by Jacob G. Hornberger

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — i.e., the national-security branch of the federal government — own and control Congress — lock, stock, and barrel, just as they own and control the president and the Supreme Court. 

Joe Biden wanted to make it clear that the Pentagon was opposed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, a trip that was obviously intended to gin up a crisis with Red China. 

The notion that the Pentagon opposed Pelosi’s trip is sheer nonsense. In my opinion, there is no possibility whatsoever that any member of Congress, and especially the Speaker of the House, would ever buck the Pentagon on anything. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — i.e., the national-security branch of the federal government — own and control Congress — lock, stock, and barrel, just as they own and control the president and the Supreme Court. 

This is not a new phenomenon. Once the federal government was converted to a national-security state, everyone in Washington knew that there was a new sheriff in town, one that wielded omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, including the power of assassination. Given the overwhelming power of the new national-security branch of the government, the other three branches went into passive-and-support mode, especially after the Kennedy assassination in 1963. 

But this phenomenon clearly existed prior to that assassination. That was reflected by the term that President Eisenhower initially planned to use — “the military-industrial-congressional complex” — in the warning he issued to the American people in his Farewell Address in 1961.

Longtime readers of my blog know that for the past few years, I have been recommending a book entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is professor of international law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and who served as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Everyone in America should read Glennon’s book. It is a true eye-opener as to how the federal government is run, especially in foreign affairs.

Glennon’s thesis is a simple one: The national-security establishment is in charge of the federal government. But it permits the other three branches to have the appearance that they are actually in control. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA don’t care about appearances. It’s fine by them that Americans maintain the belief that the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court are in charge. What matters to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA is that actual power of being in charge. 

If Glennon is right — and I have no doubt that he is — then there is a good possibility that it was the Pentagon that put Pelosi up to making her trip or at least quietly supported it, even while creating the false appearance that Pelosi was acting against the wishes of the U.S. military establishment.

Why would the Pentagon do such a thing? For the same reason the national-security establishment has been ginning up crises around the world practically since its inception. The more crises, the better, because then Americans get afraid and get convinced that a national-security state is necessary to keep them safe. More crises mean more power, influence, and tax-funded largess for the national-security establishment. 

That’s what their old Cold War racket was all about — a perpetual crisis ostensibly based on a supposed international conspiracy supposedly based in Moscow in which the Reds were coming to get us. The more they made Americans afraid of the supposed communist threat to take over America, the more Americans supported them with power and warfare largess.

As I point out in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, President Kennedy, having achieved a gigantic breakthrough after the Cuban Missile Crisis, decided to put an end to their Cold War racket and to move our nation in a totally different direction. He is the only president to have done so. No president since Kennedy has dared to take on the national-security establishment. Kennedy’s different vision for America’s future was why they needed to eliminate him and elevate Vice President Johnson, who had the same Cold War mindset as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

When they lost their perpetual Cold War racket, they turned to deadly and destructive interventionism in the Middle East, knowing that that would produce a new crisis, one that would be based on terrorist blowback. The initial blowback — e.g., the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and the attack on the USS Cole — was not sufficient to produce a gigantic crisis. But the 9/11 attacks did prove to be sufficient. At that point, the national-security establishment had a new, big, perpetual crisis, one based on “terrorism.” They were now off to the races again. That’s when they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people and wreaking massive destruction in those two countries — and producing what seemed to be a perpetual crisis based on a never-ending supply of new terrorists. 

But they knew that their war on terrorism might ultimately begin to fizzle. The rather ho-hum reaction among many Americans to their assassination of 71-year-old al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri this week reflects the fizzling out of their war on terrorism. They need another big terrorist attack on American soil to get it ramped up again.

But it is now clear that they never gave up hope of restoring Russia and China as renewed official enemies. That’s what the Pentagon’s use of NATO to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact was all about. The Pentagon knew that if NATO ultimately threatened to absorb Ukraine, it could get Russia to react, which Russia ultimately did with its invasion of Ukraine.  

But clearly that’s not enough for these people. They need to ramp up another Cold War crisis with Red China, which would enable them to reinvigorate their old Cold War anti-communist crusade. That would enable them to trot out all of their old anti-communist mantras. That’s what President Trump’s trade war against China was all about. That’s also what Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan is all about. U.S. officials are dead-set on ginning up another crisis in that part of the world against another of their old Cold War official enemies. Don’t be surprised about additional crises involving North Korea, Cuba, and maybe even Vietnam.

The biggest mistake the American people have ever made — even bigger than having adopted the socialism of a welfare state and the federal income tax to fund it — was to permit the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state. So long as that conversion is permitted to stand, Americans will continue to live lives that are besieged by crises. To get our nation back on the right road — the road toward liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world — it is necessary to restore our founding government system of a limited-government republic, which necessarily means the dismantling and termination of the national-security establishment. 

Be seeing you