One month ago, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China released a twelve-point peace proposal to end the War in Ukraine. The plan called for, among other things, “[a]bandoning the Cold War mentality,” “[r]esuming peace talks,” and implementing “a comprehensive ceasefire.”
In response, failed musician and current U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, declared that a ceasefire in Ukraine “would violate the U.N. Charter.”
In other news, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In declaring peace illegal, the U.S. has reached new Orwellian heights in its continued attempts to prolong and profit from this conflict.
Of course, Mr. Blinken’s statement was a lie. Of course, declaring a ceasefire would not violate the U.N. Charter. Of course, an immediate ceasefire - i.e., ending the shooting, bombing, and exploding of people into pieces - would prevent untold deaths, which already number in the hundreds of thousands. To the average human being, who values being alive as opposed to being dead, an immediate ceasefire is obviously a good thing. But to War freaks like Mr. Blinken and the government he represents, a ceasefire is not desirable. As described in prior posts (see here for how the U.S. started and profits from this War in particular, and here for how the U.S. profits from War in general), the U.S. wants to prolong the current conflict for as long as possible for the grand geostrategic purpose of “bleeding” Russia, which comes with the nice ancillary benefit of massive private profits for weapons manufacturers like Lockheed and Raytheon at the cost of billions of dollars to the U.S. taxpayer and the publics of the world who indirectly finance U.S. military spending.
But since Mr. Blinken brought up the U.N Charter, perhaps we should see what it actually says. It was ratified by the U.S. Senate after all, and is therefore the “supreme law of the land” in the United States.
As I’ve described in prior posts, the managers of the U.S. permanent War economy and empire are a lawless group of rapacious criminals, as the U.N. Charter clearly demonstrates. Specifically, Article 2(4) provides that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The U.S. government has flagrantly violated this provision countless times, in violation of both international and domestic law. Among other things, it is guilty of assassinating foreign leaders, fomenting violent coups and toppling foreign governments, launching Wars of aggression against sovereign countries, murdering foreign civilians, inflicting mass starvation and death through unilateral sanctions (see here), and intervening in the internal affairs of nearly every country in the world. The U.S. has also violated its own domestic laws by assassinating its own citizens and engaging in systematic drug trafficking, money laundering, warrantless surveillance, and involuntary human experimentation (as discussed in my prior post on the U.S. clandestine biological weapons program).
Don’t believe me? Well, let’s take a look:
Foreign Assassinations, Coups, and Wars
The Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”), established in 1947, is prohibited by its charter from spying on Americans or conducting operations on U.S. soil. In response to learning about CIA involvement in Watergate,1 then-CIA director James Schlesinger commissioned an internal CIA report of its illegal activities in 1973, which became known as the “family jewels.” Ultimately declassified in 2007, the report details 25 years of illegality. As set forth in a January 3, 1975 internal government memorandum (which referred to such activities as “skeletons in the closet”), those activities included:
“the two-year physical confinement” of a Soviet defector “from 1964 to 1966” which “might be regarded as a violation of the kidnapping laws”;
the 1963 “wiretapp[ing] [of] two columnists”;
“personal surveillances” and “breaking, entry or wiretapping” of American citizens, including a Washington Post reporter;
the screening and opening of “mail to and from the Soviet Union” from “1953 and 1973,” and “to and from the Peoples’ Republic of China” from “1969 to 1972”;
the funding of research “[b]etween 1963 and 1973” “on the general subject of behavior modification,” including testing on “unwitting” citizens “of certain drugs”;
“covertly monitor[ing]” “dissident groups in the Washington, D.C. area” between “1970 and 1971,” including surveillance of “anti-war activities, including the U.S. peace movement and foreign groups” and the creation of files on “some 9,900 plus Americans”; and
plotting the “assassination of some foreign leaders, including Castro, Lumumba and Trujillo.”
The public first became generally aware of some of these misdeeds when journalist Seymour Hersh published an article titled “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” on December 22, 1974. In response to the article, President Gerald Ford in 1975 appointed the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, kicking off the so-called “Year of Intelligence,” which also saw the creation of the Church Committee and the Pike Committee.
