\n
Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n INTRODUCTION<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n This will be a summary, update, and extension from, a 25,000-word masterpiece of historical writing: the obscure, little-noticed, but hair-raising and scrupulously documented, account of how U.S. foreign policy, starting in 1994 (shortly after Bill Clinton became President), began to be subcontracted-out or privatized to Silicon Valley and America\u2019s top weapons-firms such as Lockheed Martin: Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed<\/span><\/a>\u2019s magisterial 22 January 2015 article, \u201cHow the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind\u00a0mass surveillance, endless war, and\u00a0Skynet\u201d<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n His detailed account is 100% consistent with theorists who have alleged that ever since at least the George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. government has been moving more and more in the direction of becoming a police-state, but Ahmed\u2019s focus is earlier than that and on the international-affairs portion of that, and on the participation of Google and other Silicon Valley firms \u2014 and Wall Street (basically the entire aristocracy) \u2014 in making it all happen.<\/span><\/p>\n Ahmed, perhaps the greatest of all investigative journalists, had previously been the first person to publish a book (in 2002, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked September 11, 2001<\/i><\/span><\/a>) disproving and exhaustively replacing the \u2018historical\u2019 (which is largely mythological) narrative that the U.S. government and its aristocratic masters promulgate regarding 9\/11. He there proved that networks of individuals inside the U.S. government<\/i> participated along with some major U.S. corporations,<\/i> in perpetrating the 9\/11 attacks. He also crucially noted (page 42) that \u201cThe only countries that openly accepted the Taliban as Afghanistan\u2019s legitimate government were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates \u2014 all of which happen to be U.S\/Western clients,\u201d but<\/i> he probed in depth only<\/i> into the U.S. side<\/i> of the planning of the 9\/11 attacks. He didn\u2019t deny the Saudi and other foreign involvement, but he documented high-level U.S. government-and-corporate assistance in the operation\u2019s success. <\/span><\/p>\n Much additional information came to light<\/span> after 2002 filling in crucial details of the higher-level<\/i> cooperation between the U.S. aristocracy and the aristocracies of mainly Saudi Arabia but also of those other Sunni-Islamic nations, to produce not only<\/b> the 9\/11 attacks<\/span><\/a><\/span> but<\/b> the entire jihadist movement, which is solely a Sunni-Islamic phenomenon (not at all Shiite, but specifically Sunni and headquartered in Saudi Arabia, which is the core of fundamentalist-Sunni belief). (Even Hillary Clinton said that it was the Sunni nations\u2019 aristocracies that were providing the \u201cterrorist financing.\u201d)<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n In an ironic turn of history, the U.S. aristocracy is allied with the Sunni aristocracies against the Shia ones, and therefore pretends that Shiite Iran, and Syria\u2019s non-sectarian but mainly Shiite-led government, have posed the chief terrorist threat against non-Islamic-majority countries. But this narrative has never actually been true except for Israel, which is the sole target of Shiite terrorists, as well as being also<\/i> a target of Sunni ones. Other than in Israel, virtually the entire problem of Islamic extremism comes from fundamentalist-Sunnis, who are financed by the royal Sunni families of Arabia, and (to a lesser extent, and also acknowledged by Clinton<\/span><\/a>) by Pakistan\u2019s Sunni aristocracy. In Israel, terrorism comes both from Shiites and from Sunnis, due to the apartheid Israeli occupation, which galvanizes all types of Muslims, but only in Sunni Islam is jihadism<\/i> (the phenomenon that terrorizes the entire world<\/i>) a reality. All jihadists are fundamentalist Sunnis. And yet, the United States aristocracy and thus the government it controls<\/span><\/a> has latched itself to the Sunni aristocracies, which are fundamentalists and actually enemies of not only the publics of Christian-majority nations, but of Shiites and even of non-devout Sunnis, everywhere \u2014 and even of publics everywhere, including of many people within their own countries. (For example: the Shiite minorities in the Arabic oil kingdoms are legally discriminated-against, and this anti-Shiite discrimination by Sunni aristocrats, causes significant resistance to their regimes<\/span><\/a>.) <\/span><\/p>\n The U.S. government is allied with state-sponsored enemies of the U.S. people, but this is an extremely profitable partnership for both the U.S. aristocracy (who control America\u2019s \u2018defense\u2019 firms and high-tech firms and oil-and-gas firms), and the Sunni aristocracies (who are not only top oil-and-gas producers but also the largest foreign buyers<\/i> of U.S. weaponry and much else \u2014 buying weapons in order to crush their domestic dissent). Arabic royals will always need plenty of weapons in order to control their publics, and that\u2019s a market which to a large extent shapes U.S. foreign policies.<\/span><\/p>\n However, Nafeez Ahmed didn\u2019t discuss the crucial support that Google (now called \u201cAlphabet\u201d) Corporation had been supplying both to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then to her Presidential campaign against first Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump<\/span><\/a>; but this Google-and-U.S.-government operation is a crucial part of the U.S. aristocracy\u2019s plan since at least 24 February 1990 to conquer post-communist and post-Soviet Russia, and to impose upon the American public also a police state dictatorship, and I have covered that in \u201cHow America Double-Crossed Russia And Shamed The West\u201d<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n And here now is my selection of excerpts from Ahmed\u2019s 25,000-word fully-documented-by-links account of what Hillary Clinton was calling (with praise) \u201cpublic-private partnerships,\u201d which have produced a U.S. national government that is controlled by America\u2019s wealthiest investors, and that does their bidding, especially in foreign affairs and the military, but also regarding control of the domestic public \u2014 a modern, sophisticated, police-state (Hillary Clinton\u2019s goal to complete). I am reducing his 25,000-word account to 5,500 words, and removing the links. Obviously, anyone who wants to explore Ahmed\u2019s account in more detail and also to explore his sources, can easily do that by clicking onto his article. I urge readers to do that, especially to donate to that great investigative journalist\u2019s crowd-funded site so that he will be able to produce and make available to the public, his brilliant articles and books. Here is my summary of that article<\/span><\/a> by means of excerpts:<\/span><\/p>\n ABBREVIATED VERSION OF AHMED\u2019S ARTICLE<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies useful\u00a0for intelligence agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel came earlier,\u00a0when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit.