How the US Is Cementing Its World Domination

Neither James R. Clapper, director of National Intelligence, nor Keith B. Alexander, NSA director, is a particularly good ambassador for his native United States. They are typical, gruff, standoffish career soldiers, but, without a doubt, both understand a great deal about the business of spying. In this respect, they are the right men, in the right jobs.

It was also military men who stood at the dawn of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, as the American historian Alfred McCoy, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes in the August issue of Lettre International. In 1901, Gen. Ralph Van Deman became head of the Military Intelligence Division of the American occupying forces in the Philippines and began to gather detailed information about thousands of Filipinos.

Back home, in America, he formed the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, which, together with the FBI, compiled over a million pages of surveillance documents on American citizens of German descent during World War I. McCoy calls this “the institutional foundations for a future internal security state.” The next victims of the new spying apparatus were left-wingers and trade unionists. When Van Deman retired in 1929 — a major general by that time — he had over a quarter-million of files on suspected “subversives” in his house in San Francisco.

Clearly, spying on fellow citizens had become something of an addiction for some secret service agents. Since then, the U.S. has been busily building a surveillance state on an unprecedented scale. George W. Bush’s successor, Obama, is expanding the surveillance systems he created after 9/11.

“In what has become a permanent state of ‘wartime’ at home, the Obama administration is building upon the surveillance systems created in the Bush years to maintain U.S. global dominion in peace or war through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information control. The White House shows no sign — nor does Congress — of cutting back on construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor rival powers, counter hostile cyberstrikes, launch pre-emptive cyberattacks and protect domestic communications,” writes McCoy.

The French philosopher and publicist Regis Debray, writing in the same issue of Lettre International, is under no illusions:

“It is normal that an empire wants to know everything that happens within its territory and at its edges … It is an empire, ingenious and smiling, with sparkling white teeth and fresh breath, no more or less of a ‘cold monster’ than others.”

More level-headedness would do a world of good for Germans, who are outraged by the NSA scandal. The debates in Germany always influence the mood in the Austrian media. In May’s issue of Internationale Politik, the chief political correspondent of Reuters in Berlin, Andreas Rinke, calls for the hysterical voices in Germany to reflect for a moment. According to Rinke, the revelations about the NSA’s activities fundamentally only show one thing:

“Intelligence agencies do exactly what they have always done — they use the latest technical capabilities to gain access to information. What is new though is the use of big data,” or the analysis of large quantities of data.

However, it is precisely in this area that Germany is lagging miles behind other countries.