By James Bovard

November 14, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - “Thank God for the deep state,” declared former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin recently while appearing on a panel at George Mason University. A year ago, the deep state was routinely reviled as a figment of paranoid right-wingers’ imagination. But much of the news media are now conferring the same sainthood on the deep state that was previously bestowed on special counsel Robert Mueller. 

A New York Times article last month gushed that “over the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present ... and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistleblower” on President Donald Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine. Times columnist James Stewart declared: “There is a deep state, there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law ... protecting the American people.” Times editorial writer Michelle Cottle proclaimed that “the deep state is alive and well” and hailed it as “a collection of patriotic public servants.”

Intelligence agencies gone rogue

Former CIA Director John Brennan, appearing on the same panel as McLaughlin, declared, “The reason why Mr. Trump has this very contentious relationship with CIA and FBI and the deep state people ... is because they tell the truth.”

Much of the news coverage of the Trump impeachment is following that storyline — even though it is astonishing as an overheated Trump tweet.

Five years ago, Brennan’s CIA ignited what should have been a constitutional crisis when it was caught illegally spying upon the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was compiling a massive report on the CIA torture program. After 9/11, the CIA constructed an interrogation regime by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods,” The Times reported in 2007. Secret Bush administration torture memos “set the CIA loose to slam suspects’ heads into walls up to 30 times in a row, to deprive suspects of sleep for more than a week straight, to confine them to small dark boxes for hours at a time ... and to suffocate them with water to induce the perception that they are drowning,” Georgetown University law professor David Cole noted. But the only official who went to prison was John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who publicly admitted that the CIA was waterboarding.

Is the deep state more trustworthy when it is killing than when it is torturing?