John Stanton, who has recently likened the conduct of the US government to the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler, also says that the Obama administration has launched a massive campaign against the progressive media and their freedom-seeking journalists who are trying to expose the malfunction and misdeeds of the White House and Pentagon.
"President Obama’s administration has pursued national security journalists and whistleblowers with a vigor never seen in American history using, on occasion, World War I era legislation to do so," said John Stanton in an interview with Fars News Agency. "If, indeed, the United States’ is pushing back against challenges to its hegemony through global warfare, then it is to the advantage of American leadership to limit the visual-based reporting of war by independent journalists or media outlets inclined to be anti-American in their views."
According to Stanton, the American people don’t confide in the mechanisms and structures of the ruling establishment anymore, and this was reflected in the surprisingly low turnout at the recent mid-term Congressional elections in the United States.
John Stanton is an independent journalist specializing in national security and political matters. His writings and commentary have been cited in different publications. His articles regularly appear on the political newsletter CounterPunch co-founded by the late Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He leads a seminar on national security at a private school in the Washington, DC metro region.
The following is the text of FNA’s interview with Mr. John Stanton.
Q: Many critics of President Obama accuse him of breaching the freedom of speech and press freedoms. One of the examples they cite is the US government’s prosecution of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist James Risen, who has made significant revelations about the complicity of the CIA in running a covert operation to disrupt and damage Iran’s nuclear program in 2000. It’s said that Risen’s email and phone communications with the former CIA Operations Officer Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, who disclosed important information about the "Operation Merlin" to him, were illegally monitored by the federal government. What do you think about Risen’s case? Don’t these practices violate the principles of the US Constitution and those values which the American society is said to be oriented on?
A: The United States of America fights for its interests which are designed by its ruling plutocracy, classes. To insist that the United States fights for democracy is incorrect as it supports totalitarian governments the world over: Bahrain and Egypt are just two of many. No nation on Earth operates in any ideal way except insofar as its interests are served. In this respect the United States is no different than any other nation. The difference lies in the extraordinarily immense power that the United States has and the inability of the American people to think critically and affect change through the ballot box or a boycott of it.
It is common for American leaders to promote democracy and talk about the United States in mythic terms but most Americans do not believe any longer in this bombast. Proof of that is in the recent national elections in the United States in which only 36.3 percent of registered voters took the time to cast ballots: A figure not seen since 1942. Only seven states had participation over the 50 percent mark with some states as low as 28 percent. This data is from the United States Elections Project.
It is instructive to look at how American leaders view their own people. Consider the plight of the residents of the city of Detroit, Michigan cut off from clean water or the lockdown of Boston, Massachusetts in the hunt for one perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombings. Consider too the national child poverty rates, the unemployed, and those simply cast aside through the manipulation of government labor figures by economists. Most Americans recognize that the stunning rise in the American stock indices have minimal relation to the daily lives of the middle to lower economic classes. In short voting is inconsequential when the two parties—Republican and Democrat—are nearly one in the same.
To analyze the United States it is imperative to view its people, culture, actions, strategies, operations and tactics through its history and instruments of national power. The instruments of national power are: diplomacy, information, military, economic, financial, law enforcement, intelligence and human capital. These instruments of power are substantial individually and, when combined, are wickedly formidable. Further in his 2010 US National Security Strategy statement, President Obama indicated that foreign and domestic strategies and operations are essentially indistinct.
Q: In one of your recent articles, you’ve compared the policies and actions of the US government to those of the Nazi Germany under the late dictator Adolph Hitler. Do you really see any connections between the US government in the 21st century and the Third Reich? What similarities have you identified in their political, economic, intelligence and security approaches?
A: United States history is one of violence and that continues in the first part of the 21st Century. According to Zoltan Grossman in his History of Military Interventions since 1890, the American government has taken military action hundreds of times against its own people and other countries.
The United States of America has been engaged in a War on Terror, in various guises, for nearly two decades now. At 15 years in length, the Afghanistan occupation is the longest conflict in America’s relatively young history. The Iraq occupation technically lasted for roughly 9 years though the United States always maintained a robust military and intelligence presence in Iraq after “exiting” in 2012.
In reality the United States never left Iraq — and will not leave Afghanistan — and has embarked on a third military occupation of that country ostensibly to fight the Islamic Caliphate. During the week of 12 November 2014, the world learned that America’s plan is to eliminate the Syrian government of President Assad while simultaneously destroying the Islamic Caliphate and Al-Qaeda. The plan was the worst kept secret in Washington, DC.
Clearly, the coming military engagement pitting the United States of America against Syria and Iraq, Sunni and Shia and Kurd will require a sizeable United States military force and a long term commitment of national will and treasure. Further, the interests of many nations are at stake: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait and Turkey are among them.
But the matter is far more significant in terms of geopolitical competition. The United States seeks to weaken both Russian and Chinese interests in the Middle East, Persian Gulf regions and, indeed, destabilize the internal operations of those two nations.
