Some Back Story
One person to speak out recently is NBC/MSNBC reporter William Arkin, a longtime and well-known military reporter who is best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010. He co-reported it with two-time Pulitzer winner Dana Priest on how sprawling, unaccountable, and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era. This report dealt with black budget operations, programs that not even the commander in chief nor Congress has any idea about.
It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about. – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defence Minister
Their investigation lasted approximately two years and concluded that America’s classified world has “become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
This was many years ago, and the latest developments with regards to these programs has come in the form of $21 trillion missing dollars from the Department of Defence, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Michigan State professor and Economist Mark Skidmore, along with former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts found that this money was going towards black budget programs as well. Fitts has also been quite outspoken about a secret space program.
You can read more about that particular story
here.
With regards to the report by Arkin,
When that three-part investigative series, titled “Top Secret America,” was published, I hailed it as one of the most important pieces of reporting of the war on terror, because while “we chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.”
(source)
This is one of many proofs of the Deep State. It’s been referenced by countless politicians and academics throughout history.
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. – Theodore Roosevelt
The most recent politicians to reference it were Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, as well as Vladimir Putin. Western mainstream media will have you believe this narrative as being completely ‘fake,’ despite the fact that many western politicians themselves have also shared this perspective.
William Arkin Speaks Out Against NBC & MSNBC
Arkin recently blasted NBC News along with MSNBC news in an email for “becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump, and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism.” This is something, based on my research, mainstream media has always been. It’s why they were created in the first place.
Arkin stated that, as a result of this, “the national security establishment not only hasn’t issued a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength, and “is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.”
Another great quote comes to mind here,
“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation . . . The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties . . . [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”
(source)– Mayor of New York City from 1918-1925
Arkin has worked with NBC and MSNBC since 2016, and it’s great to see that he’s leaving due to the fact that these outlets have become nothing but the “central propaganda arm of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI. This network alone consists of former CIA, NSA and Pentagon officials as news analysts. MSNBC host and former Bush-Cheney Communications Director Nicole Wallace is one of multiple great examples.
Establishment Media Mouthpieces
MSNBC’s star national security reporter Ken Dilanian was widely mocked by media outlets for years for being an uncritical CIA stenographer before he became a beloved NBC/MSNBC reporter, and let’s not forget CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s connections to the CIA.
Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to infiltrate mainstream media and use it to influence the minds of the masses decades ago, seems to be in full effect today, at a larger scale than anyone can possibly imagine.
In early 2018, NBC hired former CIA chief John Brennan to serve as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst.”
A declassified document from the CIA archives in the form of a letter from a CIA task force addressed to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency details the close relationship that exists between the CIA and mainstream media and academia. The document states that the CIA task force “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation,” and that “this has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success” stories,’ and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others.” Furthermore, it explains how the agency has “persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.”
The Email
Again, all of this lead to Arkin publishing a critique of NBC and MSNBC in the form of an email he sent to multiple outlets, including the Intercept where I first came across this story.
You can read it in its entirety below.
My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus. …
To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous. …
Windrem again convinced me to return to NBC to join the new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.
