Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World
Tom Engelhardt, Glenn Greenwald
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN: 1608463656
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. In his new book, Tom Engelhardt takes in something new under the sun: what is no longer, as in the 1960s, a national security state, but a global security one, fighting secret wars that have turned the president into an assassin-in-chief. Shadow Government offers a powerful survey of a democracy of the wealthy that your grandparents wouldn't have recognized.
Obama administrations have not in any traditional sense been spies. None were hired or trained by another power or entity to mine secrets. All had, in fact, been trained either by the US government or an allied corporate entity. All, in their urge to reveal, were whistleblowers who might, in the American past, have been deemed patriots. None were planning to turn over the information in their possession to an enemy power. Each was trying to make his or her organization, department, or agency
human beings had known it for millennia—the history, that is, of the rise and fall of empires. Could the United States actually be the last empire? Is it possible that there will be no successor because something has profoundly changed in the realm of empire building? One thing is increasingly clear: whatever the state of imperial America, something significantly more crucial to the fate of humanity (and of empires) is in decline. I’m talking, of course, about the planet itself. The present
helped turn the region into a churning sea of refugees, gave life and meaning to a previously nonexistent al-Qaeda in Iraq (and now a Syrian version of the same), left Iraq drifting in a sea of roadside bombs and suicide bombers, and like other countries in the region, threatened with the possibility of splitting apart. And that’s just a thumbnail sketch. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about destabilization in Afghanistan, where US troops have been on the ground going on thirteen
I read an essay by NSA expert James Bamford in which he mentioned, “Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in the Guardian and the Washington Post . . . bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the ‘Movers & Shakers’ list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day.” Nonetheless, amid a jostling crowd of worried Americans, I did keep reading that novel and found it at least as touching, disturbing, and
was “preparing retaliation” against those it believes killed the US ambassador, possibly including “drone strikes, special operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden, and joint missions with Libyan authorities.” The near certainty that, like the previous intervention, this set of military actions would only further destabilize the region with yet more unpleasant surprises and unintended consequences hardly seemed to matter. Nor did the fact that, in crude form, the results of such