The Rockefeller Committee ultimately produced a report that was a complete whitewash. Notably, then-White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney (yes, that Dick Cheney), played a key role in editing the final report, downplaying many illegal activities as “merely ‘improper’ rather than illegal.” He also removed an entire 86-page section titled “Alleged Plans to Assassinate Certain Foreign Leaders.” A draft of that excised section was declassified many years later, and is available at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, and online here.
Having read the report in full, it is clear why it was suppressed. Among other things, it sets forth in detail the CIA’s multiple assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo (the former dictator of the Dominican Republic), President Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia, its assassination of the democratically elected prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, as well as its open collaboration with the Mafia. Some choice quotes below:
“[t]here is evidence that prior to Lumumba’s death [in 1961] some CIA personnel and others discussed the possibility of undertaking a plan to assassinate Lumumba. According to Richard Bissell, who was the CIA Deputy Director of Plans at the time, he was aware of discussion of plans within the Agency concerning the possible assassination of Patrice Lumumba and that a case officer was directed to look into the possibilities . . . According to the case officer, who is now retired, Bissell asked him to go to the Congo and there murder or arrange for the murder of Lumumba . . . ”;
“Bissell also testified that there was discussion within the Agency of the possibility of an attempt on the life of President Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia which ‘progressed as far as the identification of an asset who it was felt might be recruited for this purpose.’”;
“Phase I plans [to assassinate Castro] involved the preparation of poison botulism pills by the CIA, the delivery of those pills to organized crime figures who in turn were to get the pills delivered to contacts they had in Cuba for placement in a beverage to be drunk by Premier Castro”;
The CIA asked contract agent Robert Maheu “to establish contact with a member or members of the gambling syndicate to explore their capabilities . . . contact with another syndicate member from Chicago, [Mafia leader] Sam Giancana, was made, and in turn an arrangement was made through Giancana for the CIA intermediary and his contact ‘to meet with a ‘courier’ who was going back and forth to Havana’”;
“Colonel [Sheffield] Edwards advised that in connection with the CIA’s operation against Castro he personally contacted Robert Maheu during the fall of 1960 for the purpose of using Maheu as a ‘cut-out’ in contacts with Sam Giancana, a known hoodlum in the Chicago area. Colonel Edwards said that since the underworld controlled gambling activities in Cuba under the Batista government, it was assumed that this element would still continue to have sources and contacts in Cuba . . .”;
“[D]uring 1963 several miscellaneous schemes were developed inside the Agency for possible use against Fidel Castro . . . One of these schemes involved . . . giv[ing] to Fidel Castro a contaminated skindiving suit. It was known that Fidel Castro liked to skindive. The CIA plan was to dust the inside of the suit with a fungus producing madera foot, a disabling and chronic skin disease, and also contaminating the suit with tuberculosis bacilli in the breathing apparatus.”
“During his period of time there were also discussio[ns] about preparing a booby-trap spectacular seashell which would be submerged in an area where Castro often skindived. The seashell would be loaded with explosives to blow apart when the shell was lifted. [seriously?] After investigation it was determined that there was no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive . . .”
The CIA “develop[ed] a ballpoint pen which had a hypodermic needle inside that when you pushed the lever, the needle came out and poison could be injected into someone.”
“Near the end of June [1960], according to CIA files, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs approved the provision of ‘a small number of sniper rifles or other devices for the removal of key Trujillo people from the scene,’ and requested that they be supplied at the earliest possible moment.”
“In a cable on March 4 [1961], a letter on March 16, and an airgram on March 22 the Consul General in Ciudad Trujillo reported that plans for Trujillo’s assassination were coming to a head. He requested additional authority to supply the pro-U.S. dissidents with weapons. Similar requests were made by the CIA Station Chief of his headquarters.”
