"If the US military and CIA are not accountable to the American tax payers or their elected representatives, who are they accountable to?"

New US Security Appointments and The Dangerous Separation of State and Military

Tony Cartalucci

The latest game of Washington musical chairs expects to see General David Petraeus head the CIA while current CIA Director Leon Panetta is to take over Robert Gate's position as Secretary of Defense. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) astutely noted that this arrangement further blurs the lines between America's "intelligence community" and the role of the US Armed Forces.

To call the CIA an "intelligence agency" is entirely a misnomer. In reality, the CIA has become an extra-legal private military that has waged secret wars for decades. It has been recently augmenting its repertoire with pilotless drones to carry out air campaigns along the Afghan-Pakistani border. The CIA has also been involved in on-going military operations inside of Iran, Somalia, and now Libya. The CIA's ever expanding budget has long been categorized as "classified" and therefore entirely unaccountable to both the American tax payers and their so-called elected representatives.

The CFR's article, "Crumbling Wall Between the Pentagon and CIA" notes that the CIA's growing influence is due to "its greater integration with the military." This "greater integration" will engender the US military with less oversights and more secrecy as it expands its support for the CIA's growing role in waging global war.

As the lines blur between the US military and this private, secretly funded army we can expect the worst of both worlds to be combined, with the US military already conducting extra-legal operations in Libya in tandem with the CIA, with absolutely no Congressional oversight or even so much as token approval given. If the US military and CIA are not accountable to the American tax payers or their elected representatives, who are they accountable to?

The short answer is global corporate-financier interests. These are the entities that create, fund, and supply a steady stream of resources to private international think-tanks that shape and peddle what ultimately becomes US, and to a greater extent, "Western" foreign and domestic policy. The move toward "international law" and "international institutions" being the ultimate arbiters of Western progress, leaves the future of an increasing number of nations under the control of unelected, often largely unknown corporate-financier oligarchs. General Petraeus himself was a Council on Foreign Relations member as of 2009.

Operations in Libya within the greater "Arab Spring" is just one example of what we can expect, as policy planned in the shadows of secrecy are piecemeal revealed and sold to the public by a complicit corporate-owned media, and carried out by an increasingly unaccountable military-intelligence-industrial complex. The usurpation of personal and national sovereignty is not solely a matter of foreign policy. Americans need only look back to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the extra-legal collection of legal firearms, the extra-legal deployment of military troops in direct violation of Posse Comitatus, along with entirely illegal and illegitimate private mercenaries roving the streets of New Orleans. This is only the beginning of what is becoming a truly dystopian nightmare.

As people continue to wake up and call for accountability, even the scant illusion of such accountability will be systematically taken away. Such accountability will continue to ebb as long as the corporate-financier oligarchy continues to hold the power and resources we literally depend on to live. The US Constitution specifically put arms in the hands of citizens and the duty to declare war in the hands of elected representatives to prevent what is happening this very day. This dangerous separation of state and military represents another aspect of American government taking the unmistakable shape of absolute tyranny.

In the face of such unaccountable power mongering, the answer is to usurp in turn the power of these corporate-financier oligarchies, built upon over a century of our own ignorant complicity. By boycotting and replacing their system, purchase-by-purchase, house-by-house, community-by-community, we will erode the foundation upon which they wield such ever-expansive unwarranted influence. From their fiat financial system, to their factory farms, to their monopolistic industrial practices that stand like a brick wall in the way of real technological progress, everything they have commandeered has become a bane to our existence and an exercise of control over us. We have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking these responsibilities back into our own hands, lest this corporate army, unaccountable to the people, becomes the enforcer of this increasingly neo-feudal system.

Link:
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/04/new-us-security-appointments-and.html