This article first appeared in CounterPunch on June 29, 2023.
I just got through experiencing a read of a Guardian headline: "Synthetic human embryos created in groundbreaking advance." The UK and US, in alliance. Jesus, I thought. It made me recall the work of the Chinese doctor He Jiankui, the would-be boutique designer baby entrepreneur, who cloned humans for the first time back in 2018, and "accidentally" enhanced the brains of the embryos, soon named Lulu and Nana.
In a December 2019 MIT Technology Review piece, scientist Kiran Musunuru wrote of He that there were "egregious scientific and ethical lapses" in his work. Now, I'm reading about artificial humans and seeing the same criticism: "The breakthrough could aid research into genetic disorders but raises serious ethical and legal issues." Jesus.
It may not be immediately apparent what the link is between medical cowboys f*cking with human embryos and the nature of the Deep Dark State, but it's embedded in the license they take with freedom. The Great Experiment in freedom that American Democracy is said to represent started with Founding Fathers, who were property owners, establishing their almost-feudal authority, with the Bill of Rights thrown in as a bone to the plebian dogmatists at the last possible minute.
Thought-experiment, for a moment: What would the US be like if it had no amendments to chasten its natural authoritarian appetencies? Since around Citizens United, We, the People have become more fully aware that there is a domestic 'reset' going on that privileges corporations over plebs, like the Founding Fathers, by making corporations the equivalent of plebs in the first place.
This can be a tricky proposition. Take Delaware, for instance, home of Joe Biden, where there are more registered corporations than there are people. The most powerful corporations there are credit card banks that offer plebs endless opportunities to be debt slaves. (No way student loan forgiveness had a chance: f*cker pandered for votes.) Maybe you don't see the necessary connection between debt slavery and the Deep State.
The 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is coming up in November. The event continues to affect our collective culture and to reverberate in ways that we may not have been able to anticipate. Lately, I've been following the tracks laid down by Jefferson Morley (et al) on his Substack site, JFK Facts, set up to publish and soberly analyze key pieces of newly released JFK records that have long gathered dust in the vaults of state secrecy. It all recalls the now-familiar warning by Ike in his January 1960 Farewell Address to Beware the Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC), where he avers, in part, "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." It also brings to mind JFK's expressed desire to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."
Which recalls Harry Truman's op-ed one month after JFK's assassination, calling for limits on the Agency's growing rogue behavior. The ex-president said, in part,
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
It was Truman who set up the CIA; so, his concern is especially noteworthy.
Regarding JFK's "scatter" quote, I have long-known that it was cross-referenced with some memorandum that JFK's advisor, Arthur Schlesinger, wrote in late June 1961, titled, "CIA Reorganization." I hadn't read it before, unless it was part of the deluge of conspiracy information since forgotten that I, and so many other Americans, throughout the 70s practically drowned ourselves in, the interest peaking with the Church Hearings in 1975 that essentially convinced many of us that as John Lennon put it in his song "God," that the dream is over. So, I read the Memo. It begins by noting that "On balance, CIA's record has probably been very good." Aye, the CIA is an honorable agency.
And then Schlesinger brings down the sledgehammer. He notes that the downward path to wisdom, as Katherine Anne Porter phrased a certain learning curve ahead, in 1953, when the State Department and the CIA were headed by the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster, and they got together for trippy little operations (perhaps captured here in this James Bond clip).
The Agency has veered from its mission of gathering intelligence of secret foreign governmental doings, and has begun to put boots on the ground in support of wars neither pre-approved or authorized, accompanied by "the CIA's tendency to present a proposed operation almost as a fait accompli." Schlesinger writes that it operates a "parallel" system that is already covered by State Department functions, and has its own combat forces and its own air force; indeed, that it is practically "a state within a state." And what's more, Schlesinger compares the quality of Washington's CIA operatives with those in the field:
While the CIA people in Washington are men of exceptionally high quality, the men attracted to field jobs are sometimes tough and even vicious people motivated by drives of their own and not necessarily in political or even moral sympathy with the purposes of the operation.
One thinks here of the legendary Duane Clarridge, the first head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, who saw to it that Latin America was laid to waste in the 70s and 80s, including the overthrow of the "What's his name" government in Chile on 9/11 1973, and who told us (through John Pilger) that if we didn't like these covert activities and coups that it was "just tough" and we could "lump it." Clarridge was exactly the kind of kind you called on as an answer to Henry Kissinger's famous quip:
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