While the U.S. mainstream press comes down hard on the military crackdown in Myanmar, unfortunately, but predictably, they fail to see any parallel with our situation here in the United States.
Myanmar, like the United States, is a national-security state. For some years, the national-security establishment in Myanmar has permitted the other branches of government to maintain the facade of being in charge of the government and the country. But civilian, democratic rule was always by permission. The reality was that the national-security establishment was always in charge and could, as a practical matter, resume its total control over the government and the nation any time it wanted, which is what it recently did. Since then, the military and intelligence forces have imposed a severe crackdown against people who are protesting the military’s direct resumption of power.
Longtime readers of my blog know that I have long recommended a book entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon. Glennon is not some crackpot author. He is professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tuft’s University. From 1977-1980, he served as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Here is a more complete bio on Wikipedia. Glennon spoke at a conference The Future of Freedom Foundation held in 2017. You can view his talk here.
Glennon’s thesis is that the national-security part of the federal government is the entity that is actually in charge of running the federal government. It permits the other three branches of the federal government to maintain the facade of being in control, but it’s just a facade.
Sound familiar? Take a look at the situation in Myanmar.
Glennon’s thesis is a highly discomforting thesis, one that the mainstream press as well as many Americans are loathe to consider. It’s much easier to spend one’s energies focusing on Myanmar and other foreign countries.
Just consider the extreme deference that the other three branches of the federal government pay to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. The federal judiciary has make it clear that it will never interfere with regime-change operations carried out by the Pentagon and the CIA, including assassinations of both foreigners and Americans.
There is also no reasonable possibility that Congress would ever take on the national-security establishment at a fundamental level, especially given the large number of military and CIA veterans in Congress. Every member of Congress knows that if he even just thinks about significantly reducing the budget for the Pentagon, the CIA, or the NSA, much less dismantling them in favor of a restoring a limited-government republic, he will immediately be made a target for elimination of military projects and bases in his district, thereby making him an “ineffective congressman” in the eyes of the mainstream press and his constituents.
And woe to any president who dares to take on the national-security establishment. No president since John F. Kennedy has dared to do that, and we all know what happened to him. For a while, it appeared that President Trump was going to do that, which is one reason he won the 2016 election, but for some unknown reason he soon crumbled and cratered, giving the Pentagon and the CIA whatever they wanted and, in the end, not daring to pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
The control of the federal government wielded by the national-security establishment is not a new phenomenon. President Eisenhower alluded to it in his Farewell Address in 1961. He warned that this governmental structure — what he called “the military-industrial complex — posed a grave threat to the freedom and democratic processes of the American people. The people are Myanmar are now experiencing what Ike was talking about.
Think back to what happened after President Kennedy was assassinated. As soon as he was declared dead by the treating physicians in Parkland Hospital in Dallas, the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, was going to conduct an autopsy, which Texas law required.
Instead, a team of Secret Service agents, operating on orders, immediately went into action and, brandishing guns and implicitly threatening to kill anyone who got in their way, refused to permit Rose to conduct the autopsy and forced their way out of Parkland with the president’s body. They took the body to Dallas Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. Johnson then delivered the body into the hands of the U.S. military.
One of the fascinating aspects of this occurrence is that the mainstream press never questioned the role of the U.S. military in conducting the autopsy. It was just considered normal. It still is considered normal by the mainstream press today.
Yet, it is the epitome of abnormal, at least for a nation that is supposedly a civilian nation. The federal government, much less the military, didn’t have any jurisdiction to be involving itself in the president’s autopsy. At that time, it wasn’t a federal crime to murder the president. The assassination, under the law, was strictly a state crime.
But by that time — in the midst of the Cold War — the mainstream press, many of which had become assets of the CIA, had come to accept the supremacy of the national-security establishment within the federal government and within American society. That’s why they never even thought about questioning or challenging the national-security establishment’s decision to take control over the autopsy. That’s why they still fail to do so.
Next week, as part of our current, ongoing online conference entitled “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination,” we begin four presentations on the medical evidence surrounding the national-security establishment’s autopsy of President Kennedy’s body. I am confident that anyone who dares to watch those four presentations will reach the same conclusion that many of us have reached — that the national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on the president’s body.
There is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy, and no one has ever dared to present one. It’s just one more discomforting fact that the U.S. mainstream press, along with, unfortunately, all too many Americans, are loathe to confront. It’s easier and more comfortable to just keep muttering about “conspiracy theories.”
We will begin with a recorded presentation entitled “The JFK Medical Cover-Up” by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board, which we have posted online in advance of Horne’s Q&A presentation next Wednesday, April 7, at 7 p.m. Eastern time. Registration is free on the conference page of our website.
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