for those who have wondered if the deep state "Got To" Obama

[grasswire]

for those who are stunned by the embracing of the Surveillance State by this administration, when candidate Obama seemed to promise more transparency and protection for citizens.

The question is asked by David Carr (RIP -- he died four hours after this interview) and then answered by Edward Snowden in this video made last Thursday. A very direct question by Carr, and then a very clear answer by Snowden.

The particular segment begins about 44 minutes into the video.

"Did the spooks get to him? What happened?"

Snowden's response is clear, and answers the question for me.

[spanone]

1. i think snowden is correct.....they don't care who the president is.....

he'll be gone and they will still be there.....

and they can fuck with him mightily if they wish.

[grasswire]

2. and they do

For those who don't want to watch this video.

Edward says that the agency threatens a new president by presenting him/her with "enhanced" briefings designed to scare the bejesus out of him/her. And they tell him/her "we can't protect you, your family, the American people from this unless we have free reign with powers and budget" (paraphrased). Just as we have suspected.

[daredtowork]

3. he also says

They sort of make him an "insider" by barraging him with information so he feels like he's one of the few people in the know, and so the decisions he makes can be different from whatever popular sentiment or the Congressional vote is because they aren't "in the know". And he never gets a break from this constant apparent threat level (while the "protectors" justify their jobs...). Maybe he needs to put a restriction on how much information of that type can be brought to him and then routinize the rest to the head of the agency.

[hopemountain]

7. suspected as much

president obama's "demeanor" was radically different the morning after his inauguration & first presidential briefing and round of meetings. even though he may have been receiving briefings before the inauguration - he may not have been told everything until he was in the whitehouse.

i also remember the changes in demeanor of certain members from previous administrations.

[wildbilln864]

30. I definitely noticed that too.

I maybe thought it was more criminal as in he'd maybe been threatened or his family but had no evidence of course. But the look on his face seemed changed and more distraught and fearful. Just MHOOC but it crossed my mind.

[99th_Monkey]

4. K&R

But I totally posted this just yesterday. just sayin'
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026235697

Actually I welcome more exposure for this particular subject, so
I'm not complaining

[grasswire]

20. I know you did, and thank you

And someone else posted it a couple of days before. Every time we post it, new readers get it.

I sincerely thank you for presenting it the way you did.

[99th_Monkey]

24. and same to you

I liked how you found another angle on it,
and gave info about the minutes/seconds info
of pertinent segments of video.

[BrotherIvan]

5. This is the most important thread of the week

For those who oppose Snowden because they think he tried to make Obama look bad: he just said it wasn't his fault. So now can we talk about the issue of the intelligence octopus taking over our government?

This whole discussion should be required viewing. It makes perfect sense that a new president would want to keep his family safe and ensure that no terrorist attacks happen on his watch. So the totally meaningless and nonspecific "terrorist theat scares" are used to keep the president on down in line. Fear works. That is the very essence of the theory of terrorism. But apparently, the intelligence community is the one doing it.

[Fred Sanders]

6. The same geopolitical forces that forced Obama to go briefly to Saudi are at work.

To make any changes at all we have to all have Obama's back - The Guardian's Greenwald and Snowden and Manning are liberal and progressive heroes who have given up all hope of anonymity and are living with the real fear of the real consequences of telling the truth.

So of course the only counter attack is by sowing seeds of doubt based on misinterpreting their intent which is exactly how counter intelligence works.

I think not much "gets to" Obama, you can see it written in his face....that man does not give a fuck about the media and their epidemic of lying. His job approval numbers versus the do nothing GOP Congress tells me most folk outside the media bubble agree.

[hifiguy]

15. They don't refer to it as the "permanent government" for no reason.

[wildbilln864]

36. so needs a kick! n.t

[randome]

8. Right. All-seeing Snowden not only can read the President's email, he can read his thoughts!

Oh, God! Make it stop!


[hr][font color="blue"][center]“If you're not committed to anything, you're just taking up space.”
Gregory Peck, Mirage (1965)[/center][/font][hr]

[DisgustipatedinCA]

11. Snowden can at least read.

i don't believe you've taken the time to read this article, based on your response.

[riderinthestorm]

13. Oh right, the eminent David Carr was notorious for interviewing scammers

And charlatans...



.... NOT!

[Egnever]

26. Sure he was

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/david_carr/index.html

Plenty of scammers and charlatans in there.

[grasswire]

22. you have revealed your role here at DU

And the efforts are futile.

