07/19/13 – Alfred McCoy – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
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Our first guest today is Alfred W. McCoy.
He is the J.R.W. Smale Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hi, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I gave a speech there once.
Very nice place.
He's a Tom Dispatch regular.
He's the author of The Politics of Heroin, A Question of Torture, and quite a few others, including Policing America's Empire, The United States, The Philippines, and The Rise of the Surveillance State.
Welcome back to the show, Alfred.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
And yourself?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Happy to be here.
And I really appreciate this work too.
I can't wait to read the book, although I've got a pretty big stack of books to read.
But I'll get to it someday.
But this article version, treatment of the subject, is fascinating.
Surveillance Blowback, The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898 through 2020.
I might have called it War is the Health of the Police State.
So I guess, take us back to the 1890s.
Who invaded who and why?
Sure.
What we're seeing now with Edward Snowden's revelations and our sudden awareness that the National Security Agency, the NSA, has been building a global panopticon, sucking up virtually every U.S. email and telephone call, and increasingly gathering up much of the world's communications as well, that this actually represents part of a pattern that reaches back over 100 years.
In 1898, the United States conquered and colonized the Philippines.
At that point, the Philippine Revolutionary Republic had just defeated the Spanish, and they launched nearly a decade of determined resistance against U.S. pacification.
In order to break down the Philippine resistance, the United States found, after they smashed the regular army, that they were facing really protracted and demanding guerrilla warfare as well as determined political resistance.
And so they built the world's first surveillance state.
The U.S. Army up to this point had had no field intelligence, so the Army built their first field intelligence unit under a man named Captain Ralph Van Diemen, who later became known as the father of U.S. military intelligence.
And he developed an ambitious project, for example, of mapping the entire Filipino elite, building data cards on thousands of members of the Filipino elite, showing kinship, real property, education, political affiliations.
And then the first U.S. governor general of the Philippines, a man named William Howard Taft, who later became president of the United States, as our colonial governor, Taft enacted draconian legislation that gave him the right to suppress free speech and suppress newspaper publication.
And then he also built up a very powerful colonial police force called the Philippines Constabulary that sucked up information that conducted surveillance of the Filipino elite.
And along with the routine political information they gathered, they also gathered scurrilous information about sexual dalliance or financial malfeasance.
And allies of the U.S. colonial regime could play ball with William Howard Taft.
They would find that that scurrilous information would be locked up safe and secure inside U.S. colonial government files.
Those who challenged the regime, however, found their data released.
And during World War I, just ten years after...
Well, wait a minute.
I'm sorry.
Can we stay on the Philippines for just a minute before we get to World War I?
Which I know the Wilson years, we're going to have a lot to talk about there.
But in the Philippines, all this information that they were collecting, could you fill us in on how they used it as far as during the war?
I mean, they pretty much had, separate from just the Marines, they had kind of a Phoenix program run by intelligence, military intelligence guys, kind of underground assassination network sort of a thing in the Philippines too, didn't they?
They used torture to extract information, but no, they didn't engage much in the way of assassination.
Their idea was not to destroy the Filipino elite, but to break them, to penetrate them, marginalize the political radicals.
Those who refused to sign a loaf of oil to the United States were exiled to Guam.
The idea was to force them slowly through a pervasive surveillance and the threat of these kinds of releases of scurrilous information into a close collaboration with the United States.
And Captain Van Diemen, through this massive intelligence collection operation, first of all, developed very good political intelligence on Philippine activities, and second of all, useful tactical information that he relayed to field combat units through the 10,000 miles of telegraph lines that the U.S. Army Signal Corps strung across the Philippine archipelago.
William Howard Taft and both his prosecutors and the constabulary basically stifled any criticism of the U.S. colonial regime, and then collected this very sensitive political intelligence on elite Filipinos, and as I said, those that transgressed, those that challenged Taft and the U.S. colonial regime found there was scurrilous information released, and those that collaborated found that information concealed.
Yeah, you know, it's quite remarkable, isn't it, how they go from collecting this information to use this dirt on the Filipino elite.
They'll turn right around and use it against an American Associated Press reporter or any American who's trying to interfere with their plans, too.
The exact same methodology, just with the flip of a switch.
Right.
During World War I, and this is a process that we've seen, these crucibles of counterinsurgency in Asia forced the United States to draw upon all available information technology, fuse them into a surveillance apparatus of unprecedented power, and then when that war is over, there is a kind of imperial mimesis.
This stuff migrates homeward, all right?
And so just ten years after we completed the pacification of the Philippines in 1907, the United States entered World War I, and we were the only army on either side of the battle lines that didn't have an intelligence service.
We had no intelligence of any description.
And so the U.S. Army drew upon the small cadre of Philippine veterans, and they made now Colonel Ralph Van Diemen the founder and the head of the military intelligence division of the U.S. Army.