I’m not a legal expert, but it would seem to me plotting to assassinate the leaders of foreign countries (however absurd the methods) and supplying arms to factions within those countries might constitute the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
There are dozens of other instances of such unlawful use of force from that period and beyond, approved by all U.S. Presidents from Eisenhower to Trump, including, to name a few: the 1953 CIA-backed overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran (Operation Ajax); the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the democratically elected President of Guatemala (Operation PBSuccess); the 1956-57 CIA-backed attempted overthrow of the government of Syria (Operations Straggle and Wappen); the 1957 attempted overthrow of the government of Indonesia, which ultimately led to a coup in 1965 that installed a dictator who slaughtered over a million alleged communists, including individuals identified on kill lists provided by the CIA; the 1963 CIA-backed overthrow of the South Vietnamese government; the 1966 CIA-backed coup in Brazil; 1966 CIA-backed coup in Ghana; the 1971 CIA-backed coup in Bolivia; the 1973 CIA-backed overthrow of the democratically elected President of Chile; the 1975 U.S.-backed invasion of East Timor by Indonesia that killed 100,000 people; the 1976 CIA-backed coup in Argentina in which 30,000 people were killed, and in which then-Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who does not travel abroad “without consulting his lawyers about the possibility of his arrest,” “urged the Argentinian military regime to act before the US Congress resumed session” and stated, “[t]he quicker you succeed the better . . . The human rights problem is a growing one . . . We want a stable situation. We won’t cause you unnecessary difficulties” (see here); the 1979 CIA operation to finance and arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan to draw the Soviets in and “bleed” them (Operation Cyclone); the 1981-1990 CIA-backed guerrilla war and support for the Contras against the Nicaraguan government; the 1996 CIA-backed attempted coup against Saddam Hussein in Iraq; multiple U.S.-backed coups in Haiti in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2021; the 2002 U.S.-backed coup in Venezuela; U.S.-sponsored color revolutions in the early 2000s, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, and the (failed) Denim Revolution in Belarus in 2005; the NATO and U.S.-backed uprisings and Civil War in Libya in 2011; the U.S.-backed uprisings and Civil War in Syria from 2011 to 2017 (discussed in a prior post); and the U.S.-backed Saudi genocide in Yemen from 2015 to the present.
The U.S. also launched multiple Wars of aggression against sovereign countries, including Korea (1950-1953); Vietnam; (1955-1975); Granada (1983); Libya (1986) and Panama (1989-1990) (see here). The U.S. armed and funded both sides in the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988, and helped Saddam Hussein deploy chemical weapons against the Kurds, in a conflict that killed over 500,000 people. The U.S. lied about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators and slaughtered hundreds of retreating Iraqi troops in 1991 during Iraq War I, then imposed sanctions and a no-fly zone against Iraq in the 1990s that resulted in 500,000 child deaths, which Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described as “worth it.”
The U.S. and NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium in a “humanitarian intervention” that killed at least two thousand civilians, blew up a “passenger train, a religious procession, a refugee column, a vacuum cleaner factory, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well.” And in the Twentieth Century, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, occupying it until 2021, and invaded Iraq in 2003, where troops remain to this day. American troops also occupy one-third of Syria. What is the reason for that troop presence? Well, as then-President Donald Trump described in 2019:
We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.
As part of its War of Terror, the U.S. operates an unmanned drone program in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, assassinating 90% innocent civilians with bombs from the sky, including U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in early 2011, and his 16-year-old son a few months later (Donald Trump finished Barack Obama’s work, killing al-Awlaki’s 8-year-old daughter in a February 2017 special forces raid in Yemen).
Vastly expanded by President Obama, the U.S. drone program relies heavily on “signature strikes,” where “unknown people” “can be targeted based on patterns of suspect behavior” (see here). In the Pentagon’s official counts of civilian deaths from the drone program, “officials counted any military-age male killed as combatants unless evidence showed they were not after the fact.” Decisions to approve drone strikes are made by committee, and during the Obama administration were discussed in weekly meetings known as “Terror Tuesdays” where “kill lists” were drawn up (Obama approved 540 strikes in his presidency).