<\/span><\/p>\n Known as the \u201cHighlands Forum,\u201d this private network has operated as\u00a0a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American elites outside\u00a0the military since the mid-1990s. Despite changes in civilian\u00a0administrations, the network around the Highlands Forum has become\u00a0increasingly successful in dominating US defense policy.<\/span><\/p>\n Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science\u00a0Applications International Corporation [SAIC] are sometimes referred to as\u00a0the \u2018shadow intelligence community\u2019 due to the revolving doors\u00a0between them and government, and their capacity to simultaneously\u00a0influence and profit from defense policy. But while these contractors\u00a0compete for power and money, they also collaborate where it counts.\u00a0The Highlands Forum has for 20 years provided an off the record\u00a0space for some of the most prominent members of the shadow\u00a0intelligence community to convene with senior US government\u00a0officials, alongside other leaders in relevant industries. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n New Scientist<\/i>\u00a0magazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands\u00a0Forum to elite meetings like \u201cDavos, Ditchley and Aspen,\u201d\u00a0describing it as \u201cfar less well known, yet\u2026 arguably just as\u00a0influential a talking shop.\u201d Regular Forum meetings bring together\u00a0\u201cinnovative people to consider interactions between policy and\u00a0technology. Its biggest successes have been in the development of\u00a0high-tech network-based warfare.\u201d \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n In the prologue to his 2007 book,\u00a0A Crowd of One: The Future of\u00a0Individual Identity<\/i>, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media\u00a0Lab Human Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a\u00a0\u201cHighlands Forum\u201d gathering, an \u201cinvitation-only meeting funded\u00a0by the Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for\u00a0networks and information integration.\u201d This was a senior DoD post\u00a0overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon\u2019s most\u00a0powerful spy agencies including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence\u00a0Agency (DIA), among others. Starting from 2003, the position was\u00a0transitioned into what is now the undersecretary of defense for\u00a0intelligence. The Highlands Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded\u00a0by a retired US Navy captain named Dick O\u2019Neill. Delegates include\u00a0senior US military officials across numerous agencies and\u00a0divisions\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201ccaptains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and\u00a0commanders\u201d as well as \u201cmembers of the DoD leadership.\u201d \u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Andrew \u2018Yoda\u2019 Marshall, head of the Pentagon\u2019s Office of Net\u00a0Assessment (ONA) and co-chair of the Highlands Forum, at an\u00a0early Highlands event in 1996 at the Santa Fe Institute. Marshall is\u00a0retiring as of January 2015. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cVice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,\u00a0and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz\u201d \u200a\u2014\u200a widely considered the\u00a0hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics\u200a \u2014 \u200awere among Marshall\u2019s \u201cstar prot\u00e9g\u00e9s.\u201d \u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Highlands Forum\u2019s influence on US defense policy has thus\u00a0operated through three main channels: its sponsorship by the\u00a0Office of the Secretary of Defense (around the middle of last\u00a0decade this was transitioned specifically to the\u00a0Office of the\u00a0Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which is in charge of\u00a0the main surveillance agencies); its direct link to Andrew \u2018Yoda\u2019\u00a0Marshall\u2019s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.<\/span><\/p>\n According to Clippinger in\u00a0A Crowd of One<\/i>,\u00a0\u201cwhat happens at informal\u00a0gatherings such as the Highlands Forum, could, over time and\u00a0through unforeseen curious paths of influence, have enormous\u00a0impact, not just within the DoD but throughout the world.\u201d He wrote\u00a0that the Forum\u2019s ideas have \u201cmoved from being heretical to\u00a0mainstream. Ideas that were anathema in 1999 had been adopted\u00a0as policy just three years later.\u201d \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way \u2018influence bridge\u2019:\u00a0on the one hand, for the shadow network of private contractors to\u00a0influence the formulation of information operations policy across\u00a0US military intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to\u00a0influence what is going on in the private sector. …<\/span><\/p>\n O\u2019Neill\u2019s proposed strategy identified three categories of targets for IW [Information Warfare]:\u00a0adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable; potential partners,\u00a0\u201cso\u00a0they perceive the cause [of war] as just\u201d; and finally, civilian\u00a0populations and the political leadership so they \u201cperceive the cost as\u00a0worth the effort.\u201d A secret briefing based on O\u2019Neill\u2019s work \u201cmade its way\u00a0to the top leadership\u201d at DoD. \u201cThey acknowledged that O\u2019Neill was right\u00a0and told him to bury it. [Ahmed here presumes that a reader understands what this means: that the Pentagon agreed but wanted O\u2019Neill\u2019s proposed strategy never to become publicly known.]<\/span><\/p>\n Except the DoD didn\u2019t bury it.