Are We
Witnessing a Coup Operation Against the Trump
White House?
Our intelligence apparatus is doing far more
than stoking paranoia about the Russian
bogeyman—it’s threatening democracy.
By Patrick Lawrence
February
24, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Nation"
- A
couple of books come to mind amid the relentless
leaks emanating from the spooks on either side
of the Potomac and, not to be missed, their high
approval ratings among our patriots of liberal
persuasion.
One is
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the
CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,
published two summers ago. This is David
Talbot’s history of the infamous CIA director’s
quite successful effort to turn Langley,
Virginia, into a state within a state, perfectly
capable of taking on the one whose leaders
Americans elect. We now call this “the Deep
State,” and Glenn Greenwald put the debate on
this point to bed in 140 characters a few days
ago: “To summarize journalistic orthodoxy: only
fringe conspiracists think a Deep State exists,
but all sane people know Kremlin controls US
Govt.”
President Kennedy fired the Deep State’s
godfather in 1961, after the Bay of Pigs
calamity and Dulles’s never-acknowledged support
for a failed coup against de Gaulle (believe it,
the French president). Taking this to the
ultimate, Talbot, who founded Salon
20-odd years ago, makes a persuasive case that
Dulles retreated to Georgetown, gathered his
loyalists, and probably architected JFK’s
assassination two years later. Talbot’s book
does not include this incident, but I have it
from a former spook of great integrity, now
noted for blowing whistles: A few years into
Barack Obama’s presidency supporters asked at a
fundraiser, “Where’s our progressive foreign
policy, Mr. President?” Obama’s reply: “Do you
want me to end up another JFK?”
The other book is I.F. Stone’s The Haunted
Fifties, 1953–1963. The great Izzy’s
commentary in I.F. Stone’s Weekly
during those egregious years was among the few
available sources of sanity in a nation of
anti-Russian zombies. “To have kept his head in
the hurricane of corrupted speech, ritualized
patriotism, paranoid terror, and sudden
conversions to acceptability,” Arthur Miller
wrote in a foreword to the collection, “required
something more than his wits and investigative
talent and a gift for language.” It did—and
does, so let us take a lesson. Stone endured,
Miller observed, because he had faith that “a
confident, tolerant America” would eventually
come back to life.
I propose staying with this thought. But it is
no good looking for help among the corrupted,
the paranoid, and the suddenly converted.
One finds little confidence and less tolerance
among Americans now. One finds instead, a
president who has more bad ideas than you’ve had
hot dinners—a man with an antidemocratic streak
that appears to result from his failure to
understand the principles of democratic
government. There is only one thing worse than
this president. I refer to the liberal reaction
to his election. It had been bad but short of
dangerous for some time after the night of last
November 8. As of last week, I count it a
disgrace: It is full of danger now.
I
know it is a long time ago, but cast your mind
back to those autumn days when mainstream
Democrats considered “President Hillary Clinton”
a shoo-in. There was going to be a big problem
come November 8, they direly warned: All the
Trumpets and Trumpettes will not accept the
result. They will refuse Clinton her legitimacy.
They will deny and resist and rampage. They will
be in the streets. They will put our great
republic’s political process, our very glory, at
risk.
Striking it has been to watch liberals as they
commit these very sins. One opinion-page
inhabitant predicted “a perpetual fever swamp”
after Clinton took the White House. Are we not
sloshing through one now? Here is what these
people utterly refuse to grasp, from what one
can make out because it is too embarrassing:
Donald Trump is a consequence. He is not the
cause of anything.
To be clear: Given that the Supreme Court broke
the democratic process decisively with its
Citizens United decision seven years ago,
the street is a perfectly logical place to be,
in my view. But there is no point in being there
unless one is for something and not
merely contra. Having failed to think
things through, the implicit argument among many
of those taking it to the street these days is
that things were copacetic before Trump came
along and ruined them. Obama now goes down as
the Mighty Quinn. The self-delusion is
astonishing, and the historians will fix it, one
hopes. But in the meantime, this error turns
consequential: It lands us with the kind of
problem that David Talbot suggests killed
Kennedy in Dallas, if you care to entertain the
thesis.
