Being Woke to the Praetorian Guard - Version 2

This post is an update to a previous version: Being Woke to the Praetorian Guard, Version 1

A version with a further update is available here.

I've just written an epistle or two which I want to save for possible future reference.  Here they are:

My Dear Beloved Friends,

Last night, several of you asked why and how I associate the CIA of 1963 with the CIA of today, with regard to meddling in domestic politics.  Separately, Glenn forwarded us an article four days ago which pondered the question of why Trump voters are still loyal.  And I'm forwarding here my response to an article forwarded by my sister-in-law about taking seriously the possibility of a Trump coup.  The short answers are as follows:

●       The CIA is similar to the Praetorian Guard:   Power and ability to spy, using the most advanced tools with an enormous budget, to learn the truth and the secrets and to use any means necessary to "safeguard the realm" form institutions with continuity beyond a single generation.

●       Most Trump voters distrust the mainstream media / cultural narrative, and thus support him as a kindred spirit.

●       Trump does not have the support of the CIA / military industrial intelligence complex, and thus is unlikely to be successful with respect to a coup.

My longer epistle below provides more flesh to go with these bare bones and, of course, I'm happy to discuss.

Love and hugs,
Dan

---------- Forwarded message ---------

From: Dan Secrest <danielsecrest@gmail.com>

Date: Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: The Atlantic: ‘This Must Be Your First’

Hi, ...

Thanks for sharing the article about the possibility of a coup in the United States, led by Donald Trump and his Republican supporters.  Belief in democracy is one of my core values -- and talking with friends and family about politics is basic to democracy.

My take is that most of the coups over my lifetime have been facilitated by the CIA, and the CIA is not on Trump's side. 

The 3 Turkish coups that the author cites were led by U.S. allied military officers trained to put down leftist dissent:

●       The 1960 coup was led by a colonel who had been among the first 16 officers trained by the United States in 1948 to form a stay-behind counter-guerrilla force.  At the time of the coup, he explicitly stated his anticommunism and his faith and allegiance to NATO and CENTO, an organization whose goal was to contain the Soviet Union (USSR) by having a line of strong states along the USSR's southwestern frontier.

●       The 1971 coup was a crackdown by the military on general disorder, including that of the Workers' Party of Turkey for carrying out communist propaganda and supporting Kurdish separatism. 

●       The 1980 coup, which provides the central cautionary tale of the article you forwarded, was led by the commander of  an anti-communist "stay-behind" guerrilla force set up with the support of NATO.

Donald Trump does not have a military background and has not been able to control the CIA during his presidency.  A CIA whistleblower working in the White House developed the case that led to Trump's impeachment:

Eric Ciaramella, the CIA operative who worked on loan to the White House as a top Ukrainian analyst in the National Security Council, had previously served as an adviser on Ukraine to Vice President Biden.

And it is my strong belief that the Mueller investigation was based upon false reports of Russian collusion invented by U.S./U.K. intelligence assets.  Trump's America first policy was not in line with the consensus U.S. foreign policy and thus he was investigated using tactics that have been all too common throughout my lifetime.

I have recently come to the realization that JFK was assassinated by the CIA.  Here's a good book on the subject: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.  I find the evidence overwhelming, and have written about it in some detail in a blog entitled This I Believe.

The CIA seems similar to the Praetorian Guard of the Roman Empire:

The Praetorian Guard was an elite unit of the Imperial Roman army whose members served as personal bodyguards and intelligence for Roman emperors…  the first emperor, Augustus, founded the Guard as his personal security detail. Although they continued to serve in this capacity for roughly three centuries, the Guard became notable for its intrigue and interference in Roman politics, to the point of overthrowing emperors and proclaiming their successors.

Power and ability to spy, using most advanced tools with an enormous budget, to learn the truth and the secrets and to use any means necessary to "safeguard the realm" form institutions with continuity beyond a single generation.

The CIA and its sister intelligence agencies have been leaking information to the mainstream media.  Thus, we went to war in Iraq in 2003, destroying large swathes of the Middle East.  Thus, Russia was used as a scapegoat for Trump's victory in 2016. 

I am a firm believer that the Republican party is responsible for the dire situation today.  They have been much closer to the military-industrial complex over the decades, and I can't blame the Democrats for wanting to enlist some of that power on their side.  But I do disagree with the specifics employed, including the scapegoating of Russia and leftists.  We need to be WOKE to the power behind the news as reported by The Atlantic, The New York Times, NBC, etc.

With love,
Dan

Update -- Email Response to Some Questions...

Here are some off the top of my head answers to your questions:

Trump is trying to steal the election.  That’s clear.  The Atlantic article also so states.  If successful, wouldn’t that represent a coup?

In my understanding, there is quite a bit of similarity in what Trump is doing this year to what Hillary did in 2016-2019.  Here's Matt Taibbi:

Do I personally believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump? No. However, I also didn’t believe the election was stolen from Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the Internet was bursting at the seams with conspiracy theories nearly identical to the ones now being propagated by Trump fans... 
 
