The American People Need A New Independence

Happy 4th of July!

Actual Defense Department graphic, lol | Tyndall Air Force Base

The 4th of July feels like a sad holiday to me. We celebrate an independence won over two centuries ago, like an out of shape former athlete reminiscing about his glory days on the high school football team. 

What we need independence from today isn’t the British — who seem about as threatening as a glass of warm Ovaltine — but from modern tyrannies like big business and, of course, the national security state. 

Since working on this newsletter full time, I’ve tried hard to watch almost all of the national security press briefings the administration conducts. This has been very instructive and my own personal hell, a real-life Bosch painting of bureaucrats evading frankness in ways that at times border on the surreal. 

Simple questions from a mostly unthreatening media are routinely swatted down with the glib excuse  that even the broadest answer would imperil things like “operational security” and intelligence “sources and methods.” Yet somehow these concerns melt away when the national security state  wants to manipulate the public, or when the White House circulates what they themselves say is classified because it is politically favorable. Consider, for instance, the publicly available itemized list of weapons provided to Ukraine, which the administration periodically updates. The transparency is because of fear of Congress taking the money away, and it is a signal to NATO that it had better follow suit. But still, the accounting is made public and the public benefits.

And yet no such list is available for U.S. military aid to Israel. (I’ve written about this here.)

“We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” White House national security spokesperson retired rear admiral John Kirby said of U.S. arms assistance to Israel.

Of course! What weapons the United States is providing Israel is just too controversial and inconvenient for the administration and the national security state to divulge. So we, the public, are kept in the dark by the new colonial masters.

There is disclosure, sometimes, but mostly it comes after the news media reports on something and forces the Pentagon or the administration’s hand (such as with the Gaza pier). But even when forced, disclosure amounts to little more than a vague acknowledgement of what is already in the news, offering little if any additional detail.

There was a textbook example of that dance just this week. Following news media reporting that U.S. military bases in Europe had been placed on heightened alert due to concerns of a terror attack, the Pentagon acknowledged that this was true  but declined to say anything  whatsoever about the the actual threat. As a result, all kinds of wild speculation has been able to proliferate, especially from the national security auxiliary that colludes with the Crown. Retired admiral James Stavridis asserted without evidence that a  terror attack might be designed to disrupt the 2024 presidential election, an explosive claim which racked up over 500,000 views on X. (I’ll have a story on this tomorrow.) 

Rumors like these could be dispelled with a simple statement from the Pentagon characterizing whatever threat there is; there’s a strong argument for maximum disclosure in the name of greater ability to detect and thwart any attack. Which leads me to suspect that the supposed “threat,” and the scare tactics as employed, are really meant to remind the public that they need to continue to foot the Pentagon’s bills without complaining or asking too many questions.

The national security community professes deep concern about disinformation but contributes to it with its habitual and manipulative secrecy. Like a dog that wants to play fetch but doesn’t want to drop the ball, the government wants to have it both ways. 

Meanwhile, the public is deprived of information it often needs to meaningfully participate in debates about what our national security policy should look like. Lacking that information, they predictably check out. The apologists for the national security status quo, the elite types on cable news, then have the audacity to call the public stupid, lazy, uninformed and the like, for being disengaged from a process they are blocked from in the first place. 

Here are just some basic questions about our government’s conduct that it has refused to answer:

• What is the endgame in Ukraine?

• What have we actually done with Israel that has forced it to change its practices in its Hamas war?

• What is the United States trying to achieve in the wider Middle East, with its record number of U.S. troops in Jordan and its secret deployments in places like Yemen?

• Why is virtually nothing said about the goal and the effect of U.S. military forces in Africa, at a time when military coups are rampant and terrorism is growing?

• Why is more and more basic information about the workings of the national security state being removed from the Internet?

• Why can’t America have a civilian secretary of defense, as the Constitution demands, rather than a retired general?

• Why can’t we know how many American citizens are on the terror watchlist?

• When are we going to stop the practice of denying basic data about the intelligence budget to the American people?

• Why does the Department of Homeland Security have more law enforcement officers than the FBI?

• Why are the number of above-Top-Secret “special access programs” ballooning?

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Until national security officialdom can answer these basic questions, it seems they’ve declared independence from us.

— Edited by William M. Arkin