\u00a0Around 1994, the Highlands Group was\u00a0founded by O\u2019Neill as an official Pentagon project at the\u00a0appointment of Bill Clinton\u2019s then defense secretary\u00a0William Perry\u200a \u2014 \u200awho went on to join SAIC\u2019s board of directors after retiring from\u00a0government in 2003.\u00a0\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n In 1998, the Highlands \u201cGroup\u201d became a \u201cForum.\u201d According to\u00a0O\u2019Neill, this was to avoid subjecting Highlands Forums meetings to\u00a0\u201cbureaucratic restrictions.\u201d What he was alluding to was the\u00a0Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which regulates the way\u00a0the US government can formally solicit the advice of special\u00a0interests.<\/span><\/p>\n Known as the \u201copen government\u201d law, FACA requires that US\u00a0government officials cannot hold closed-door or secret\u00a0consultations with people outside government to develop policy. \u2026 In bypassing FACA, the Pentagon overrode even the loose\u00a0restrictions of FACA, by permanently excluding any possibility of\u00a0public engagement. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n Total participants in the DoD\u2019s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25\u201330 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns.<\/span><\/p>\n Other participants have included senior media professionals: David Ignatius, associate editor of the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0<\/i>and at the time the executive editor of the\u00a0International Herald Tribune<\/i>; Thomas Friedman, long-time\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/i>columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at\u00a0Washington Times\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0United Press International<\/i>; Steven Levy, a former\u00a0Newsweek\u00a0<\/i>editor, senior writer for\u00a0Wired\u00a0<\/i>and now chief tech editor at\u00a0Medium<\/i>; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the\u00a0New Yorker<\/i>; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the\u00a0Daily Beast<\/i>; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of\u00a0Global Voices Online<\/i>; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the\u00a0New York Times.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Due to its current sponsorship by the OSD\u2019s undersecretary of defense for intelligence, the Forum has inside access to the chiefs of the main US surveillance and reconnaissance agencies, as well as the directors and their assistants at DoD research agencies, from DARPA, to the ONA. This also means that the Forum is deeply plugged into the Pentagon\u2019s policy research task forces.<\/span><\/p>\n Google: seeded by the Pentagon<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In 1994 \u200a\u2014 \u200athe same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA \u200a\u2014 \u200atwo young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google\u2019s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the\u00a0<\/span>Digital Library Initiative<\/span>\u00a0(DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.<\/span><\/p>\n But that\u2019s just one side of the story.<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe funded Stanford University through the computer scientist\u00a0Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising graduate students\u00a0working on many exciting areas,\u201d Prof. Thuraisingham told me.\u00a0\u201cOne of them was Sergey Brin, the founder of Google. The\u00a0intelligence community\u2019s MDDS program essentially provided Brin\u00a0seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources,\u00a0including the private sector.\u201d\u00a0\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n In an extraordinary\u00a0<\/span>document<\/span>\u00a0hosted by the website of the University of Texas, Thuraisingham recounts that from 1993 to 1999, \u201cthe Intelligence Community [IC] started a program called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS<\/b>) that I was managing for the Intelligence Community when I was at the MITRE Corporation.\u201d The program funded 15 research efforts at various universities, including Stanford. Its goal was developing \u201cdata management technologies to manage several terabytes to petabytes of data,\u201d including for \u201cquery processing, transaction management, metadata management, storage management, and data integration.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n At the time, Thuraisingham was chief scientist for data and information management at MITRE, where she led team research and development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air Force Research Laboratory, as well as the US Navy\u2019s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and Communications and Electronic Command (CECOM). She went on to teach courses for US government officials and defense contractors on data-mining in counter-terrorism.<\/span><\/p>\n In her University of Texas article, she attaches the copy of an abstract of the US intelligence community\u2019s MDDS program that had been presented to the \u201cAnnual Intelligence Community Symposium\u201d in 1995. The abstract reveals that the primary sponsors of the MDDS programme were three agencies: the NSA, the CIA\u2019s Office of Research & Development, and the intelligence community\u2019s Community Management Staff (CMS) which operates under the Director of Central Intelligence. Administrators of the program, which provided funding of around 3\u20134 million dollars per year for 3\u20134 years, were identified as Hal Curran (NSA), Robert Kluttz (CMS), Dr. Claudia Pierce (NSA), Dr. Rick Steinheiser (ORD \u200a\u2014 \u200astanding for the CIA\u2019s Office of Research and Devepment), and Dr. Thuraisingham herself.<\/span><\/p>\n Thuraisingham goes on in her article to reiterate that this joint CIA-NSA program partly funded Sergey Brin to develop the core of Google, through a grant to Stanford managed by Brin\u2019s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIn fact, the Google founder Mr. Sergey Brin was partly funded by this program while he was a PhD student at Stanford. He together with his advisor Prof. Jeffrey Ullman and my colleague at MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton [Mitre\u2019s chief scientist in IT], developed the Query Flocks System which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. In fact the last time we met in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which became Google soon after.