present time.
Well that's a very important phrase, I think, military Keynesianism.
It's demand-side economics, but it's all centered around putting people to work making weapons.
Kate Gaines never ever used the term.
We just use it because of his belief in counter-cyclical spending in the times of depression, in order to regain employment by the government becoming a source of work at a last resort.
I mean, he said we may, if necessary, have to start seeding disused mines with something valuable and then hiring people to dig it up.
But he did believe that this was counter-cyclical, that we should, the moment that things began to recover, you should shift and begin to pay for the deficit spending that you've engaged in.
We've never done that.
Military Keynesianism never backs down and begins to go the other direction.
Well and this has led us to really the byline of this article.
It's the military-industrial complex.
It's later than you think.
You know, by the time I gave this...
Well, it's urgent because we don't even know who's in charge anymore.
I've now been so thoroughly privatized that no matter how hard a serious Congress, which we don't have, but how hard a serious Congress tries to do oversight, these are now private and proprietary issues of corporations like SAIC or CACI International and others.
Right.
I mean, and this is where we get to where we're just, I guess we're still not supposed to call it this unless there are men in gray uniforms goose-stepping down the street, but this is fascism.
Well, that was one of the things.
It started back in the late 1930s when Roosevelt began to try and build what he called the arsenal of democracy in this country and promoted so-called cooperative, collaborative arrangements between the private sector and private business.
It turns out that some people pointed out at the time that there were a good many Italian fascists.
Mussolini himself ultimately quoting one of his major economic theorists, that fascism amounts to a union between private business and the government.
Well, and in fact, for quite a time, Mussolini was very popular here in America and there were prominent Democrats like Woodrow Wilson's alter ego, Colonel Edward Mandel House, who bragged that his theories about how America ought to run in his book, Philip Drew Administrator, anticipated Mussolini by several years.
Yes.
Yes.
But they were not foreign to the United States and they did, as it turned out, ultimately overcome the Great Depression.
It was arms spending during the Second World War that finally overcame the Depression.
It was one of the reasons also we now know for NSC-68 and the Cold War and things of this sort was the fear in the late 1940s that the Depression was going to return.
That's funny.
You put all that money in investing it in do-nothing nuclear bombs.
Yes.
As supposed to save us when all it did is reorder our economy.
It didn't necessarily save it.
Well, it surely did reorder it and it vastly undercut our idea of where power is, how it should be supervised.
I believe that the biggest single crime of the military-industrial complex against our democracy has been the almost total corruption of Congress in the sense that Congress is now totally complicit with the Pentagon in arms building.
Individual congressmen or women will do anything to keep bases, military plants, army bases, things of that sort in their districts because it equates, in their view, with good jobs.
Now this will be controversial and contrary, but I would argue that really the problem is democracy.
The problem is this Congress that is so easy to control who comes to Congress when you already have your hands in the till and then when you control who comes to Congress you get to keep your hands in the till and make sure that they come back next time.
They're re-elected at, what, 98% or something?
No question.
Incumbency is just a scandal.
But precisely, it's one of the points I try and make in this article for Tom Dispatch is, I quote at some length, the growing body of evidence that democracy is being subverted, truly subverted by private interest, by so-called privatization, the theme of Sheldon Wolin's new book on so-called inverted totalitarianism, by which he means the totalitarian tendencies towards conformity and peddling of dissent and things of that sort in the United States, but without the repressive policies of German, Italian, or Soviet totalitarianism.
These are serious issues, and that's why I say I greatly admire Shorrock's Spies for Hire book.
It's a brilliant book.
But at the same time, his subtitle concerns the outsourcing of our intelligence services.
I don't think it's outsourcing.
I think outsourcing means a business going outside to buy things that it can't manufacture itself.
Scotch tape, paper clips, whatever.
This is more than outsourcing.
It is actually getting to the point where clandestine services, the National Security Agency, that it's up in the figures of three quarters, so 80% of the employees are green badges, so-called.
That is, regular employees have blue badges, but green badges are working for a private company, not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not subject to the orders of anyone in official or elected position, and serving the interests of a private company and its bottom line.