Whistleblower, hero, and former Air Force official, Daniel Hale, was sentenced to 45 months in prison for bringing us much of this information. In a moving letter to the judge at his sentencing, Daniel Hale described the crisis of conscious that led him to disclose secret aspects of the U.S. drone program:
To say that the period of my life spent serving in the United States Air Force had an impression on me would be an understatement. It is more accurate to say that it irreversibly transformed my identity as an American. Having forever altered the thread of my life’s story, weaved into the fabric of our nation’s history. To better appreciate the significance of how this came to pass, I would like to explain my experience deployed to Afghanistan as it was in 2012 and how it is I came to violate the Espionage Act, as a result.
In my capacity as a signals intelligence analyst stationed at Bagram Airbase, I was made to track down the geographic location of handset cellphone devices believed to be in the possession of so-called enemy combatants. To accomplish this mission required access to a complex chain of globe-spanning satellites capable of maintaining an unbroken connection with remotely piloted aircraft, commonly referred to as drones. Once a steady connection is made and a targeted cell phone device is acquired, an imagery analyst in the U.S., in coordination with a drone pilot and camera operator, would take over using information I provided to surveil everything that occurred within the drone’s field of vision. This was done, most often, to document the day-to-day lives of suspected militants. Sometimes, under the right conditions, an attempt at capture would be made. Other times, a decision to strike and kill them where they stood would be weighed.
The first time that I witnessed a drone strike came within days of my arrival to Afghanistan. Early that morning, before dawn, a group of men had gathered together in the mountain ranges of Patika [province] around a campfire carrying weapons and brewing tea. That they carried weapons with them would not have been considered out of the ordinary in the place I grew up, much less within the virtually lawless tribal territories outside the control of the Afghan authorities. Except that among them was a suspected member of the Taliban, given away by the targeted cell phone device in his pocket. As for the remaining individuals, to be armed, of military age, and sitting in the presence of an alleged enemy combatant was enough evidence to place them under suspicion as well. Despite having peacefully assembled, posing no threat, the fate of the now tea drinking men had all but been fulfilled. I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain.
Since that time and to this day, I continue to recall several such scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair. Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions. By the rules of engagement, it may have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men—whose language I did not speak, customs I did not understand, and crimes I could not identify—in the gruesome manner that I did. Watch them die. But how could it be considered honorable of me to continuously have laid in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons, who, more often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time. Nevermind honorable, how could it be that any thinking person continued to believe that it was necessary for the protection of the United States of America to be in Afghanistan and killing people, not one of whom present was responsible for the September 11th attacks on our nation. Notwithstanding, in 2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was a part of killing misguided young men who were but mere children on the day of 9/11.
Nevertheless, in spite of my better instincts, I continued to follow orders and obey my command for fear of repercussion. Yet, all the while, becoming increasingly aware that the war had very little to do with preventing terror from coming into the United States and a lot more to do with protecting the profits of weapons manufacturers and so-called defense contractors. The evidence of this fact was laid bare all around me. In the longest or most technologically advanced war in American history, contract mercenaries outnumbered uniform wearing soldiers 2 to 1 and earned as much as 10 times their salary. Meanwhile, it did not matter whether it was, as I had seen, an Afghan farmer blown in half, yet miraculously conscious and pointlessly trying to scoop his insides off the ground, or whether it was an American flag-draped coffin lowered into Arlington National Cemetery to the sound of a 21-gun salute. Bang, bang, bang. Both served to justify the easy flow of capital at the cost of blood—theirs and ours. When I think about this I am grief-stricken and ashamed of myself for the things I’ve done to support it.
The most harrowing day of my life came months into my deployment to Afghanistan when a routine surveillance mission turned into disaster. For weeks we had been tracking the movements of a ring of car bomb manufacturers living around Jalalabad. Car bombs directed at US bases had become an increasingly frequent and deadly problem that summer, so much effort was put into stopping them. It was a windy and clouded afternoon when one of the suspects had been discovered headed eastbound, driving at a high rate of speed. This alarmed my superiors who believe he might be attempting to escape across the border into Pakistan.