He started off with one employee himself, and very quickly he had 1,700 employees.
He formed a working alliance with the FBI, and he took over something called the American Protective League that had 350,000 badge-carrying citizen gumshoes who were deputized by a military intelligence division to conduct an extraordinarily dense surveillance of politically active German Americans and Italian Americans who, until April 1917, had been, many of them, lobbying for their homeland, which now became America's enemy, Germany and Italy.
And they compiled something like approximately about a million pages of typed intelligence reports in little more than 14 months, which, as far as I can tell, was the world's most intensive surveillance to date.
And once the war was over, the FBI and the military intelligence division, continuing to work with these citizen vigilantes, unleashed a crackdown on the labor movement and the American left, involving the notorious Luster Raids in New York City, the Palmer Raids across the northeastern United States, led by J. Edgar Hoover, who was then a young section head in the FBI, and then actions against strikers across the United States, from New York all the way to Seattle.
And these actions were so intrusive, so violent, so disruptive, that as soon as Woodrow Wilson left office in 1921, Republican conservatives who were concerned about democracy and privacy came in, determined to cut this right back.
The Attorney General of the United States in a Republican administration in 1924, a man named Harlan Fiske Stone, proclaimed that a secret police is a danger to liberty.
And he forced the FBI to cut back its surveillance operations.
He announced that the FBI had no interest in the political opinions, whatever they might be of any American, and he forced them to cut their ties to these vigilante groups.
Five years later, in 1929, a Republican Secretary of War, which is the equivalent of the Secretary of Defense of that day, abolished the ciphers, the code-breaking section of the military intelligence division, saying famously, Henry Simpson said famously, gentlemen do not read each other's mail.
So that in effect blocked the formation of kind of a standing surveillance state in the United States, and that's where things were.
So the process was established.
In imperial pacification in Asia, like the Philippines, we build a powerful surveillance apparatus.
It migrates homeward in time of war and crisis to become the basis for elaborate, expanded counterintelligence and surveillance operations in the United States.
But when peacetime comes, then the rival political party, in this case Republicans cracking back on Democrat Woodrow Wilson's surveillance operations, they push it back so we don't get the basis for a permanent or standing surveillance state.
Well, and then, yeah, there's the ratchet effect, though, as Robert Higgs calls it.
Even when there is a return to normalcy of one kind or another, they never ratchet it.
It never goes all the way back to the way it was before.
The apparatus remains.
The template is there, and indeed we saw that during the next major crisis the United States faced.
In the 1960s, of course, we were fighting the Viet Cong guerrillas in Vietnam, and we applied our most sophisticated computer technology in an attempt to pacify the Vietnamese people and the Viet Cong guerrillas, okay?
At the same time, the FBI and the CIA, and the CIA quite legally, began applying that same technology.
Counterintelligence of the kind the FBI used in World War I and the pomerades, they applied that to the anti-war left in the United States, the anti-war protest in the United States.
The CIA, in violation of their charter, launched something called Operation Chaos, and they built a computer file with 300,000 names of suspected anti-war activists across the United States.
Now, in the mid-1970s, as the Vietnam War was winding down, the press and Congress investigated.
Seymour Hersh, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, exposed the CIA's Operation Chaos, their illegal monitoring of domestic anti-war protesters here in the United States.
That prompted Senator Frank Church of the famous Church Committee of the U.S. Senate to investigate, and the upshot was, in 1978, President Carter, again, a Democrat, pushing back against a Republican Richard Nixon's expansion of the surveillance apparatus, President Carter signed the FISA Act, which required that henceforth, any U.S. federal agency wanting to do a national security wiretap in the United States had to go to a special court, a FISA court, and get a warrant to make this legal.
Now, that pattern that we've seen, all right, continued after the War on Terror in 2001, but with one important difference.
Right after 2001, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency, FBI, and to a lesser degree, the CIA, to conduct really massive internal surveillance that was actually legal.
Bush didn't bother to go to the FISA court and get warrants.
He wanted to basically conduct massive surveillance.
So the FBI's investigative data warehouse, for example, sucked up something like a billion documents in its first five years of operation.
The NSA's Operation Pinwheel and other operations were doing data gathering of similar size.
Now, this all was exposed in 2005 by the New York Times, an investigative report in the New York Times exposed Bush's illegal wiretapping.
The next year, USA Today had a superb investigative report, and they said that the NSA's ambition – and this was very prescient on the part of the USA Today reporter – they said that the ambition of the NSA was to capture and to monitor every single American domestic communication.
All right, now, President Obama, when he was a U.S. Senator, was critical of this illegal surveillance by the Bush administration, but he broke that partisan pattern.
When President Obama came into office in 2009, instead of doing what the Republicans did in the 1920s, or the Democrats had done in the 1970s, instead of pushing back, instead of cutting back the NSA and the FBI surveillance, he expanded it.