Read the histories. The Ivy League culture that
still suffuses the CIA has from the first been
far more liberal than conservative. The
Democratic Party’s Clintonian era is perfectly
exemplary on this point. As a smart friend said
the other day, John Brennan, who served Bill
Clinton and then Obama at the CIA and wanted to
serve in an HRC administration, had a lot of
trouble sorting out his role in Langley and his
relations with the Democrats.
Now
look.
It is one thing to tar Donald Trump with a
groundless campaign, Nixon-style, so as to
insinuate without evidence that he entertains
objectionable ties to Russia. That is mere
politics. (And I like Reince Priebus’s term for
this last Sunday on Fox News. Citing top
officials in the IC, which stands for
intelligence cabal, Priebus asserted, “They have
made it very clear that the story is complete
garbage.”)
It is another matter altogether when the
descendants of Dulles (whom Priebus suggests are
not united on this one) mount what looks awfully
like a coup operation against the president of
our republic. That is a strong phrase, but it
belongs on the table far more than the “complete
garbage” you can read in any day’s edition of
The New York Times. There I will put it
for now, awaiting a historically informed
argument for taking it off.
Leaks have the wonderful advantage of requiring
no substantiation. With Michael Flynn’s
resignation as Trump’s national-security
adviser, they have already claimed one prominent
victim. Who or what is next? Priebus? Trump
himself? Or maybe just crippling the Trump White
House’s determination to forge a saner
relationship with Moscow will do.
I
have seen a few naked emperors in my day, but
this one is positively obese (and wears a Speedo
at the beach). This is a perception-management
campaign quite similar to those mounted decades
ago in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere. The media
are thoroughly complicit, and the objective is
perfectly plain but nowhere mentioned. We have
an intelligence apparatus that has accreted
autonomous power such that no president dares
try to control it: This much lies beyond debate.
Now we watch as it counters a president who
proposes to scrub the single most important
passage in the narrative of fear and animosity
on which this apparatus depends.
You have two potential casualties here, readers.
It is very dangerous to suffer either.
One, this looks like the most serious threat to
(what remains of) American democracy since…
since the Kennedy assassination, if you accept
David Talbot’s case. It comes from the very
people everyone from Pat Moynihan to Edward
Snowden warned us about—those who abide in the
culture of secrecy, the Deep State. Set aside
all thought of “it can’t happen here.” At the
very least you are watching the threat that it
is going to happen.
You want to get Trump out of office? Good idea.
Do the work. We all want to see your plan.
Two, if the spooks, the seething mainstream of
the Democratic Party, and the neoconservative
warmongers succeed in taking down Trump’s
détente policy and who knows whom among its
advocates, the already distorted role of
intelligence agencies in the foreign-policy
process will be further consolidated. More
immediately, Americans will be condemned to live
with Russophobic fear more or less indefinitely.
I have only one question on this point, and
maybe some (more) elderly fellow can answer it:
Was the anti-Communist case that haunted the
1950s so impossibly flimsy as this? Hard to
believe, given all the damage it did, but maybe
we are about to learn something very awful.
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Another question, actually. How did it come to
be that what we witness daily now is to be
cheered? My own answer runs to an old confusion
characteristic of Americans. Most of us are
entirely taken up with means. This has
been so for a long time. We say we have ideals,
ends, but in truth these are museum
curiosities now. Our only purpose is merely to
sustain the present—which by definition is not
an ideal. If it takes a CIA operation to get
this done—in this case to kneecap Donald
Trump—well, one is all for it.
“Bring on the special prosecutor” was the
headline on an editorial in the Times a
few days after Flynn resigned. All the banners
of liberal outrage were aloft by then. At first
Flynn’s sin was talking to Russian officials
before Trump’s inauguration. When the idiocy of
this position finally dawned, it was, as it is
now, that Flynn had lied to Trump and Vice
President Pence. Unless Flynn broke a law, and
he did not by any untainted judgment, this is a
matter strictly between Trump and Pence and
Flynn, if I am not mistaken. It is the latest
peg for the anti-Trump people to hang their hats
on, but as grounds for a special prosecutor, it
is ridiculous. The proposal is less for a
special investigation than for a fishing
expedition, and given how the non-evidence of a
mail hack was conjured into the “highest
confidence” of Russian meddling, it is
impossible to say what “evidence” or
“conclusions” would be drawn from it.
