Is Anybody Running the Deep State?

August 28, 2017
Submitted by: Love Knowledge
Category: Politics

The post Is Anybody Running the Deep State? appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Barry Eisler has had many jobs. He was a covert operative for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, an attorney in an international law firm, in-house counsel at the Osaka headquarters of Panasonic, an executive in a Silicon Valley technology startup, and a best-selling author.

This week Barrett Brown talks to Eisler about the future of the United States, whether the CIA is relevant anymore, and whether the US even has a future as a representative democracy, given the way politics, especially participation in local government, has changed.

In Brown’s commentary, he looks back at an old Tom Friedman column and its not-so-wise assessment of the future of Russia and President Vladimir Putin.

Barry Eisler is the author of numerous thrillers, all published by Thomas & Mercer, including Zero Sum (June, 2017), The God’s Eye View (February, 2016), A Lonely Resurrection (August, 2014), A Clean Kill in Tokyo (October 2014).

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Full Text Transcript:

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Barrett Brown:	This is Barrett Brown. Thanks for listening to our WhoWhatWhy podcast. Barry Eisler is a former CIA Director of Operations official and a best-selling thriller novelist. He’s also a long time critic of CIA practices and a here-and-there sort of pundit who’s weighed in a number of issues facing the republic over the last 15 years.
	Barry, let me ask you this. Are we facing a different politic fundamentally, a different civic situation than we were 10 years ago?
Barry Eisler:	The short answer, I guess, would be yes but not necessarily so much because our civics have changed as much as our circumstances have. Changing circumstances would require changing civics and if the circumstances change and the civics don’t, then that’s going to create a problem for the republic. The circumstances that have changed, as I see it, is the increasing metastasis of surveillance technology, such that the government is able to know more and more about the citizenry, even as we the citizenry know less and less about the government. That’s going to require a different kind of civics, but I don’t think a different kind of civics has adequately emerged to meet those changing circumstances.
Barrett Brown:	Is our republic viable?
Barry Eisler:	I can’t say I feel terrible optimistic at the moment. In part, just because I try to place most of my confidence in patterns I see rather than particular historical moments. And the pattern is, how long do empires last? The American experiment has now been around for close to 250 years, that’s a reasonably long run, and I see a pattern in which the kinds of fights our ruling elite are willing to engage in have changed from fights you could at least reasonably argue were more important from any sort of reasonable national security perspective, to ones that are primarily petty and have more to do with ego than any kind of substantive national security concerns.
	I look at that as kind of the psychology of an increasingly old and senescent empire, it’s just what happens. I think there’s even an expression that empires start off fighting big opponents, big enemies and end up fighting small ones. And I think that pattern tends to fit what we see here in the American empire.
Barrett Brown:	Sort of a two part question. For one thing, do you believe that, aside from its expanded surveillance capabilities, that the CIA plays less of a central role in these fights than it did, say, in the ’50s and ’60s? If so, does that reflect what you’re referring to regarding the lessening of what these struggles are about? The struggles among the elites.
Barry Eisler:	When you’re talking about the ’60s and ’70s, or I guess even earlier, the ’50s, are you talking about CIA-inspired coups like in Iran and Guatemala, that sort of thing?
Barrett Brown:	Yeah, in general. Both in terms of its ability to exert power domestically within … We had that complicated situation with Nixon where of course the CIA played some role in surveilling the White House, just as the Pentagon did, and over time obviously had some degree of influence. In addition to that, also, it’s power projection, with governments abroad and that sort of thing, influenced policies, splashed-back information. Has its role, or has its ability to serve as the policy-making tool of one or more people, a handful of people, has that diminished since the ’60s and ’70s?