He amplified it.
Because Obama was doing something very important.
What he was doing was he was realizing that conventional combat operations involving tanks, trucks, ships, planes, all that, that was antiquated.
He realized that we were entering a new century with a new kind of warfare, information control and information warfare.
And so in his 2012 budget, you'll see that President Obama cut back infantry expenditures by 14%.
At the same time, he has been building upon what Bush did with the NSA to build a kind of global information control system, total information control, through the NSA.
In March of this year, the NSA sucked up 97 billion communications, electronic communications worldwide.
They've been warehousing virtually all U.S. telephone and email, all electronic communications.
Basically what they're doing is they're sinking probes into fiber optic cables here in the United States, and then in collaboration with the government communications headquarter, the counterpart agency of the NSA in the United Kingdom, beginning in 2011 under Obama, they sank 200 probes into the transatlantic telecommunications system, fiber optic cables, and they're yanking down about 600 million messages a day through that tapping.
They're getting 50 to 60 million messages a day in Germany, about half a billion messages a year, lesser amounts for other nations around the world.
And then President Obama's gone beyond that.
The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C. has recently completed a $1.8 billion headquarters.
They have 16,000 people on staff, and they're sucking in an amazing array of global visual and electronic surveillance.
Also President Obama's presided over the construction of a fleet of specialized drones, the Global Hawk.
We're building an armada of 99 of them.
Now, these are not militarized drones.
These don't fire missiles.
They fly at 50,000 feet with sophisticated eavesdropping equipment.
They can take photographs in a 100-mile ambit.
They can suck up electronic communications, two-way radio communications, military, terrorist, whoever, localized cell phone communications that are hopping from tower to tower, everything that's not in that global fiber optic system.
And we've built a string of about 50 secret drone bases stretching from essentially Sicily in the central Mediterranean, ringing the Eurasian landmass across the Indian Ocean and up off the coast of East Asia all the way to Japan and South Korea.
So the combination of drones in the skies above for localized communication and those probes into the fiber optic cables as they cross the continents and enter the oceans will give the United States virtually total information.
The other thing we've been doing, too, is that under Obama, we launched a new generation of low-cost, lightweight, very agile spy satellites.
The spy satellites used to be very expensive, require Atlas booster rockets, and they're basically about the size of a school bus.
Now we've got them down to very small, 6'8", 10 feet high, weighing about 1,000 pounds, costing a fraction of that cost.
One of the new model spy satellites, the ATK-200, was launched in May 2011, and it's now used by the U.S. Central Command, which can operate the satellite's cameras remotely and focus them where they need them, so they're not sort of flying over and just photographing the Earth below.
They're very agile, very focused, and this gives the U.S. Central Command in Afghanistan really good audiovisual satellite surveillance, and that's the kind of thing that the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is gathering as well.
So it's really, what we're building is a new architecture for global power that gives us total surveillance, and mind you, it's also targeted, it's focused.
One thing we've learned from Edward Snowden's documents that, you know, we target the European Union, for example.
Right now we're about to enter into negotiations for a free trade agreement.
It turns out the United States has hacked into the computers at the European Union's Brussels headquarters.
We've tapped, we've gotten into their telecommunications in the European Union offices at the United Nations, and we've penetrated their encryption machinery at their embassy, the European Union Embassy in Washington, D.C.
So it's friends and enemies alike, okay?
We want all the information, you know, generalized communications, and then specific strategic communication about friends and allies worldwide for the exercise of global power.
Through this strategic edge in information and knowledge, you know, Obama, I think, hopes to extend U.S. hegemony on the cheap, beyond our waning global economic capacity.
Now here's the funny thing about all that.
It doesn't seem to me to be working.
I mean, you can have a Pacific Ocean full of ones and zeros, but that doesn't mean you're wise or actually know anything about anything at all.
Witness, for example, the U.S. State Department in action every day for the last five years.
You know, you can go either way on this.
I mean, look, there's no question that U.S. power is declining.
I mean, about 1950, we had about 50 percent of world trade.
We're down to about 18 percent now, okay?
Again, in every way imaginable, take U.S. patents.
You know, after World War II, we were the world's preeminent technological innovator.
You know, as of 2008, the last time I crunched the numbers, we were number two behind Japan.
And between 2000, 2008, we had about a 40 percent increase in number of patents.
The number three, China, had about an 800 percent increase on patents.
They were coming up hard behind us.
So, you know, in terms of our educational performance, there are these international standard PISA tests that the OECD administers.
And I think, what are we, 24 in math and 30 in science?
Okay, so there's every indication that our relative power, you know, is declining.
The rest of the world has been developing.
You know, if you wanted to, you could say it's a tribute to the U.S. global hegemony, that other nations are coming online.