A drone strike was our only chance and already it began lining up to take the shot. But the less advanced predator drone found it difficult to see through clouds and compete against strong headwinds. The single payload MQ-1 failed to connect with its target, instead missing by a few meters. The vehicle, damaged, but still driveable, continued on ahead after narrowly avoiding destruction. Eventually, once the concern of another incoming missile subsided, the driver stopped, got out of the car, and checked himself as though he could not believe he was still alive. Out of the passenger side came a woman wearing an unmistakable burka. As astounding as it was to have just learned there had been a woman, possibly his wife, there with the man we intended to kill moments ago, I did not have the chance to see what happened next before the drone diverted its camera when she began frantically to pull out something from the back of the car.
A couple of days passed before I finally learned from a briefing by my commanding officer about what took place. There indeed had been the suspect’s wife with him in the car. And in the back were their two young daughters, ages 5 and 3 years old. A cadre of Afghan soldiers were sent to investigate where the car had stopped the following day. It was there they found them placed in the dumpster nearby. The eldest was found dead due to unspecified wounds caused by shrapnel that pierced her body. Her younger sister was alive but severely dehydrated. As my commanding officer relayed this information to us she seemed to express disgust, not for the fact that we had errantly fired on a man and his family, having killed one of his daughters; but for the suspected bomb maker having ordered his wife to dump the bodies of their daughters in the trash, so that the two of them could more quickly escape across the border. Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.
The U.S. drone program is also notorious for striking “funerals of people killed in drone strikes,” as well as for its use of “double-tap” attacks, in which a follow-up missile is dropped after an initial strike to kill would-be rescuers. According to a Pakistani villager interviewed in 2012, after one strike on his in-laws’ home, “[o]ther people came to check what had happened; they were looking for the children in the beds and then a second drone strike hit those people.” According to Clive Smith, director of Reprieve, a charity formed to challenge extra-judicial drone strikes in court: “An entire region is being terrorized by the constant threat of death from the skies . . . Their way of life is collapsing: kids are too terrified to go to school, adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meeting[s] or anything that involves gathering in groups.”
That Vladimir Putin sure doesn’t respect the UN Charter!
Domestic Illegality
We discussed above the CIA’s “family jewels” and the revelation in the 1970s that it had violated its own charter for 25 years by conducting operations on U.S. soil. But the crimes committed by the CIA and other government agencies well exceeded what was revealed in the “family jewels.” Among other instances, the U.S. violated its own domestic laws by:
Assassinating dissidents and civil rights leaders such as Fred Hampton and likely Martin Luther King, Jr.;
Spying on and harassing Martin Luther King, Jr., even attempting to convince him to commit suicide with blackmail;
Spying on, surveilling, and conducting psychological warfare on civil rights groups, anti-war protestors, and other dissidents (the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS programs);
Conducting covert mind-control and other experiments on unwitting subjects, including “the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects’ consent, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture” (the CIA’s MKUltra program) (see also here);
Trafficking narcotics and other illegal drugs via the CIA’s proprietary air transport services (see also here and here) and other fronts, including an operation revealed by The New York Times in 1993 that “shipped a ton of nearly pure cocaine to the United States in 1990” that “wound up being sold on the streets in the United States” and for which “[n]o criminal charges [had] been brought.” (Interestingly, Gary Webb, the journalist who revealed further CIA drug trafficking operations involving crack cocaine subsequently committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the head);
Laundering drug money and other illicit proceeds through the international financial system to fund covert operations (see here and here);
Torturing detainees and then destroying the records of their interrogations in violation of court orders requiring their preservation;
Engaging in illegal, warrantless mass surveillance against its own citizens in express violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and lying about it under oath before Congress; and
Planning to kidnap and assassinate political prisoner and journalist Julian Assange, who the Trump Department of Justice indicted on trumped-up charges under the Espionage Act based on false testimony provided by a convicted child molester.
