@blatham,
blatham wrote:
It's Edward Snowden. But aside from that, you have this exactly backwards which is a very weird mistake to make.
Those of us who initially wrote in defense of Assange's project or who supported Snowden's or Manning's actions were trying to understand and address 1) the dangers arising from the vast expansion of intelligence gathering in the West and 2) the different, though potentially related, set of dangers to citizen democracy arising from institutional alliances between governments and business entities/big money (eg, we would very much have wished to see a release of the transcripts of discussions between Cheney and the petroleum industry people he met with prior to the invasion of Iraq).
Thank you for the correction, but rather than me having it exactly backwards, it appears that you didn't read what I wrote very carefully, which is fine, I don't always read what you write...unless I feel the need to respond to it.
In any case, if you had read what I wrote you would know that I don't consider the government's intelligence agencies to be the deep state. The degree to which they collect information and the manner in which they do so may be problematic, but unless it is being done without authorization or in contradiction to established policy it is not an example of deep state operations.
At the same time, the deep state is not based on any alliance between government institutions and business entities. As I wrote, deep state actors may occasionally coordinate their efforts with established institutions and business entities but this is not a defining characteristic.
Whether or not a transcript of Cheney's discussions with oil industries would have been informative, if it could not be obtained through legal means it might have been obtained by a deep state operative who felt that releasing it somehow served his personally preferred agenda for America whether that be the downfall of Cheney or the advancement of government support for alternative energy sources.
Julian Assange relies, primarily, on two sources: hackers and deep state operatives. Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were examples of the latter although they certainly saw themselves as heroic whistle blowers. I feel certain that a goodly number (although not all) deep state operatives are convinced that they are serving the best interests of the country when they act outside the boundaries of their authority and the law. Obviously this doesn't make it so.
Although it wouldn't address the argument you've made which, frankly, doesn't make much sense given what I wrote, I should have worded my statement
Quote:If you think Chelsea Manning and Joseph Snowden are heroes you're probably big fans of some, if not many who operate in the deep state environment.
I'm pretty sure that fans of Manning and Snowden were not similarly big fans of Seth Richards who apparently provided Wikileaks with thousands of DNC e-mail and who unfortunately became a member of that very strange club of people who coincidentally end up dead after crossing the Clintons. Richards, at most, operated on the fringe of the deep state since he was a DNC staffer and while the Democrat Party is a major US political institution it is not an actual arm of the government. Regardless, I'm pretty sure that this time you get the picture.
My definition of deep state may not be consistent with some others but it doesn't stand alone in the wilderness. I don't suggest that there is a anything like a single secretive shadow government consisting of a vast number of conspiring government employees and operating from the bowels of government. Some may, and admittedly it's a far more ominous and dramatic notion than mine. It's what is implied by the original usage of the term, but terms like these have elastic qualities. In any case I don't think my concept of deep state is rendered harmless because it would support the plot line of a bestselling thriller. It is dangerous and it is creating chaos in government.