The European Union, the BRICS, the next 11, they're called.
There's about 20 dynamic economies worldwide that either individually or collectively are challenging U.S. dominion.
And the fact that we've managed to sort of stay on top in some way amidst this changing world indicates that, you know, this has got sort of a shot.
This system might in some way extend U.S. global dominion, U.S. hegemony.
It won't do it forever.
You know, empires always decline.
That's part of their nature.
Well, sure.
And yeah, I mean, it's that attempt at hegemony.
That's the number one thing undermining our civilization, right?
But let's focus.
This is why Obama broke that 100-year-old historic pattern that I described, that he didn't reverse the work of his predecessor and partisan rival, Republican George W.
Bush.
He didn't cut back the NSA, didn't cut back the FBI.
In fact, he expanded it.
And he said that in his statements.
When he went into a few statements, he talks about this.
All right.
He says this is what he's doing.
This is what he sees as the shape of global warfare in the 21st century.
And mind you, the concentration of power by Lieutenant General James Alexander, he's not only head of the NSA, but in 2009, when Obama established the U.S. Cyber Command, which establishes cyberspace as an operational, as a combat domain like air, land and sea.
OK, so the U.S. Cyber Command is now like the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Marines, the U.S. Army.
It's a combat force.
And he appointed, you know, the head of the NSA in an enormous concentration to also be concurrently the head of the U.S. Cyber Command.
So this is an enormous concentration of intelligence power in a single person.
And this indicates that what we're looking at with the NSA, which seems to be just data gathering, is actually one part of information warfare.
Well, so you're saying it looks to you like they're actually looking at empire on the cheap, maybe close down some bases and just rule with drones and computers.
Well, they won't close down all the bases because there are going to be times when we will, where Washington, D.C. will perceive a need to intervene.
All right.
But but this is the shape of warfare.
I mean, I think what what they're aspiring to is with this kind of cyber warfare and drone activity, that what they'll be able to do against a rival power is knock out the electrical system, you know, disable all the the command control and communication computers.
And then China, of course, is launching a system of global satellites.
Most of you are aware that since the mid 1960s, we have had one basis of our power has been the fact that we are the only nation in the world that operates a system of global telecommunication satellites.
Other nations have a few satellites up there, but we're the you know, for 50 years, we have had a global system of telecommunication satellites.
By 2020, China is going to complete the launch of 35 satellites.
And in 2007, China, in a tactical exercise, shot down one of their own satellites with a surface air missile.
That was a signal to the Pentagon of Washington that China potentially could extend warfare into space.
Now, space was there is a International Space Treaty.
Actually, I mean, at that time, though, Alfred, weren't they begging the Americans to stop militarizing space?
And weren't they just saying, hey, listen, we have the ability to defend ourselves from you a little bit.
I would not attribute anything akin to altruism to the leaders of the Communist Party.
Oh, I don't know about altruism.
I'm just saying it wasn't the Americans that were picking the fight, militarizing space and the Chinese who are the up and coming power, just saying they have the ability to resist rather than threatening us.
That sure is the way it seemed at the time.
Well, for whatever reason, they showed the capacity to do it.
And in 2010, we launched the world's first space drone, the X-37B, their prototypes.
They've both flown very successfully and they have the capacity to carry a missile that can knock out a rival satellite system.
So we're now extending our combat capability into space to both defend our own satellite network and destroy a rival satellite network.
So, you know, we're building what I regard as a kind of a three tier aerospace canopy.
OK, so it's, you know, X-37B and second, third generation space drones, 250, 300 miles above the Earth, all the way down to stuff like the Falcon hypersonic cruise vehicle that can fly at, what, 20 times the speed of sound.
And supposedly they're having problems with that one.
They keep crashing.
But nonetheless, they fly at these incredible speeds.
They'll be able to strike anywhere in the world in two hours.
And then next will be the Global Hawks.
And below that will be the Predators and Reapers, the more tactical drones.
And then the Global Hawks will be sucking up kind of cell phone and two way communications in the atmosphere.
And meanwhile, NSA, through these probes into the fiber optic cables, which centralize all telephone and digital communications very handily, they'll be data mining.
And then they'll be, again, engaged in cyber warfare and cyber intelligence for strategic information about enemies and just and allies alike and then to strike.
So when this system is operational, it'll be able to blind an entire army on the battlefield, atomize an insurgent field and favela, take out an enemy's critical electronic communications, fend off full spectrum dominance, they call it.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but we just got to go.
We're all out of time for this segment.
But I sure appreciate your time and I appreciate your point.
Thanks very much, Alfred.
Good.
Good talking.
Fine.
All right.
That is Alfred W.
McCoy.
He's a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He's the author of Policing America's Empire and Question of Torture and the Politics of Heroin.
All great books.
We'll be right back after this.
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