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Brin and Page officially incorporated Google as a company in September 1998, the very month they last reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n Dr. Anita Jones, head of DARPA from 1993\u20131997, and co-chair of\u00a0the Pentagon Highlands Forum from 1995\u20131997, during which\u00a0officials in charge of the CIA-NSA-MDSS program were funding\u00a0Google, and in communication with DARPA about data-mining for\u00a0counterterrorism\u00a0\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n John Doerr, who led the Kleiner Perkins investment in Google obtaining\u00a0a board position, was a major early investor in Becholshtein\u2019s Sun\u00a0Microsystems at its launch. He and his wife Anne are the main funders\u00a0behind Rice University\u2019s Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL),\u00a0which in 2009\u00a0received\u00a0$16 million from DARPA for its platform-aware-compilation-environment (PACE) ubiquitous computing R&D program.\u00a0Doerr also\u00a0has a close relationship with the Obama administration,\u00a0which he advised shortly after it took power to\u00a0ramp up\u00a0Pentagon\u00a0funding to the tech industry. In 2013, at the Fortune Brainstorm TECH\u00a0conference,\u00a0Doerr applauded \u201chow the DoD\u2019s DARPA funded GPS,\u00a0CAD, most of the major computer science departments, and of\u00a0course, the Internet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n From inception, in other words, Google was incubated, nurtured\u00a0and financed by interests that were directly affiliated or closely\u00a0aligned with the US military intelligence community: many of whom\u00a0were embedded in the Pentagon Highlands Forum.<\/span><\/p>\n Google captures the Pentagon<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine under\u00a0special\u00a0contract\u00a0with the CIA for its Intelink Management Office, \u201coverseeing top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other\u00a0IC agencies,\u201d according to\u00a0Homeland Security Today.\u00a0That year, CIA\u00a0funding was also being \u201cquietly\u201d funneled through the National Science\u00a0Foundation to projects that might help create \u201cnew capabilities to combat\u00a0terrorism through advanced technology.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The following year, Google bought the firm\u00a0Keyhole, which had originally\u00a0been funded by In-Q-Tel. Using Keyhole, Google began developing the\u00a0advanced satellite mapping software behind Google Earth. Former\u00a0DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones had been on\u00a0the\u00a0board of In-Q-Tel at this time, and remains so today.<\/span><\/p>\n Then in November 2005, In-Q-Tel issued notices to sell $2.2 million of\u00a0Google stocks. Google\u2019s relationship with US intelligence was further\u00a0brought to light when an\u00a0IT contractor\u00a0told a closed Washington DC\u00a0conference of intelligence professionals on a not-for-attribution basis that\u00a0at least one US intelligence agency was working to \u201cleverage Google\u2019s\u00a0[user] data monitoring\u201d capability as part of an effort to acquire data of\u00a0\u201cnational security intelligence interest.\u201d\u00a0\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n Those connections include Michele Weslander Quaid, an ex-CIA\u00a0contractor and former senior Pentagon intelligence official who is now\u00a0Google\u2019s chief technology officer where she is developing\u00a0programs\u00a0to\u00a0\u201cbest fit government agencies\u2019 needs\u201d; Elizabeth Churchill, Google\u00a0director of user experience; James Kuffner, a humanoid robotics expert\u00a0who now heads up Google\u2019s robotics division and who introduced the\u00a0term \u2018cloud robotics\u2019; Mark Drapeau, director of innovation engagement\u00a0for Microsoft\u2019s public sector business; Lili Cheng, general manager of\u00a0Microsoft\u2019s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs; Jon Udell, Microsoft\u00a0\u2018evangelist\u2019; Cory Ondrejka, vice president of engineering at Facebook;\u00a0to name just a few.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion dollar\u00a0no-bid contract\u00a0with the\u00a0NSA\u2019s sister agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency\u00a0(NGA). The contract was to use Google Earth for visualization services\u00a0for the NGA. Google had developed the software behind Google Earth\u00a0by purchasing Keyhole from the CIA venture firm In-Q-Tel.<\/span><\/p>\n Then a year after, in 2011, another of O\u2019Neill\u2019s Google Plus connections,\u00a0Michele Quaid\u200a\u2014\u200awho had served in executive positions at the NGA,\u00a0National Reconnaissance Office and the Office of the Director of\u00a0National Intelligence\u200a\u2014\u200aleft her government role to become Google\u00a0\u2018innovation evangelist\u2019 and the point-person for seeking government\u00a0contracts. Quaid\u2019s last role before her move to Google was as a senior\u00a0representative of the Director of National Intelligence to the Intelligence,\u00a0Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force, and a senior advisor to\u00a0the undersecretary of defense for intelligence\u2019s director of Joint and\u00a0Coalition Warfighter Support (J&CWS). Both roles involved information\u00a0operations at their core. Before her Google move, in other words, Quaid\u00a0worked closely with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for\u00a0Intelligence, to which the Pentagon\u2019s Highlands Forum is subordinate.\u00a0Quaid has herself attended the Forum, though precisely when and how\u00a0often I could not confirm.<\/span><\/p>\n In March 2012, then DARPA director\u00a0Regina Dugan \u200a\u2014\u200a who in that\u00a0capacity was also co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum\u200a \u2014 \u200afollowed\u00a0her colleague Quaid into Google to lead the company\u2019s new Advanced\u00a0Technology and Projects Group. During her Pentagon tenure, Dugan led\u00a0on strategic cyber security and social media, among other initiatives.\u00a0\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n In sum, many of Google\u2019s most senior executives are affiliated with the\u00a0Pentagon Highlands Forum, which throughout the period of Google\u2019s\u00a0growth over the last decade, has surfaced repeatedly as a connecting\u00a0and convening force. The US intelligence community\u2019s incubation of\u00a0Google from inception occurred through a combination of direct\u00a0sponsorship and informal networks of financial influence, themselves\u00a0closely aligned with Pentagon interests.<\/span><\/p>\n The Highlands Forum itself has used the informal relationship building of\u00a0such private networks to bring together defense and industry sectors,\u00a0enabling the fusion of corporate and military interests in expanding the\u00a0covert surveillance apparatus in the name of national security.