[randome]

35. As are Snowden's.

"I only want to help people! THAT'S why I stole hundreds of thousands of national security documents and fled the country! Please be my friend!"
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Aspire to inspire.[/center][/font][hr]

[riderinthestorm]

9. K&R and K&R and K&R. Sobering and scary.

I can certainly believe there are psychological head games that are played on a new president. We have the best players in the world who have extensively studied how to break people.

Why wouldn't they have worked out exactly how to "break" a president to their will, even as the president has no idea what's happening.

[wildbilln864]

31. and if they cannot break him then what?

I shudder to think but it's just so obvious.

[hifiguy]

10. The Permanent Paranoid Hidden Fascist State

corrupts even those with the best of intentions. It should be smashed to atoms.

[Octafish]

12. Yeah. And then they show him the transcripts from Chicago.

Russ Tice, Bush-Era Whistleblower, Claims NSA Ordered Wiretap Of Barack Obama In 2004

The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing
Posted: 06/20/2013

Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst who in 2005 blew the whistle on what he alleged was massive unconstitutional domestic spying across multiple agencies, claimed Wednesday that the NSA had ordered wiretaps on phones connected to then-Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004.

Speaking on "The Boiling Frogs Show," Tice claimed the intelligence community had ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats.

"Here's the big one ... this was in summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator for Illinois," he said. "You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives right now would you? It's a big white house in Washington, D.C. That's who they went after, and that's the president of the United States now."

Host Sibel Edmonds and Tice both raised concerns that such alleged monitoring of subjects, unbeknownst to them, could provide the intelligence agencies with huge power to blackmail their targets.

"I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on," Tice said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama_n_3473538.html

[elias49]

33. I hadn't thought of Russel Tice in years.

Not a whistle-blower yet has been able to gain significant traction. It's frustrating.

[tblue37]

14. Could you summarize his answer for us deafies, please? nt

[riderinthestorm]

17. Post #2 and 3 are a pretty good summary nt

[grasswire]

23. I will transcribe Snowden's answer later this evening.

Thanks for asking.

[tblue37]

27. Thanks! nt

[Savannahmann]

29. I'll try.

The idea is pretty simple. The intelligence agencies don't care who the President is. They are going to do what they want. They know the President can only be in office for eight years, and they know that the President will have a lot of things to deal with besides them. Additionally, the Intelligence Agencies will scare the newly elected President by briefing him/her on all the signs of threats that they have found. In short, the President is ignorant of the activities of the Intelligence Agencies, and when or if the President does learn, doesn't have enough time to reform the agencies before the President is out of office.

If you will allow me to put in some of my own thoughts here, as background to what I think Snowden is saying. To a great extent, I don't have trouble believing that. Historically, it is what has been done. One of the first examples of that that I am aware of is the Zimmerman Telegram and all the shadowy intrigue that was going on around it. When the German Government agents were meeting with exiled President Huerta there was enough spies from various agencies that reading it later you would think they were hosting a convention at the hotel where the meetings were held. Generally speaking, none of the spies knew that the others were there.

Then there was the Venona project. Military Intelligence and the State Department's intelligence were copying Soviet cables from the embassy in Washington to Moscow. Even though they couldn't break the code yet, they continued to copy these messages and try to break them. Despite being ordered to cease during the Roosevelt Administration, the intelligence agencies continued to participate. The Senior Generals and the State Department intelligence leaders decided that the President didn't know what was best for the Country, so they would keep doing what was good for us, no matter what orders were given. With the formation of the OSS, you had an organization that was formed to do just that sort of dirty trick. The President remained ignorant through Truman, until Eisenhower was elected. General Eisenhower had been briefed on the Venona Project when he was commander of the European Theater during World War II. Eisenhower was able to order it shut down, but by then we had the CIA which was run by the old spies of the OSS with much the same attitude as they had during the war.

I believe that the realization of the futility of all of this including but not limited to Venona was why Eisenhower gave his Military Industrial speech. Of course, by then he was authorizing the invasion of Soviet Airspace by U2 spy planes because we had to know what the Soviets were up to, or something.

Kennedy learned faster than Eisenhower after the Bay of Pigs debacle. The CIA told Kennedy that they could not imagine any situation in which they would request Military intervention. Kennedy allowed the plan to go forward. Then of course, the predictable happened in about two hours, and the CIA insisted they had to have Military assistance to help oust Castro. Kennedy said no, and the rest is History. The CIA and Military types believed Kennedy would go with the asinine in for a penny, in for a pound mentality. Some people believe that the CIA and Joint Chiefs were furious when Kennedy did not invade Cuba during the Missile Crisis.

