Michael Glennon gave the fourth talk in the Future of Freedom Foundation webinar “Restoring Our Civil Liberties.” Drawing from his excellent book National Security and Double Government, he provides a substantial revisionist reevaluation of its incisive conclusions as he argues that the Constitution and the rule of law have been dramatically eroded by the unelected deep state.

Glennon is an authoritative national security “insider” who is Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He has been Legal Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1977-1980); a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC (2001-2002); and Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Scholar at the United States Military Academy, West Point (2005).

The deep state is beyond the Constitution. It is separate from the “Madisonian” American government which we all learned about in school, composed of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The deep state has no restrictions on its extra-constitutional actions, no separation of powers, no checks and balances, no transparency or open accounting for its egregious and invasive behavior.

Since after World War II, in the name of fighting the Cold War, this monstrosity has been grafted covertly upon the backs of Americans, and is the primal source of all the misery, devastation, and destruction of our once great and noble republic.

The deep state is not monolithic or homogeneous but is composed of many seemingly disparate elements or competing factions united by their systemic base criminality under the phony rubric of “national security.”

Administrations change, but the deep state endures.

So who makes up the deep state? This alliance is composed of three primary elements. First, the “too big to fail” Wall Street bankocracy who profit by the billions from taxpayer bailouts stolen from the US treasury and the Fed, who fuel with their plunder the corruption of our political process by their Super Pacs’ funding of their complacent and compliant shills and political puppets.

Next, it is composed of the corrupt crony corporatists who again benefit at the public’s expense from their phony “free trade” deals (such as NAFTA and TPP) deindustrializing and destroying by millions the livelihood and jobs of American workers and their families.

Lastly, and most importantly, the deep state is made up of the military-industrial complex comprised of pentagon profiteers and private contractors of the imperial National Security State it sustains, with seemingly endless no win wars which have murdered millions of hapless victims across the planet, generating terrorism as blowback from its decades of unconstitutional covert actions and preemptive wars of aggression.

Some of those internecine factions within the deep state — particularly those un-elected powerful national security bureaucrats deep within the permanent government and Pentagon substructure that determine actual day-to-day policy from one administration to another, act out of amoral self-interest and institutional loyalty.

The Best of Charles Burris