One cannot figure,
in the case of the Times, what the
object of the exercise might be. On the one
hand, it is a brimming chalice of liberal anger,
and so an expression of the Democratic Party’s
elites. Recall, the Times
confessed on page one
last summer that it had abandoned all efforts to
report about Trump objectively. On the other, it
is full tilt these days finding Russians under
every bed: Having subverted our democracy, they
are subverting elections in France. They are
subverting elections in Holland. They are
subverting something or other in Kosovo, I
cannot make out quite what. This is typical CIA
stuff. Does the Times carry the
agency’s ball, then?
Maybe both. Or, as earlier suggested, between
the Democrats and Langley, maybe there is only
one ball: It is the same for the two of them.
Long, long ago, Tom Wicker, the much-noted
Times reporter and later columnist, called
the CIA “a Frankenstein monster no one can fully
control.” That was in the edition of April 27,
1966, when the Times published the
third in a running series of influential exposés
of the CIA’s limitlessly crazy doings. People
were outraged, as I suppose it is necessary to
explain. This was five years after Arthur Hays
Sulzberger stepped down as publisher. Sulzberger
served the CIA and had signed a secrecy
agreement with the agency, so Wicker could not
know of this connection, and it was not in his
piece.
To
conclude where I began, think for a moment about
I.F. Stone during his haunted 1950s. While he
was well-regarded by a lot of rank-and-file
reporters, few would say so openly. He was PNG
among people such as Sulzberger—an outcast.
(Among my favorites of Stone’s many good lines:
“It’s always fun reading the Washington Post
because you never know where you’ll find a page
one story.”) Now think of all the good Stone
did. “I know that in the fifties,” Arthur Miller
wrote in recollection, “to find his Weekly
in the mail was to feel a breath of hope for
mankind.”
Now think about now.
A few reporters and
commentators advise us that the name of the game
these days is to sink the single most
constructive policy the Trump administration has
announced. The rest is subterfuge, rubbish. This
is prima facie the case, though you can
read it nowhere in the Times or any of
the other corporate media. A few have asserted
that we may now be witnessing a coup operation
against the Trump White House. This is a
possibility, in my view. We cannot flick it off
the table. With the utmost purpose, I post
here one of
these pieces. “A Win for the Deep State” came
out just after Flynn was forced from office. It
is by a writer named Justin Raimondo and
appeared in a wholly out-of-bounds web
publication called Antiwar.com. I know nothing
about either, but it is a thought-provoking
piece.
My point here is simple. You have studied the
Enlightenment? Good: You know what I mean when I
say we are headed into the Endarkenment. The
lights upon us are dimming. We have been more or
less abandoned by a press that proves incapable
of informing us in anything approaching a
disinterested fashion. As suggested, either the
media are Clintonian liberals before they are
newspapers and broadcasters, or they are
servants of power before they serve us.
This is the media’s disgrace, but our problem.
It imposes a couple of new burdens. We, readers
and viewers, must discriminate among all that is
put before us so as to make the best judgments
we can and, not least, protect our minds. The
other side of the coin, what we customarily call
“alternative media,” assumes an important
responsibility. They must get done, as best they
can, what better-endowed media now shirk. To put
this simply and briefly, they and we must learn
that they are not “alternative” to anything. In
the end there is no such thing as “alternative
media,” as I often argue. There are only media,
and most of ours have turned irretrievably bad.
And now they are doing much to land us in very
grave trouble.
Patrick Lawrence is a longtime columnist,
essayist, critic, and lecturer, whose most
recent books are Somebody Else’s Century:
East and West in a Post-Western World and
Time No Longer: America After the American
Century. His website is
patricklawrence.us.