Unrestrained speculation about the illegitimacy of the 2016 election had a major impact on the public. Surveys showed 50 percent of Clinton voters by December of 2016 believed the Russians actually hacked vote tallies in states, something no official agency ever alleged even at the peak of the Russiagate madness. Two years later, one in three Americans believed a foreign power would change vote tallies in the 2018 midterm elections...   
What makes the current situation particularly grotesque is that the DNI warning about this summer stated plainly that a major goal of foreign disruptors was to “undermine the public’s confidence in the Democratic process” by “calling into question the validity of the election results.”
 
Our own domestic intelligence agencies have been doing exactly that for years now. On nearly a daily basis in the leadup to this past Election Day, they were issuing warnings in the corporate press that you might have reason to mistrust the coming results: ...

In fact, go back across the last four years and you’ll find a consistent feature of warnings about foreign or domestic “disinformation”: the stern scare quote from a bona fide All-Star ex-spook or State official, from Clint Watts to Victoria Nuland to Frank Figliuzzi to John Brennan to McMullan’s former boss and buddy, ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden. A great many of these figures are now paid contributors to major corporate news organizations.

What do we think the storylines would be right now if Trump had won? What would those aforementioned figures be saying on channels like MSNBC and CNN, about what would they be speculating? Does anyone for a moment imagine that YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook would block efforts from those people to raise doubts about that hypothetical election result?
 
We know the answer to that question, because all of those actors spent the last four years questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s election without any repercussions. The Atlantic, quoting the likes of Hayden, ran a piece weeks after Trump’s election arguing that it was the duty of members of the Electoral College to defy voters and elect Hillary Clinton on national security grounds. Mass protests were held to disrupt the Electoral College vote in late December 2016, and YouTube cheerfully broadcast videos from those events. When Electoral vote tallies were finally read out in congress, ironically by Joe Biden, House members from at least six states balked, with people like Barbara Lee objecting on the grounds of “overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in our election.”

In sum, it’s okay to stoke public paranoia, encourage voters to protest legal election results, spread conspiracy theories about stolen elections, refuse to endorse legal election tallies, and even to file lawsuits challenging the validity of presidential results (Judge tosses DNC’s election-hacking lawsuit against Russia, WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign), so long as all of this activity is sanctified by officials in the right party, or by intelligence vets, or by friendlies at CNN, NBC, the New York Times, etc.

Even if we accept that the CIA has been deeply involved in all coups of Dan’s lifetime, couldn't a coup or de facto coup occur WITHOUT CIA involvement, yea even to install, after the coup, a person who the CIA disliked?

If we are to speculate about the possibility of a coup and who it might install in power, it is useful to look for patterns in history.  What stands out to me is that coups are always military/spy agency assertions of power.  If the CIA does not support Trump, then who could be expected to support him?  From Glenn Greenwald:

Biden’s top appointees thus far overwhelmingly have massive ties to Wall Street and the industries which spend the most to control the U.S. government. As but one egregious example, Pine Island Investment Corp. — an investment firm in which key Biden appointees including Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief nominee Gen. Lloyd Austin have been centrally involved — “is seeing a surge in support from Wall Street players after pitching access to investors.”

The CIA action to arrange JFK’s killing, if true, has no relevance to later coups, Turkish or American.  Why bring it up?

My point in bringing up the 1963 CIA coup (I think that's a fair description if they toppled the elected president) is that it shows that the CIA has a history of supporting coups.  Obviously, if there is a pattern of behavior then it is relevant.  Just today I read the following:

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who is reportedly on Biden’s short list for CIA director (... has) skeletons from the past that make him singularly unfit to lead the CIA...

In Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm, he writes that Morell “coordinated the CIA review” of the intelligence used by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his infamous Feb. 5, 2003 speech to the UN Security Council on the threat from (non-existent) WMD in Iraq.

Tenet, who sat directly behind Powell on that day, pointed out that Morell had served as regular briefer to President George W. Bush. It has been reported that, of the CIA’s finished intelligence product on Iraq, it was The President’s Daily Brief delivered by Morell that most exaggerated the danger from Iraq.

Morell fluttered quickly up CIA ranks as the yes-sir protege of two CIA directors who were, arguably, the worst of them all — “Slam-Dunk” Tenet and the-Russians-hacked-so-Trump-won John Brennan. During the presidential campaign of 2016, as Brennan and his accomplices in the National Security State worked behind the scenes to sabotage candidate Donald Trump, Morell dropped any pretense of nonpartisanship — which used to be the hallmark of an intelligence professional.

From retirement (but with eyes on the big prize he coveted in a new Democratic administration), Morell openly backed the Democratic candidate in a highly unusual op-ed in The New York Times on August 5, 2016: “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.”

How does one become WOKE to the power behind the news as reported by NYT, etc.?  (Also, define WOKE, please.)

From the NY Times: 

wokeness, itself a freighted term, originally derived and then distorted from the Black vernacular “woke,” which invokes a spirit of vigilance to see the world as it really is. (The experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley may have been the first to introduce “woke” to the mainstream as an adjective, in his 1962 essay on Black idiom, “If You’re Woke You Dig It”)

So being "woke" is understanding that the world may not be how it seems according to the mainstream conventional wisdom.  That is what I've noticed.  The most well known expression of the phenomenon is Noam Chomsky's concept of Manufacturing Consent:

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky arguing that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922).[2] The book was honored with the Orwell Award.

I hope this helps.

Hugs,
Dan