Project Ivy Bells started during the Johnson Administration, and continued through Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and continues today under various new names. That is where submarines invade the territorial waters of nations, and taps underwater cables, to gather intelligence information. Now, when those taps are found, and they are, the phrase act of war describes what is going on. So every President has authorized these activities. Every President has authorized an act of war, the invasion of sovereign waters to gain a little information. The obvious explanation is "everyone does it." and Legitimate intelligence gathering.

So Snowden who doesn't say anything about what I've written from the second paragraph down, to this one, is saying that essentially nothing has changed. The history of abuses of Intelligence Agencies, and agents, is long and sickening. So even if the President did order the activities to stop, the Intelligence agencies would not obey.

[wildbilln864]

32. excellent! thank you.

I think you're spot on so what is to be done?

[Ichingcarpenter]

16. Anatomy of the Deep State

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State,


the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable:

Anatomy of the Deep State

http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/



THE AMERICAN DEEP STATE: An Interview with Peter Dale Scott for the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio


http://www.projectcensored.org/american-deep-state-interview-peter-dale-scott-project-censored-show-pacifica-radio/


There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.3

At the end of 2013 a New York Times Op-Ed noted this trend, and even offered a definition of the term that will work for the purposes of this essay:

DEEP STATE n. A hard-to-perceive level of government or super-control that exists regardless of elections and that may thwart popular movements or radical change. Some have said that Egypt is being manipulated by its deep state.4

The political activities of the deep state are the chief source and milieu of what I have elsewhere called “deep politics:” “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”5

Others, like Tom Hayden, call the deep state a “state within the state,” and suggest it may be responsible for the failure of the Obama administration to follow the policy guidelines of the president’s speeches:

We have seen evidence of a “state within the state” before, going back as far as the CIA’s operations against Cuba. In Obama’s time, the president correctly named the 2009 coup in Honduras a “coup”, and then seemed powerless to prevent it.6

This development of a two-level or dual state has been paralleled by two other dualities: the increasing resolution of American society into two classes – the “one percent” and the “ninety-nine percent” – and the bifurcation of the U.S. economy into two aspects: the domestic, still subject to some governmental regulation and taxation, and the international, relatively free from governmental controls.7 All three developments have affected and intensified each other – particularly since the

Reagan Revolution of 1980, which saw American inequality of wealth cease to diminish and begin to increase.8 Thus for example we shall see how Wall Street – the incarnation of the “one percent” – played a significant role in increasing the deep state after World War Two, and how three decades later the deep state played a significant role in realigning America for the Reagan Revolution.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-state-the-deep-state-and-the-wall-street-overworld/5372843

[xiamiam]

18. thank you for posting this ..k and r..nt

[Ramses]

19. This is an extremely important and revealing piece

[hfojvt]

21. I tend to think it is more like campaign rhetoric

Obama said many things in the campaign that he apparently really did not mean. Unless they "got to" him well before he was inaugurated. He nominated a bunch of DLC types to his cabinet well before he was inaugrated. I remember a lot of gnashing of teeth about that on DU, and yet I still held hope that it wouldn't matter too much. Clearly the teeth gnashers were proven right.

[grasswire]

25. good points nt

[Laura PourMeADrink]

28. Is that when they tell him about the UFOs ?

[wildbilln864]

34. and a kick! n/t

[woo me with science]

37. I think candidates are carefully chosen for their willingness to embrace the agenda

...and I mean the entire predatory corporate/economic/MIC/police state agenda, long before they are actually candidates.

Obama was giving speeches to Hamiltonian Democrats recommending cutting the social safety nets regardless of the pain it would cause, as early as 2006:

Obama and the Hamiltonian Democrats: "This is not a bloodless process."
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/7875

Obama is speaking of Robert Rubin. They were talking about the "losers" in the new free market economy.

"Bob and I have had a running debate now for about a year about how do we, in fact, deal with the losers in a globalized economy. There has been a tendency in the past for us to say, well, look, we have got to grow the pie, and we will retrain those who need retraining. But in fact we have never taken that side of the equation as seriously as we need to take it. So hopefully, this is not just going to be a lot of preaching to the choir. Hopefully, part of what we are going to be doing is challenging our own conventional wisdom and pushing boundaries and testing these ideas in a vigorous and aggressive way.

...Just remember, as we move forward, that there are real consequences to the work that is being done here. There are people in places like Decatur, Illinois, or Galesburg,Illinois, who have seen their jobs eliminated. They have lost their health care. They have lost their retirement security. They don't have a clear sense of how their children will succeed in the same way that they succeeded. They believe that this may be the first generation in which their children do worse than they do. Some of that, then, will end up manifesting itself in the sort of nativist sentiment, protectionism, and anti-immigration sentiment that we are debating here in Washington. So there are real consequences to the work that is being done here. This is not a bloodless process."