\u00a0The\u00a0power wielded by the shadow network represented in the\u00a0[Highlands] Forum can, however, be gauged most clearly from its\u00a0impact during the Bush administration, when it played a direct role\u00a0in literally writing the strategies and doctrines behind US efforts to\u00a0achieve \u2018information superiority.\u2019\u00a0[Ahmed here fatally ignores to\u00a0investigate: \u2018superiority over what?\u2019 It\u2019s over Russia, first, and China\u00a0second. But I\u2019ll get to that later.] \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n O\u2019Neill also affirmed that to develop information warfare doctrine,\u00a0the Forum had held\u00a0extensive discussions\u00a0on electronic\u00a0surveillance and \u201cwhat constitutes an act of war in an information\u00a0environment.\u201d Papers feeding into US defense policy written\u00a0through the late 1990s by RAND consultants John Arquilla and\u00a0David Rondfeldt, both longstanding Highlands Forum members,\u00a0were produced \u201cas a result of those meetings,\u201d exploring policy\u00a0dilemmas on how far to take the goal of \u2018Information Superiority.\u2019\u00a0\u201cOne of the things that was shocking to the American public was\u00a0that we weren\u2019t pilfering Milosevic\u2019s accounts electronically when\u00a0we in fact could,\u201d commented O\u2019Neill. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n This [2003] was also the year that the Bush administration drew up its notorious Information Operations Roadmap. Describing the\u00a0internet as a \u201cvulnerable weapons system,\u201d Rumsfeld\u2019s IO\u00a0roadmap had advocated that Pentagon strategy \u201cshould be based\u00a0on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will \u2018fight the net\u2019\u00a0as it would an enemy weapons system.\u201d\u00a0The US should seek\u00a0\u201cmaximum control\u201d of the \u201cfull spectrum of globally emerging\u00a0communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems,\u201d advocated the document.<\/span><\/p>\n The following year, John Poindexter, who had proposed and run\u00a0the TIA surveillance program via his post at DARPA, was in\u00a0Singapore participating in the Highlands 2004\u00a0Island Forum. Other\u00a0delegates included then Highlands Forum co-chair and Pentagon\u00a0CIO Linton Wells; president of notorious Pentagon information\u00a0warfare contractor, John Rendon [about whom I\u2019ll explain after the end of these excerpts]. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n This was also the year of yet another Singapore Island Forum led by\u00a0Richard O\u2019Neill on behalf of the Pentagon, which included senior\u00a0defense and industry officials from the US, UK, Australia, France, India\u00a0and Israel. Participants also included senior technologists from\u00a0Microsoft, IBM, as well as\u00a0Gilman Louie, partner at technology investment firm Alsop Louie Partners.<\/span><\/p>\n Gilman Louie is a former CEO of In-Q-Tel\u200a \u2014 \u200athe CIA firm investing\u00a0especially in start-ups developing data mining technology. In-Q-Tel was\u00a0founded in 1999 by the CIA\u2019s Directorate of Science and Technology,\u00a0under which the Office of Research and Development (ORD)\u200a \u2014\u200a which\u00a0was part of the Google-funding MDSS program\u200a \u2014 \u200ahad operated. The\u00a0idea was to essentially replace the functions once performed by the\u00a0ORD, by mobilizing the private sector to develop information technology\u00a0solutions for the entire intelligence community.<\/span><\/p>\n Louie had led In-Q-Tel from 1999 until January 2006 \u200a\u2014 \u200aincluding when\u00a0Google bought Keyhole, the In-Q-Tel-funded satellite mapping software.\u00a0Among his colleagues on In-Q-Tel\u2019s board in this period were former\u00a0DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones (who is still\u00a0there), as well as founding board member\u00a0William Perry [who had been Biull Clinton\u2019s Secretary of Defense]: the man who\u00a0had appointed O\u2019Neill to set-up the Highlands Forum in the first place.\u00a0Joining Perry as a founding In-Q-Tel board member was John Seely\u00a0Brown, then chief scientist at Xerox Corp and director of its Palo Alto\u00a0Research Center (PARC) from 1990 to 2002, who is also a long-time\u00a0senior Highlands Forum member since inception.<\/span><\/p>\n In addition to the CIA, In-Q-Tel has also been backed by the FBI, NGA,\u00a0and Defense Intelligence Agency, among other agencies. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n Facebook\u2019s 2008 round of funding was led by Greylock Venture\u00a0Capital, which invested $27.5 million. The firm\u2019s senior partners\u00a0include Howard Cox, another former NVCA chair who also\u00a0sits on\u00a0the board\u00a0of In-Q-Tel. Apart from Breyer and Zuckerberg, Facebook\u2019s only other board member is Peter Thiel, co-founder of\u00a0defense contractor Palantir which provides all sorts of data-mining\u00a0and visualization technologies to US government, military and\u00a0intelligence agencies, including the\u00a0NSA and FBI, and which itself\u00a0was nurtured to financial viability by Highlands Forum members.<\/span><\/p>\n Palantir co-founders Thiel and Alex Karp met with John Poindexter\u00a0in 2004, according to\u00a0Wired, the same year Poindexter had attended\u00a0the Highlands Island Forum in Singapore. They met at the home of\u00a0[the famous \u201cregime-change in Iraq proponent] Richard Perle, another Andrew Marshall acolyte. Poindexter helped\u00a0Palantir open doors, and to assemble \u201ca legion of advocates from\u00a0the most influential strata of government.\u201d Thiel had also met with\u00a0Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA in this\u00a0early phase. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n The Pentagon Highlands Forum was therefore intimately involved in all\u00a0this as a convening network \u2014 but also quite directly. Confirming his\u00a0pivotal role in the expansion of the US-led global surveillance apparatus,\u00a0then Forum co-chair, Pentagon CIO Linton Wells, told\u00a0FedTech\u00a0magazine\u00a0in 2009 that he had overseen the NSA\u2019s roll out of \u201can\u00a0impressive long-term architecture last summer that will provide\u00a0increasingly sophisticated security until 2015 or so.\u201d \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n Who is the financial benefactor of the new Pentagon Highlands-partnered MIIS CySec initiative? According to the MIIS CySec\u00a0site, the\u00a0initiative was launched \u201cthrough a generous donation of seed funding\u00a0from George Lee.\u201d George C. Lee is a senior partner at Goldman Sachs,\u00a0where he is chief information officer of the investment banking division,\u00a0and chairman of the Global Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT)\u00a0Group.<\/span><\/p>\n But here\u2019s the kicker. In 2011, it was Lee who engineered Facebook\u2019s\u00a0$50 billion\u00a0valuation, and previously handled deals for other Highlands-connected tech giants like Google, Microsoft and eBay. Lee\u2019s then boss,\u00a0Stephen Friedman, a former CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs, and\u00a0later senior partner on the firm\u2019s executive board, was a also founding\u00a0board member\u00a0of In-Q-Tel alongside Highlands Forum overlord William\u00a0Perry and Forum member John Seely Brown.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2001, Bush appointed Stephen Friedman to the President\u2019s\u00a0Intelligence Advisory Board, and then to chair that board from 2005 to\u00a02009. Friedman previously served alongside Paul Wolfowitz and others\u00a0on the 1995\u20136 presidential commission of inquiry into US intelligence\u00a0capabilities, and in 1996 on the\u00a0Jeremiah Panel\u00a0that produced a report\u00a0to the Director of the National Reconnaisance Office (NRO)\u200a\u2014\u200aone of the\u00a0surveillance agencies plugged into the Highlands Forum. Friedman was\u00a0on the Jeremiah Panel with Martin Faga, then senior vice president and\u00a0general manager of MITRE Corp\u2019s Center for Integrated Intelligence\u00a0Systems \u200a\u2014 \u200awhere Thuraisingham, who managed the CIA-NSA-MDDS\u00a0program that inspired DARPA counter-terrorist data-mining, was also a\u00a0lead engineer. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n Knowledge is\u00a0Power<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n Given all this it is hardly surprising that in 2012, a few months after Highlands Forum co-chair Regina Dugan left DARPA to join Google as a senior executive, then NSA chief\u00a0Gen. Keith Alexander\u00a0was emailing Google\u2019s founding executive Sergey Brin to discuss information sharing for national security. In those emails, obtained under Freedom of Information by investigative journalist Jason Leopold, Gen. Alexander described Google as a \u201ckey member of [the US military\u2019s] Defense Industrial Base,\u201d a position Michele Quaid was apparently consolidating. Brin\u2019s jovial relationship with the former NSA chief now makes perfect sense given that Brin had been in contact with representatives of the CIA and NSA, who partly funded and oversaw his creation of the Google search engine, since the mid-1990s.<\/span><\/p>\n In July 2014, Quaid spoke at a US Army panel on the creation of a \u201crapid acquisition cell\u201d to advance the US Army\u2019s \u201ccyber capabilities\u201d as part of the\u00a0Force 2025 transformation initiative. She\u00a0told\u00a0Pentagon officials that \u201cmany of the Army\u2019s 2025 technology goals can be realized with commercial technology available or in development today,\u201d re-affirming that \u201cindustry is ready to partner with the Army in supporting the new paradigm.\u201d Around the same time, most of the media was trumpeting the idea that Google was trying to\u00a0distance\u00a0itself from Pentagon funding, but in reality, Google has switched tactics to independently develop commercial technologies which would have military applications the Pentagon\u2019s transformation goals.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet Quaid is hardly the only point-person in Google\u2019s relationship with the US military intelligence community.<\/span><\/p>\n One year after Google bought the satellite mapping software Keyhole from CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in 2004, In-Q-Tel\u2019s director of technical assessment Rob Painter\u200a\u2014\u200awho played a key role in In-Q-Tel\u2019s Keyhole investment in the first place\u200a\u2014\u200amoved to Google. At In-Q-Tel, Painter\u2019s work focused on identifying, researching and evaluating \u201cnew start-up technology firms that were believed to offer tremendous value to the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.\u201d Indeed, the NGA had confirmed that its intelligence obtained via Keyhole was used by the NSA to support US operations in Iraq from 2003\u00a0onwards.<\/span><\/p>\n A former US Army special operations intelligence officer, Painter\u2019s new job at Google as of July 2005 was federal manager of what Keyhole was to become: Google Earth Enterprise. By 2007, Painter had become Google\u2019s federal chief technologist.<\/span><\/p>\n That year, Painter told the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>\u00a0that Google was \u201cin the beginning stages\u201d of selling advanced\u00a0secret versions\u00a0of its products to the US government. \u201cGoogle has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community,\u201d the\u00a0Post<\/i> reported. The Pentagon was already using a version of Google Earth developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin to \u201cdisplay information for the military on the ground in Iraq,\u201d including \u201cmapping out displays of key regions of the country\u201d and outlining \u201cSunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, as well as US and Iraqi military bases in the city. Neither Lockheed nor Google would say how the geospatial agency uses the data.\u201d Google aimed to sell the government new \u201cenhanced versions of Google Earth\u201d and \u201csearch engines that can be used internally by agencies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n White House\u00a0records\u00a0leaked in 2010 showed that Google executives had held several meetings with senior US National Security Council officials. Alan Davidson, Google\u2019s government affairs director, had at least three meetings with officials of the National Security Council in 2009, including White House senior director for Russian affairs Mike McFaul and Middle East advisor Daniel Shapiro. It also emerged from a Google patent application that the company had deliberately been collecting \u201cpayload\u201d data from private wifi networks that would enable the identification of \u201cgeolocations.\u201d In the same year, we now know, Google had signed an agreement with the NSA giving the agency open-ended access to the personal information of its users, and its hardware and software, in the name of cyber security \u200a\u2014\u200a agreements that Gen. Alexander was busy replicating with hundreds of telecoms CEOs around the country.