Lew, I believe you are absolutely on-target with your observation concerning our National Security welfare-warfare State. Decades of close reading and observation has convinced me that the undisputed facts point in this direction. I briefly want to mention two books in particular that shaped this assessment.
The first is The End of the Draft, by Karl Hess and Thomas Reeves.
At the time of its appearance on 1970 bookstore shelves, Hess was Washington Editor of The Libertarian Forum, working closely with Murray Rothbard in shaping the emergence of the modern Libertarian movement. Hess came from deep within the Pentagon/Beltway political culture. He had long been a close aide to uber-hawk Senator Barry Goldwater (one of the principal institutional power brokers of the military-industrial complex) and a key presence in DC think-tanks and policy circles. But by 1970 he had decisively rejected his previous Cold War militarized mind-set. Hess, in no place more clearly than in this powerful book, cogently states the reasons why the extra-constitutional National Security welfare-warfare State had usurped the American republic, and how “conscription” was at its insidious core. But this is not only a book on the Draft; it is an unrelenting expose’ of the very legitimacy of the nation-state.
The other book is L . Fletcher Prouty’s The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World.
As in the case of the brilliant Jules Archer volume, The Plot To Seize The White House, it is terrific to have this masterful study of the inner workings of the early CIA back in print after so many years of unavailability.
Skyhorse Publishing is to be commended in seeing to it that both of these crucial works are again available to the attentive reading public who want to know the truth concerning our dark hidden history that the government has so actively strived to keep buried.
The late Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty served as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff where he was in charge of the global system designed to provide military support for covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In Oliver Stone’s highly acclaimed film on the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, JFK, the mysterious character “X” portrayed by Donald Sutherland was in fact Colonel Prouty, who assisted director Stone in the production and scripting of this historical epic. Prouty had relayed the shocking information detailed in the movie to the actual New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Cosner, in a series of communiques.
Prouty later authored JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, which will be re-issued by Skyhorse Publishing in November. It is an excellent companion volume to James W. Douglass’s seminal JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, in explaining how the November 22, 1963 coup d’etat in Dallas changed America forever.
The Secret Team was first published in 1973 during the Watergate scandal, when many Americans were first learning about the dark side of covert government, an outlaw executive branch headed by a renegade chief of state. Richard Nixon would not be the last of this foul breed.
This was years before Frank Church’s Senate Committee’s damning revelations of CIA misdeeds and assassination plots against foreign leaders rocked the nation.
In each chapter in his book, Prouty speaks frankly with an insiders knowledge of what he describes as the inner workings of “the Secret Team.”
This prudential judgment and keen assessment of the National Security Establishment was gained from years as a behind-the-scenes seasoned professional in military intelligence working intimately with those of the highest rank in policy making and implementation.
The important story Prouty boldly tells should be read by every reflective American who wants their republic back and an end to the empire. An empire enabled by the Fed, at the very heart of the welfare-warfare state.
12:51 pm on August 23, 2009
