Nonconventional Thinker: Deep State Defiance: Kennedy Started, Trump To Continue?

January 01, 2019

Deep State Defiance: Kennedy Started, Trump To Continue?

“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, 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography, 1913

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, The New Freedom, 1913

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, in a letter to Colonel Edward M House dated November 21, 1933, as quoted in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945.

“The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings… For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced,
not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.”
John F Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, from a speech delivered to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961 and known as the “Secret Society” speech.

For at least the past hundred years (and likely a whole lot longer),

US presidents have grown used to following the dictates of the Deep State.

While Wilson & Roosevelt both campaigned promising to keep America out of war,

each ended up taking the country into world war within mere months of their re-election,

thus doing their bidding, despite both men acknowledging the existence of these powerful forces!

In his farewell address, 34th US president and 5-star general, Dwight Eisenhower
warned about a potential disaster of rising influence of the Military-Industrial Complex,
cautioning that: "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing
of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful message and goals.".
I think it is a fair conclusion to draw that in today's war climate, such a disaster has indeed occurred!

The fact that Kennedy became a Deep State casualty via the military arm of the MIC
was suspected by former president Truman who, one month to the day after his assassination,
called for the CIA's operational duties to be terminated & its role to be solely intelligence gathering.

An ailing Johnson, realizing (after the phantom Tonkin incident) that the war lust
of the powerful Deep State had only been intensified with the Kennedy coup assassination,
decided against running for a 2nd term, even after the path had been cleared with Bobby's removal.

In 1960, then VP Nixon was put in charge of Operation 40 (set up by the CIA
to topple the Castro regime). Furious at JFK's failure to support the Bay of Pigs invasion,
they were given a lead role in his assassination, Nixon himself present in Dallas the day before.
But Nixon's failure to intensify the Cold War (starting to thaw relations with China) led to his being
targeted for removal, Watergate deliberately leaked by the CIA, leading to his resignation in disgrace!

Following through on his campaign promise to "clean the cowboy elements out of the CIA",
Carter first fired then Director George Bush - followed later by 800 of its "cowboy" operatives.
This made him persona non grata with the Deep State as the CIA was their key enforcement arm
and led to the October Surprise, Iranian Hostage Crisis: A Covert CIA Operation to Stall the Iranian Revolution & Spearhead the Political Demise of Jimmy Carter and insert Bush into the White House!

Of course, the real Deep State plan all along had been to use Reagan's popularity to first
win the White House, then remove him via the tried & tested method of a 'lone-nut assassin'.
When this failed thanks to an alert Secret Service agent who had not been brought into the loop,
Reagan and his VP engaged in harried negotiations... the former calling into play all his acting skills
during the remainder of his two terms, the latter wielding more real power than those preceding him!

Without going into the full details here, suffice it to say that, while Poppy Bush had only a
solitary term in the White House, he enjoyed the equivalent of three terms in the Oval Office.
However, due to the diabolical MENA CONNECTION, the head of the Deep State crime syndicate
enjoyed an unbroken connection to the most powerful office in the world, from the Clinton regime
through to Baby Bush, finally Obama (3 generations of CIA connections), before the Trump phenom!

For the blissfully ignorant MSM 'faithful' as well as the political 'useful idiots' (on either side),
this is the reason behind an unprecedented vitriol directed at every turn to the current occupier.
After staging a successful Coup d'état in November 1963 to insert their man into the White House,
these powerful forces have enjoyed an iron grip on who sits atop the world's most powerful 'throne',
with little interruption for 55 years until along came a barbarian who threatens to drain their swamp!

Fifty five years ago, an idealistic John F. Kennedy had been given the singular opportunity
to gaze into the eyes of a dangerous foe warned about by his predecessor... and seen pure evil!
He was naïve enough to think that 'they wouldn't dare' - they (not Oswald) did & he paid the price!
The question for the seasoned man of the world, the master negotiator who now sits in his place is:
Will he exhibit Kennedy's courage while ditching his naïveté & remove their choke hold on the USA?