Q: What role do the US mainstream media play in promoting and expanding Washington’s foreign policy doctrine? You have called the mass media one of the US’s powerful instruments of national power. This is while the majority of newspapers, TV channels and radio stations in the United States are said to be run independently and without government support or intervention. What’s your perspective on that? Does the US government really use the media as a leverage to destabilize the "unfriendly" nations and incite violence and unrest in other parts of the world?
A: In essence the world is witnessing the 21st Century response of the United States to its global supremacy: the exposure by Edward Snowden of the extent of American espionage, the significant economic challenges posed by the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the growing military might of China and Russia and the threat their bilateral relationships pose to American interests, the specter of another financial crisis, the result of quantitative easing and austerity measures and the inability to put significant portions of Americans back to work.
At some point during President Obama’s presidency, the American military, industrial, corporate, financial, academic plutocracy convinced the American Commander-in-Chief that his second term was the time to push back against these challenges by using United States’ instruments of national power to wage war of every type: Currency manipulation, cyberwar, sanctions, military and intelligence operations to destabilize governments – Ukraine and Hong Kong, China for example, and disinformation operations; in short, a full-spectrum, all of government, and all of society effort to pacify the challenges and those who pose them.
When you take this background into account, the answers to your questions become obvious. Some time ago (2011) I wrote a paper titled The American National Security Consciousness, Culture and State. In that work I stated the following:
“A National Security Consciousness is firmly implanted in the psyche of the United States of America.Consequently, a National Security Culture and State has emerged as the defining characteristic of America in the early part of the 21st Century. This development was nearly a century in the making proceeding in fits and starts from the second decade of the 20th Century until the insurgent attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York City and Arlington, Virginia. Following that event, Whole of Government, Whole of Society strategies, tactics and operations were initiated to mobilize all of America’s Instruments of National Power to secure its Homeland. The American public has sanctioned this vision and mission. Behind the veil of the National Security Consciousness, Culture and State is the engine that powers the United States: American Capitalism with all its creative beauty and terrible destruction, and cyclic crises that capitalism demands. At the helm of the mighty American National Security machine are Four Controlling Domains, one of which is Big Media (a subset of the Corporate Domain). Through Big Media, and with the other Controlling Domains’ inputs, the consciousness of the American public has been shaped for acceptance of this new national security paradigm and existence within it. The American people have legitimized his reality through the electoral process [such as it is]. The process leading to the American National Security Consciousness, Culture, and State was not theresult of a conspiratorial process. The transition to the national security reality was openly discussed bythe Four Controlling Domains via Big Media.”
So with the above as background, it is easy to see why the media in the United States needs to be brought under some firmer form of control. James Risen’s case is significant not so much for the subject matter but that Risen is a member of the establishment. New York Times, which “plays ball” with the United States’ government and military, typically holds back stories that might compromise American national security.
President Obama’s administration has pursued national security journalists and whistleblowers with a vigor never seen in American history using, on occasion, World War I era legislation to do so. If, indeed, the United States is pushing back against challenges to its hegemony through global warfare, then it is to the advantage of American leadership to limit the visual-based reporting of war by independent journalists or media outlets inclined to be anti-American in their views. The world knows that the Internet and World Wide Web are, according to United States’ military doctrine, battlefields like any other. As such, the world should not be surprised that military information support operations (MISO) being waged by the Pentagon and the affiliated national security machinery will seek to manipulate everything from social media to television, radio broadcasts.
With a compliant mainstream media, and one very much reduced in size — foreign bureaus for example — by a loss of advertising and subscribers, there will be no clear picture of US war-making anywhere in the world. Note [that] imbedded reporters are censored. The American people will be less informed than they already are. The ramifications for the electoral process are severe.
I’d like to leave you with an excerpt from Paul Virilio one of my favorite writers. This is from his work Strategy of Deception, Verso Books (2000). I think he “called it” right a long time ago. Looking at the chaos going on in the world today, and the reduction of the nation-state, through privatization and austerity, to a security apparatus and financial guarantor, the following passage is informative.
For want of being able to abolish the bomb, we have decided then to abolish the state a nation state which is now charged with all sovereignist vices and all nationalist crimes thereby exonerating a military industrial complex which has spent a whole century innovating in horror and accumulating the most terrifying weapons from asphyxiating gases and bacteriological weapons to the thermonuclear device not to mention the future ravages of the information bomb or genetic bomb that will be capable not merely of abolishing the nation state but the people, the population by the genomic modification of the human race…the United States is aiming to attain the blessed state of a deterrence without an adversary or partner…Recent conflicts will merely have been arms fairs for American military equipment, new ways of promoting weapons and disastrously re-stimulating the military-industrial complex…The question which now arises is whether we have the freedom to say no to the promise of a yet more American Century that lies before us, no to the nihilistic discourse which the America of perspectiva and trans-appearance has been trotting out for 600 years.”
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari
