The Military and Those Strange Threats to Obama

As reported by the Australian newspaper The Age,

"A CLASSIFIED booklet containing President Barack Obama's Australian schedule down to the minute, as well as details of his security convoy and the mobile phone numbers of dozens of senior US and Australian officials, was found by The Age on a Canberra street yesterday morning. The booklet, Overall Program and Orders of Arrangements, for Mr Obama's visit, was found by this reporter in a gutter about 100 metres from the front entrance to Parliament."

***

I asked Bolden, the ex-presidential security man turned critic and author, about these events and his former employer, the Secret Service. He replied: "It shows a pattern that they haven't changed much since 1961 -- there's still laxity and carelessness. I see a pattern of...disturbing negligence within the organization that needs to be looked into. They have much more training now, a much larger organization now than in 1961, so you would think they would become more professional. I see them relying more on the armoring [of vehicles], but I don't any more sophistication in the protection or the attitude since the assassination of President Kennedy."

As noted earlier, ties between security services and either overt participation or willful ignorance of mortal threats to politicians is not unheard-of. A recent example is the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.  Even in modernized Western democracies like Sweden and France, elements in the military or intelligence services have been widely suspected of, at minimum, covering up the true sponsorship of assassination plots.

In the United States, key institutions, in particular academia and the media, rigorously maintain the position that it could not happen here. A search of the Nexis-Lexis database of articles from principally American media sources turns up more than 3000 articles that include the term "assassination" and "conspiracy theory" (or some variation.)  Deaths of politicians, witnesses and whistleblowers in small airplane crashes, suicides and other conflagrations are automatically toted up to the "accident" category.

Few politicians, however, believe that. And as I documented extensively in my book Family of Secrets, presidents either play ball with the national security state or bad things happen to them (see specifics on the downing, physically or otherwise, of Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter, and warnings from Ike and Truman that the security complex was badly out of control.)

At a minimum, American presidents' very real awareness of their fragile position and safety risks probably explain in part the lack of bold, dramatic action against perceived power centers, be it the military, the intelligence establishment, or the financial, industrial and resource extraction interests that ultimately shape American policy.

This is scary stuff. The easy, and default position for the establishment -- from the media to academia -- is to pooh-pooh such concerns and to paint those who raise them as fantasists or worse. But then, that's why they call it the establishment. It has no incentive to dig into these matters. And plenty of disincentives.

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