President Donald Trump walks with U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Michael Howard, commander of Joint Force Headquarters, at Arlington National Cemetery, May 29, 2017. Behind them are Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and U.S. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Flickr/CreativeCommons/DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley)

The mainstream media has attacked President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as impulsive, blindsiding his own national security team. But detailed, published accounts of the policy process over the course of the year tell a very different story. They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria.
The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone. The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state.
The relationship between Trump and his national security team has been tense since the beginning of his administration. By mid-summer 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford had become so alarmed at Trump’s negative responses to their briefings justifying global U.S. military deployments that they decided to do a formal briefing in “the tank,” used by the Joint Chiefs for meetings at the Pentagon.
But when Mattis and Dunford sang the praises of the “rules-based, international democratic order” that has “kept the peace for 70 years,” Trump simply shook his head in disbelief.
By the end of that year, however, Mattis, Dunford, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo believed they’d succeeded in getting Trump to use U.S. troops not only to defeat Islamic State but to “stabilize” the entire northeast sector of Syria and balance Russian and Iranian-sponsored forces. Yet they ignored warning signs of Trump’s continuing displeasure with their vision of a more or less permanent American military presence in Syria.
In a March rally in Ohio ostensibly about health care reform, Trump suddenly blurted out, “We’re coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon—very soon we’re coming out.”
Then in early April 2018, Trump’s impatience with his advisors on Syria boiled over into a major confrontation at a National Security Council meeting, where he ordered them unequivocally to accept a fundamentally different Syria deployment policy.
Trump opened the meeting with his public stance that the United States must end its intervention in Syria and the Middle East more broadly. He argued repeatedly that the U.S. had gotten “nothing” for its efforts, according to an account published by the Associated Press based on interviews with administration officials who had been briefed on the meeting. When Dunford asked him to state exactly what he wanted, Trump answered that he favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and an end to the “stabilization” program in Syria.
Mattis responded that an immediate withdrawal from Syria was impossible to carry out responsibly, would risk the return of Islamic State, and would play into the hands of Russia, Iran, and Turkey, whose interests ran counter to those of the United States.
Trump reportedly then relented and said they have could five or six months to destroy the Islamic State. But he also made it clear that he did not want them to come back to him in October and say that they had been unable to defeat ISIS and had to remain in Syria. When his advisors reiterated that they didn’t think America could withdraw responsibly, Trump told them to “just get it done.”
Trump’s national security team had prepared carefully for the meeting in order to steer him away from an explicit timetable for withdrawal. They had brought papers that omitted any specific options for withdrawal timetables. Instead, as the detailed AP account shows, they framed the options as a binary choice—either an immediate pullout or an indefinite presence in order to ensure the complete and permanent defeat of Islamic State. The leave option was described as risking a return of ISIS and leaving a power vacuum for Russia and Iran to fill.
Such a binary strategy had worked in the past, according to administration sources. That would account for Trump’s long public silence on Syria during the early months of 2018 while then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Mattis were articulating detailed arguments for a long-term military commitment.
Another reason the approach had been so successful, however, was that Trump had made such a big issue out of Barack Obama giving the Pentagon a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. As a result, he was hesitant to go public with a similar request for a Syria timetable. As CNN reported, a DoD official who had been briefed on the meeting “rejected that any sort of timeline was discussed.” Furthermore the official asserted that Mattis “was not asked to draw up withdrawal options….” Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Chiefs, also told reporters, “the president has actually been very good in not giving us a specific timeline.”
Nevertheless, without referring to a timeline, the White House issued a short statement saying that the U.S. role in Syria was coming to a “rapid end.”
Mattis and Dunford were consciously exploiting Trump’s defensiveness about a timeline to press ahead with their own strategy unless and until Trump publicly called them on it. That is what finally happened some weeks after Trump’s six month deadline had passed. The claim by Trump advisors that they were taken by surprise was indeed disingenuous. What happened last week was that Trump followed up on the clear policy he had laid down in April.
The Syria withdrawal affair is a dramatic illustration of the fundamental quandary of the Trump presidency in regard to ending the state of permanent war that previous administrations created. Although a solid majority of Americans want to rein in U.S. military deployments in the Middle East and Africa, Trump’s national security team is committed to doing the opposite.
Trump is now well aware that it is virtually impossible to carry out the foreign policy that he wants without advisors who are committed to the same objective. That means that he must find people who have remained outside the system during the permanent war years while being highly critical of its whole ideology and culture. If he can fill key positions with truly dissident figures, the last two years of this term in office could decisively clip the wings of the bureaucrats and generals who have created the permanent war state we find ourselves in today.
Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to The American Conservative. He is also the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.