<\/span><\/p>\n Thus, it is not just Google that is a key contributor and foundation of the US military-industrial complex: it is the entire Internet, and the wide range of private sector companies \u200a\u2014\u200a many nurtured and funded under the mantle of the US intelligence community (or powerful financiers embedded in that community)\u200a \u2014 \u200awhich sustain the Internet and the telecoms infrastructure; it is also the myriad of\u00a0start-ups\u00a0selling cutting edge technologies to the CIA\u2019s venture firm In-Q-Tel, where they can then be adapted and advanced for applications across the military intelligence community. Ultimately, the global surveillance apparatus and the classified tools used by agencies like the NSA to administer it, have been almost entirely made by external researchers and private contractors like Google, which operate outside the Pentagon. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n As the nature of mass surveillance suggests, its target is not merely terrorists, but by extension, \u2018terrorism suspects\u2019 and \u2018potential terrorists,\u2019 the upshot being that entire populations\u200a \u2014 \u200aespecially political activists\u200a \u2014\u200a must be targeted by US intelligence surveillance to identify active and future threats, and to be vigilant against hypothetical\u00a0populist insurgencies\u00a0both at home and abroad. Predictive analytics and behavioural profiles play a pivotal role here.<\/span><\/p>\n Mass surveillance and data-mining also now has a distinctive\u00a0operational purpose\u00a0in assisting with the lethal execution of special operations, selecting targets for the CIA\u2019s drone strike kill lists via dubious algorithms, for instance, along with providing geospatial and other information for combatant commanders on land, air and sea, among many other functions. A single social media post on Twitter or Facebook is enough to trigger being placed on secret terrorism watch-lists solely due to a vaguely defined hunch or suspicion; and can potentially even land a suspect on a kill list.<\/span><\/p>\n The push for indiscriminate, comprehensive mass surveillance by the military-industrial complex \u200a\u2014 \u200aencompassing the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, defense contractors, and supposedly friendly tech giants like Google and Facebook\u200a \u2014 \u200ais therefore not an end in itself, but an instrument of power, whose goal is self-perpetuation. But there is also a self-rationalizing justification for this goal: while being great for the military-industrial complex, it is also, supposedly, great for everyone else.<\/span><\/p>\n The \u2018long\u00a0war\u2019<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n No better illustration of the truly chauvinistic, narcissistic, and self-congratulatory ideology of power at the heart of the military-industrial complex is a book by long-time Highlands Forum delegate, Dr. Thomas Barnett,\u00a0The Pentagon\u2019s New Map<\/i>.\u00a0Barnett was assistant for strategic futures in the Pentagon\u2019s Office of Force Transformation from 2001 to 2003, and had been recommended to Richard O\u2019Neill by his boss Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. Apart from becoming a\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0bestseller, Barnett\u2019s book had been read far and wide in the US military, by senior defense officials in Washington and combatant commanders operating on the ground in the Middle East.<\/span><\/p>\n Barnett first attended the Pentagon Highlands Forum in 1998, then was invited to deliver a briefing about his work at the Forum on December 7th 2004, which was attended by senior Pentagon officials, energy experts, internet entrepreneurs, and journalists. Barnett received a glowing\u00a0review\u00a0in the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>\u00a0from his Highlands Forum buddy David Ignatius a week later, and an endorsement from another Forum friend, Thomas Friedman, both of which helped massively boost his credibility and readership.<\/span><\/p>\n Barnett\u2019s vision is neoconservative to the root. He sees the world as divided into essentially\u00a0two realms: The Core, which consists of advanced countries playing by the rules of economic globalization (the US, Canada, UK, Europe and Japan) along with developing countries committed to getting there (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and some others); and the rest of the world, which is The Gap, a disparate wilderness of dangerous and lawless countries defined fundamentally by being \u201cdisconnected\u201d from the wonders of globalization. This includes most of the Middle East and Africa, large swathes of South America, as well as much of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. It is the task of the United States to \u201cshrink The Gap,\u201d by spreading the cultural and economic \u201crule-set\u201d of globalization that characterizes The Core, and by enforcing security worldwide to enable that \u201crule-set\u201d to spread.<\/span><\/p>\n These two functions of US power are captured by Barnett\u2019s concepts of \u201cLeviathan\u201d and \u201cSystem Administrator.\u201d The former is about rule-setting to facilitate the spread of capitalist markets, regulated via military and civilian law. The latter is about projecting military force into The Gap in an open-ended global mission to enforce security and engage in nation-building. Not \u201crebuilding,\u201d he is keen to emphasize, but building \u201cnew nations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n For Barnett, the Bush administration\u2019s 2002 introduction of the Patriot Act at home, with its crushing of habeas corpus, and the National Security Strategy abroad, with its opening up of unilateral, pre-emptive war, represented the beginning of the necessary re-writing of rule-sets in The Core to embark on this noble mission. This is the\u00a0only\u00a0way for the US to achieve security, writes Barnett, because as long as The Gap exists, it will always be a source of lawless violence and disorder. One paragraph in particular sums up his vision:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAmerica as global cop creates security. Security creates common rules. Rules attract foreign investment. Investment creates infrastructure. Infrastructure creates access to natural resources. Resources create economic growth. Growth creates stability. Stability creates markets. And once you\u2019re a growing, stable part of the global market, you\u2019re part of the Core. Mission accomplished.