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Are the 17 Intel Agencies now the Fourth Branch of Government?
http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/agencies-fourth-government.htmlAre the 17 Intel Agencies now the Fourth Branch of Government?
By contributors | Aug. 4, 2014
The Fourth Branch
The Rise to Power of the National Security State
By Tom Engelhardt
As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. Thats bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: its just not so.
During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved. It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach. Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power. Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington. Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.
All of this is or should be obvious, but remains surprisingly unacknowledged in our American world. The rise of the Fourth Branch began at a moment of mobilization for a global conflict, World War II. It gained heft and staying power in the Cold War of the second half of the twentieth century, when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, provided the excuse for expansion of every sort.
Its officials bided their time in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when terrorism had yet to claim the landscape and enemies were in short supply. In the post-9/11 era, in a phony wartime atmosphere, fed by trillions of taxpayer dollars, and under the banner of American safety, it has grown to unparalleled size and power. So much so that it sparked a building boom in and around the national capital (as well as elsewhere in the country). In their 2010 Washington Post series Top Secret America, Dana Priest and William Arkin offered this thumbnail summary of the extent of that boom for the U.S. Intelligence Community: In Washington and the surrounding area, they wrote, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings about 17 million square feet of space. And in 2014, the expansion is ongoing.
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Are the 17 Intel Agencies now the Fourth Branch of Government? (Original Post)
unhappycamper
Aug 2014
OP
hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)1. Thanks for this excellent, if chilling, article.
Whenever news of its secret operations begins to ooze out, threatening to unnerve the public, the White House and Congress discuss reforms which will, at best, modestly impede the expansive powers of that state within a state. Generally speaking, its powers and prerogatives remain beyond constraint by that third branch of government, the non-secret judiciary. It is deferred to with remarkable frequency by the executive branch and, with the rarest of exceptions, it has been supported handsomely with much obeisance and few doubts by Congress.
And also keep in mind that, of the four branches of government, only two of them an activist Supreme Court and the national security state seem capable of functioning in a genuine policymaking capacity at the moment.
libodem
(19,288 posts)2. Yep
The secret branch. Ah, yes, we only thought our free press was the 4th estate.
We are so fucked.
BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)3. Yes, and our President
Our highest elected official is powerless to do anything about it. Just calling it torture is brave. So instead, his job is to get out in front of the Senate Report and make sure all that stuff and you know, mistakes, was really just patriots, and 9/11 scary, and USA! Brennan has full confidence whether he lies to Congress or you know, tortures some folks.
So I wouldn't call it the fourth branch, I would call it the Pentagon. One ring to rule them all.
Response to unhappycamper (Original post)
Distant Quasar This message was self-deleted by its author.