The US is Possibly Facing its Own Coup: The Deep State

Washington DC – The agencies in Washington who are “permanent power factions” while presidents come and go over elected terms, such as the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies, are now rumoured to be staging a ‘soft coup’ against the US president.

These intelligence agencies are well documented for their long reach of control that includes implementing regime change in nations worldwide (Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan to name a few); engage in propaganda, exert power to commit war crimes and organize “death squads,” according to The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald.

Take the deep state one step further, and you start to understand the intelligence community’s barely-there accountability to democracy and democratic procedure. Comparably, the permanent members of these agencies are not elected to power, as is done with the president. The 17 intelligence organizations hold more power than the president in the form of surveillance, foreign policy agenda, counterterrorism and financial intelligence, preventing the president – Trump in this case – from enacting any policies.

This is the deep state coup, or a soft coup, as some note it.

Bill Kristol, a political analyst and commentator of several networks, and founder of The Weekly Standard noted on a tweet from Feb. 15, 2017:

“Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”

Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 14, 2017

While Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a recent live interview on MSNBC, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So, even for a practical, supposedly, hard-nosed businessman, he’s [Trump] being really dumb to do this.”

Intelligence agencies operate in secret – it is their prescribed agenda for national security. Comprising of 17 distinct organizations, with the CIA as a front runner, they generally fall into the Congress or Department of Defense (DoD) categories. The annual budget has steadily increased over the years from 2005 at $44 billion (just for the CIA) to a current $70.7 billion for both the DoD and National Intelligence Program (NIP) in 2016.

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The agencies are:

The CIA;

The NSA;

The Defence Intelligence Agency;

State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (foreign policy agenda);

Air Force Intelligence;

The FBI’s National Security Branch (counterterrorism);

Army Intelligence and Security Command (intel for troops);

The Department of Energy, Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (gathering of foreign nuclear weapons information);

Coast Guard Intelligence (homeland/maritime security);

The Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (terrorism and financial intel);

The DEA;

The Marine Corps Intelligence Activity;

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency;

The National Reconnaissance Office (responsible for US spy satellites);

The Office of Naval Intelligence;

The Department of Homeland Security;

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) (where everything is collated to be presented to the President).

Why a Deep State Coup?

In recent weeks, Trump blamed the intelligence community for withholding information and leaking damaging intel, something the ODNI denied last Wednesday.

But with a deep state coup, like any coup, the procedure is to deny everything, creating uncertainty about truth-tellers and muddying the line between the false and reality.

Glenn Greenwald sums up the acts of the intelligence community as “empowering themselves to enact policy,” explaining the intelligence agencies’ pro-Clinton stance pre-election times to the anti-Trump stance, which leads to the power struggle witnessed between the intelligence community and President Trump today.

“The CIA and the intelligence community were vehemently in support of Clinton and vehemently opposed to Trump, from the beginning. And the reason was, was because they liked Hillary Clinton’s policies better than they liked Donald Trump’s. One of the main priorities of the CIA for the last five years has been a proxy war in Syria, designed to achieve regime change with the Assad regime. Hillary Clinton was not only for that, she was critical of Obama for not allowing it to go further, and wanted to impose a no-fly zone in Syria and confront the Russians. Donald Trump took exactly the opposite view.”

Is the CIA subverting Trump?

The Wall Street Journal transcribes agencies as concerned about handing information over to Donald Trump, and thus, are allegedly actively withholding intelligence from the President for the worry of potential intel sharing with Russia.

Evidence supporting Trump’s close alliance to the Kremlin failed to surface amidst the sobering claims. On the other hand, WSJ makes claims based on anonymous officials with ambiguous claims.

The trend, however, to advocate intelligence agencies to engage in a coup, whose track records of historical atrocities is regarded by Greenwald as akin to “destroying democracy overnight.”

“Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving. But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all.”

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