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Much of what Barnett predicted would need to happen to fulfill this vision, despite its neoconservative bent, is still being pursued under Obama. In the near future, Barnett had predicted, US military forces will be dispatched beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to places like Uzbekistan, Djibouti, Azerbaijan, Northwest Africa, Southern Africa and South America. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n Barnett\u2019s Pentagon briefing was greeted with near universal enthusiasm. The Forum had even purchased copies of his book and had them distributed to all Forum delegates, and in May 2005, Barnett was invited back to participate in an entire Forum themed around his \u201cSysAdmin\u201d concept.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n THE BROADER CONTEXT<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n Here is the famous article by James Bamford in the 17 November 2005 Rolling Stone<\/i> about John Rendon: \u201cThe Man Who Sold the War: Meet John Rendon, Bush’s general in the propaganda war\u201d<\/span><\/a>. In 1990 right before George Herbert Walker Bush nearly destroyed Iraq in the First Gulf War<\/span><\/a>, Rendon worked with Britain\u2019s Hill & Knowlton PR firm to get an attractive young Kuwaiti woman \u2014 \u201cNayirah\u201d is the only way she publicly identified herself, and she refused to give her last name in order \u201cto respect her need to protect her family\u201d \u2014 to testify to Congress (see the video of it here<\/span><\/a>) about Saddam Hussein\u2019s \u2018cruelty to Kuwaitis\u2019. The American public weren\u2019t told that she was Nayirah al-Sabah, the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.\u00a0Even more importantly, that family own Kuwait and its oil. The Sabah family are the royal family of Kuwait. Nayirah was the daughter of the nephew (who was serving then as Kuwait’s U.S. Ambassador) of the Emir or king, of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah. Her father subsequently became Kuwait’s Prime Minister, 2006-2011. THAT’S HOW HIGH UP AND CONNECTED ‘Nariyah’ WAS. And that testimony she gave to the U.S. Congress was lies, engineered by GHW Bush and his team, which included all of the Arabic royals, including especially the Sabahs. Saddam Hussein was at war against Shiite Iran but was, like post-1979 Iran was,\u00a0on friendly terms with Russia<\/span><\/a>, which GHWB wanted his successors ultimately to conquer, either by coup or by invasion, even after the USSR ended. So, the U.S. regime and its \u2018news\u2019 media spread its propaganda about \u201cIraqi atrocities in Kuwait\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and the Sabah family got to keep its ancestral loot. <\/span><\/p>\n And Rendon continued to be paid after the First Gulf War in order to set up ultimately an overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He worked continuously on that campaign, starting under GHW Bush and then straight through Bill Clinton\u2019s and into G.W. Bush\u2019s Presidency, when Rendon\u2019s decade-plus U.S.-government-funded propaganda-operation to deceive the American public in order for the U.S. government to invade Iraq and kill Saddam culminated in 2003.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n So, with a government that for decades deceives its own public in order to carry out what are essentially atrocities against foreign countries, and which cost U.S. taxpayers over $5 trillion, how can one reasonably call that a \u2018democracy\u2019? It\u2019s obviously an aristocracy, otherwise known as an \u201coligarchy.\u201d<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n Eric Schmidt, the top person at Google (now called \u201cAlphabet Corporation\u201d), worked along with Jared Cohen of Hillary Clinton\u2019s State Department, in 2011, helping them to set up the coup d\u2019etat that culminated in February 2014 by overthrowing the democratically elected President of Ukraine, who had been elected Ukraine\u2019s President barely a year before Schmidt started working with the State Department to organize the coup. And then, Schmidt provided the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign with crucial advice that helped defeat Bernie Sanders, but that subsequently failed to defeat Donald Trump.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Whether Trump\u2019s victory turns out to restore democracy to America will become known only by what Trump now does, and by what he avoids doing. It\u2019s too early to tell.<\/span><\/p>\n In order to understand all of this in its broadest realistic context, see my \u201cUnderstanding the Power-Contest Between Aristocracies\u201d<\/span><\/a>. Basically (starting on 24 February 1990, and up till at least the election of Donald Trump) what we\u2019ve had is an alliance of the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies and their respective vassal-aristocracies, against Russia and Iran and their vassal-aristocracies. The two nuclear superpowers remain the superpowers even after the end of the Cold War, and the U.S.-led group have, with increasing ferocity been building toward nuclear war, and proceeded very near to the precipice in their aggression against the Russia-led group.<\/span><\/p>\n Here is how U.S. President Barack Obama phrased the matter, to graduating West Point cadets, on 28 May 2014<\/span><\/a>:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That\u00a0has\u00a0been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century\u00a0to\u00a0come. But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents\u00a0opportunity, but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9\/11,\u00a0just how technology and globalization has put power once reserved\u00a0for\u00a0states in the hands of individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists\u00a0to do harm. Russia\u2019s aggression toward former Soviet states\u00a0unnerves\u00a0capitals in Europe, while China\u2019s economic rise and military\u00a0reach\u00a0worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle\u00a0classes\u00a0compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in\u00a0global forums.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n He was saying that Russia and any nation that allies with it is \u201cdispensable,\u201d only the United States is not; and that the military is central to, and serves, the economic sphere \u2014 guns exist to protect dollars not people. It was a quintessential aristocratic statement.<\/span><\/p>\n And Hillary Clinton was supposed to culminate it<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n