"This is a particularly useful time for America to reflect on those who have sacrificed so much for our freedom, a few days after Memorial Day," President Obama told the cadets. "You are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. When I first spoke at West Point in 2009, we still had more than 100,000 troops in Iraq. We were preparing to surge in Afghanistan. Our counterterrorism efforts were focused on al Qaeda's core leadership -- those who had carried out the 9/11 attacks. And our nation was just beginning a long climb out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."
The president congratulated the newest officers in the U.S. Army and reflected on America's foreign policy agenda. His full remarks are here .
The hawks at the Washington Post complained in their lead editorial that Obama was "Tying America's hands," a criticism that Republican, neo-con and neo-liberal voices repeated. The president's claque of defenders endorsed his views with their usual hand-wringing over details. Some stalwart anti-war protesters boldly rebuked the president. But their audiences are limited for the most part to the web-based alternative media.
As noted above, the mainstream media typically self-censor discussion of sensitive topics that might undermine the bipartisan support in congress for "The Intelligence-Industrial Complex," a modern successor to "The Military-Industrial Complex" denounced by President Eisenhower during his Farewell Address in 1961.
Among verboten topics are reminders of the constitutional requirements founders created for war-making. Also omitted for the most part is in-depth biographical detail of our presidents and their top advisors and their power relationships. Another self-censored area is the funding sources for private organizations supposedly independent of the defense, surveillance and similar Homeland Security sectors. Many such organizations receive secret funding from government black budgets that are almost untraceable by reporters and civic do-gooder groups.
True, each of these problems arose long before the Obama administration.
For example, Obama's proposed $5 billion slush fund for Executive Branch-ordered action against terrorism is just an additional step in a longer term transfer of war-making to the presidency from what the Constitution-writers envisioned as congressional control.
Yet each stage of power shift is so momentous and fundamentally lawless that those of us in the media should remind the public at every new landmark.
Increasingly, the Obama administration is expanding the notion of unilateral action by the United States to create war and regime change and similar actions without the blessings of major international bodies such as the United Nations -- or even the broad "Coalition of the willing" that the Bush-Cheney administration cobbled together for military action. Obama's actions tend to be sanctioned, if at all, by narrower coalitions of such strange bedfellows as Western democracies and oil-rich, repressive Gulf kingdoms.
Obama is just one of many recent presidents with hidden ties to the intelligence and law enforcement sectors. Presidential Puppetry documents that all presidents after Jimmy Carter -- with the arguable exception of George W. Bush -- have had relationships with the CIA or FBI before entering politics. The younger Bush, albeit without a formal title so far as we know, was steeped in that culture as son of George H.W. Bush, who began secretly leading a CIA front company six decades ago and who rose to become CIA director and president.
To be sure, the evidence is at times circumstance or otherwise sparse, and the Obama portrait is incomplete because of an unusual number of missing or suppressed records involving him and his family. But the important factor for readers is that few with access to relevant officials dare even to ask sensitive questions during their limited opportunities.
Finally, it is no secret to any serious researcher that an intelligence agenda has long permeated many ostensibly private organizations, including the media. Our previous column noted that Operation Mockingbird according to declassified documents involved CIA-coordinated messaging at many of the nation's most prestigious newspapers, broadcasters and magazine outlets. The late Washington Post owner Philip Graham was a leader in those secret efforts. He dined weekly with the CIA program's leader, Frank Wisner, who once boasted that he controlled "a Mighty Wurlitzer" that could create global propaganda, including in the United States.
We should fear such situations, which arguably are becoming more dangerous. Our first three Cold War presidents, all combat veterans extending from the Truman through Kennedy presidencies, ultimate (most of the time in private) against CIA's threat to American democracy. Their warnings are now little known, reported or heeded.
Congressional operations have been monitored and recorded by the NSA's secret surveillance just like everyone else's according to recent disclosures by NSA whistleblowers. Congress operates with far less independence now than powers envisioned under the constitution.
There is not a single journalist anywhere the country who regularly publishes hard-hitting, independent investigations in the mainstream media in the style of Jack Anderson and his mentor, Drew Pearson. The closest approximation is New Yorker contributor Seymour Hersh. But he does not have a wide audience, and has not been able to publish even in his care publication, the New Yorker, his most explosive recent foreign policy findings, as I reported this spring in Mainstream Media Ignore Hersh's Shocking Reports on Benghazi, Syria Atrocities.
In that column, I noted that this site and my book had also reported several of Hersh's findings. So, the unwillingness of the major media even to mention them strikes especially close to home here.
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