The U.S. claims to be governed by the rule of law. Nothing could be further from the truth. The biggest criminals in the world are those who implement U.S. foreign policy and wage Wars on behalf of the military-industrial complex for the profit of the very few at the expense of the very many. These criminals have no regard for the U.N. Charter or U.S. domestic law when it gets in the way of their interests. To the Wagers of War and the managers of U.S. Empire, the law is just a tool - a tool of control to keep those who would oppose them in line. That’s why Donald Trump, who ever-so-slightly and mostly only rhetorically questioned the U.S.’s involvement in NATO, Syria, and Afghanistan currently faces potential indictment in New York for hush money payments to a porn star, but is not facing charges for assassinating Qassem Soleimani in cold blood while he was on a peace mission in Iraq, drawing up plans to assassinate Julian Assange, authorizing the raid that killed al-Awlaki’s 8-year-old daughter, drone striking a wedding party in Afghanistan that blew 40 civilians to pieces, increasing drone strikes in the War-torn and starving country of Yemen sixfold over Obama’s policy, and continuing Obama’s policy of assisting the Saudis in their genocide there.
America first, right? It is no coincidence that the only praise Trump ever received from the establishment media was when he launched airstrikes in Syria and when he launched that raid that killed al-Awlaki’s daughter:
The fact of the matter is that it’s the President’s job to commit crimes - but only the right kind of crimes. Crimes against humanity, War crimes, and imperialist expansion are all okay; paying off a porn star with your own money? Now, that’s unacceptable.
As political scientist and historian, Aaron Good, writes in his book, American Exception:
Every political entity is constituted emotionally and morally through typically mythical narratives about its origins, history, and values . . . In a liberal democracy, not only are liberal norms salient, they are codified. This makes the rule of law another potential impediment to the imperatives of global dominance. In order to manage affairs of state in this context, a subset of the political class must manage the affairs of state . . . [t]his is the class, again, comprised of ‘high-ranking officials who are privy to state secrets, who decide what the public may and may not know, and who plan and authorize covert operations, foreign and domestic surveillance, and other espionage and intelligence activities . . .
They serve to allow the state to overcome three potential impediments to the exigencies of empire, namely: America’s moral code, global meta-norms, and the rule of law. Their amoral ethos and class consciousness allow them to be unbound from the American moral code and the norms of global society. Exceptionism—the institutionalized suspension of legal restraints—protects them from facing legal consequences stemming from their illicit clandestine activities . . .
US exceptionism emerged at the high point of American liberalism. No nation in world history was as wealthy and powerful relative to the rest of the world as was the US at the end of World War II. And yet, the liberal ideal of public sovereignty proved illusory. If sovereignty rests with the party that decides both ‘the exception’ and the ‘normal’ situation, sovereignty shifted gradually from the public to the deep state via the deep state’s dominance over the security and public states . . .
Beginning most decisively with the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, US elites began creating an overseas empire in earnest. Institutions were created which grew in tandem with US power—such that by the dawn of World War II, the US was poised to assume the mantle of global capitalist hegemon. The general character and institutional framework of the postwar world order was crafted by deep political forces, through a planning process that began prior to America’s entry into the war [the Council on Foreign Relations’ War and Peace Studies Project]. These processes led inexorably to the transformation of the American state and to the de facto abrogation of the rule of law—exceptionism, legitimized by myths of American exceptionalism.
Anyway, maybe it’s a good thing that the U.S. has declared peace to be against the law. Maybe somebody in the CIA or a future U.S. President might now try to achieve it.
Just kidding - of course they won’t. Peace would be the wrong kind of crime.
The book, American Exception, by political scientist and historian, Aaron Good, is essential reading. In it, he explains the breakdown of U.S. democracy and the rule of law and the continuity of American foreign policy across presidential administrations, and advances a theory of a “tripartite state” system of governance, comprised of an open and democratic state, an authoritarian security state, and a hidden “deep state,” which is the set of “all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society.” His chapters on Watergate and the various intrigues surrounding that deep political event are particularly illuminating.