And where the government, say, for example, the CIA might be forbidden from compiling data on all of us American citizens, they can just buy it from private companies, quote unquote, wink-nudge private companies that they're really in on anyway.
And they do it all the time.
It turns out to be seemingly much easier.
I mean, as you said in the start of the program, the Poindexter's Total Information Awareness Program, the Congress declared it an insufferable intrusion into the privacy rights of Americans.
The NSA, on its own, continued it, but got around any sort of congressional objections by simply farming it out to the private sector, who didn't seem to give it a second thought.
And now, you know, as a libertarian, I especially resent the fact that they kind of steal the term privatization.
I would like an extremely small government, or maybe even none, and I would like to basically just have what they call load-shedding, I guess, where government stops doing things and the free market takes its place.
But they use the term privatization to mean simply just contracting out government police power, socializing the costs onto the American taxpayer.
And it's just, you know, criminal crony capitalism.
My position is slightly different.
I do believe there are some inherently governmental functions, that we actually do need a government.
And one of the most dangerous themes in our society today is this tendency to believe that government is the problem, not the solution, that sort of thing.
But again, if they're inherently governmental, I want them kept in the government with congressional oversight, with accountability in the form of our entire legal apparatus coming to bear on it.
And that's what's being covertly undercut here by so-called privatization.
Yeah, I mean, we actually are talking about police powers.
We're talking about the enforcement arm of the state here.
It's hard to believe anything is more inherently governmental than the analysis of foreign intelligence to see whether this is just noise or a signal of a real threat to the country.
And yet that's now being done by the private sector.
Well, the title of your last book is called Nemesis, the last days of the American Republic.
I guess some would even argue it's the last days of the American empire.
Is there anything that can be done about this?
Well, the only thing that I can think of, I mean, we know that no new president, no political party that's already complicit in what has happened is going to actually reverse the influence of the military industrial complex or of the 16 secret intelligence agencies that add up to a private army of the president.
But the only thing I can imagine that could be done, I'd have to say as a political scientist, I think it's unlikely that it will be done.
We are trotting the path of the former Soviet Union.
But that that could be done is to mobilize the public to what they're about to lose.
And the fact that once they do lose their democracy, they're not going to get it back.
And that the public should be sensitized to that.
I'm myself convinced that this is making some progress in America.
I find that the public is extremely sensitive about the thought that we are heading in a fatal direction.
And there's a general sort of national quiet alarm about all of this.
I think that's right.
You know, they had that poll, the New York Times poll, I think 81% said we're headed in the wrong direction.
These are the highest numbers we've ever seen in asking that question, Gallup polls and things of that sort.
And you know, it's interesting because there's so many that the good liberals and leftists and good paleo conservatives and right wingers and libertarians can agree on in terms of, you know, basic markets opposition to this sort of, you know, crony capitalism that we're talking about protections in the Bill of Rights.
It seems like we ought to be able to make a real middle, a real moderate middle to it, to oppose the extremist middle represented by the neoconservatives and neoliberals, right?
But the thing that's amazing to me, I think Sharp has done a real service to the country to bring to the public information.
I guarantee you they don't have that the media is not interested in bringing to them things of this sort.
But the tragedy is that this is precisely the kind of information that should have been brought to them by a courageous and crusading congressperson by the political process.
The political process is not working.
It occasional, often isolated investigative journalists like Chorok and others with a lot of experience in Washington are beginning to do so.
We have other prominent journalists, Seymour Hersh and people of that sort.
But there are few and far between.
You'd have to say that among the biggest failures in our country has been precisely the failure of the press to use powers of the free press given to it, which were not to protect People Magazine.
They were there to penetrate the greatest single weapon of the official bureaucrat, namely secrecy.
Right.
Well, you've sure done more than your part in the last few years.
Everybody, that's Chalmers Johnson from the Japan Policy Research Institute.
He's the author of Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic.
You can find his most recent article with Tom Englehart at antiwar.com slash Englehart.
It's called The Military Industrial Complex.
Thank you very much for your time today, sir.
I appreciate your call.