donderdag 20 februari 2014

Tom Engelhardt 54


February 20, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Thug State U.S.A.
[Book Recommendations for TomDispatch Readers: Here are four books you might consider putting in your library if you haven’t done so already.  There’s the new paperback of Nick Turse’s widely acclaimed bestseller, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.  Recently, we offered any reader who contributed $100 (or more) to this site a personalized, signed copy of it.  (Check out our donation page for more information.)  In addition, the newest Dispatch book by Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story, couldn’t be more powerful.  It’s a breath-catching odyssey through the true human costs of war, and though this should have been a mainstream journey, no one other than Jones bothered to take it.  Beautifully written, it really is a must-read.  For the fiction readers among you, there’sTomDispatch author Beverly Gologorsky’s Stop Here, a rare genuine working class novel about America (and its wars) and, as readers have been writing me, definitely an experience not to be missed.  Finally, a non-TomDispatch recommendation: The Sixth Extinctiona book by perhaps the best environmental writer of our moment, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert, has just beenpublished.  The subject, our own potential demise, couldn’t be grimmer, but I can guarantee you that it’s a riveting read (as Al Gore recently indicated on the cover of the New York Times Book Review).  And here’s a small reminder: if you're an Amazon customer and decide to buy any of these books (or anything else whatsoever), as long as you arrive at that website by clicking on a TomDispatch book link or the cover image link in any TD piece, we get a small cut of your purchase at no cost to you. Tom]

Documenting Darkness 
How a Thug State Operates 
By Tom Engelhardt

Here, at least, is a place to start: intelligence officials have weighed in with an estimate of just how many secret files National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden took with him when he headed for Hong Kong last June.  Brace yourself: 1.7 million.  At least they claim that as the number he or his web crawler accessed before he left town.  Let’s assume for a moment that it’s accurate and add a caveat.  Whatever he had with him on those thumb drives when he left the agency, Edward Snowden did not take all the NSA’s classified documents.  Not by a long shot.  He only downloaded a portion of them.  We don’t have any idea what percentage, but assumedly millions of NSA secret documents did not get the Snowden treatment.
Such figures should stagger us and what he did take will undoubtedlyoccupy journalists for months or years more (and historians long after that).  Keep this in mind, however: the NSA is only one of 17 intelligence outfits in what is called the U.S. Intelligence Community.  Some of the others are as large and well funded, and all of them generate their own troves of secret documents, undoubtedly stretching into the many millions.
And keep something else in mind: that’s just intelligence agencies.  If you’re thinking about the full sweep of our national security state (NSS), you also have to include places like the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (responsible for the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and the Pentagon.  In other words, we’re talking about the kind of secret documentation that an army of journalists, researchers, and historians wouldn’t have a hope of getting through, not in a century.
We do know that, in 2011, the whole government reportedly classified92,064,862 documents. If accurate and reasonably typical, that means, in the twenty-first century, the NSS has already generated hundreds of millions of documents that could not be read by an American without a security clearance.  Of those, thanks to one man (via various journalists), we have had access to a tiny percentage of perhaps 1.7 million of them.  Or put another way, you, the voter, the taxpayer, the citizen -- in what we still like to think of as a democracy -- are automatically excluded from knowing or learning about most of what the national security state does in your name. That’s unless, of course, its officials decide to selectivelycherry-pick information they feel you are capable of safely and securely absorbing, or an Edward Snowden releases documents to the world over the bitter protests, death threats, and teeth gnashing of Washington officialdom and retired versions of the same.

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