The Corporate Media Industrial Military Security/Surveillance Complex and Eisenhower’s, Orwell’s and Washington’s Warning to US

January 19, 2011

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Fifty years ago Dwight D. Eisenhower warned we the people not to bind our economy to the “military-industrial complex” but like most prophets he was ignored in his lifetime and today we the people pay to support much more.
Eisenhower cautioned in his farewell address of the potential for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” from militarist interests that would gain control over this country’s national security policy and it came to be after that day we call 9/11.
The 9/11 attacks fed into militarist alliances and the Bush administration exploited a climate of fear as The Media assumed the role of secretaries taking down Big Brother’s dictation and we the people were railroaded into a war of aggression against Iraq. American military leadership used Iraq as the base from which to wage a campaign of regime change that expanded to other countries and assured even more power to the war mongers.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy wrote how after 9/11:
“The CIA sought and obtained virtually unlimited freedom to carry out drone strikes in secrecy and without any meaningful oversight by Congress. The Pentagon embraced the idea of the ‘long war’– a twenty-year strategy envisioning deployment of U.S. troops in dozens of countries, and the Army adopted the idea of ‘the era of persistent warfare’ as its rationale for more budgetary resources.
“The military budget doubled from 1998 to 2008 in the biggest explosion of military spending since the early 1950s — and now accounts for 56 percent of discretionary federal spending. The military leadership used its political clout to ensure that U.S. forces would continue to fight in Afghanistan indefinitely, even after the premises of its strategy were shown to have been false.
“Those moves have completed the process of creating a ‘Permanent War State’ — a set of institutions with the authority to wage largely secret wars across a vast expanse of the globe for the indefinite future. The Special Operations Forces, which operate in almost complete secrecy, obtained extraordinary authority to track down and kill or capture al Qaeda suspects not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in many more countries.” [1]
In Naomi Klein’s 2007 release, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” she argued that at the height of the 2003-07 economic boom, the military industrial complex was driving Israel’s tremendous economic growth, and Israel had the largest GDP growth of any Western country.
Klein theorized that the source of Israel’s tremendous economic growth could not be attributed simply to its encouragement of high tech entrepreneurship and basic science. Its success must be understood, rather, as a product of its ability to use the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory for defense industry innovation-and to showcase their wares.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and “suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom–a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war.
“Israel now sends $1.2 billion in ‘defense’ products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world. Much of this growth has been in the so-called ‘homeland security’ sector.
“Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of [2007], Israeli exports in the sector [reached] $1.2 billion-an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.
“Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’. Israel’s policy of erecting walls and checkpoints to seal off the occupied territories are also “laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested Palestinians–whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling Hamasistan–are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.” [2]
In 1948, George Orwell wrote “1984” and illuminated that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away because of the human addiction to power.
“Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins [and] although under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy all the fighting nations lost moral considerations…the unlimited destruction of civilian populations…atomic bombs…can human nature be changed so that man will forget his longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, love-can man forget that he is human?” [3]
In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington warned US:

“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.”
It will require an alert, engaged, knowledgeable citizenry of conscience to rise up and not just hold politicians accountable but fill them with fear of loosing their power that will save US from becoming nothing more than ‘guinea pigs’ for the Corporate Media Industrial Military Security/Surveillance Complex.
1. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/17-6
2. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070702/klein
3. Erich Fromm, Afterword, Centennial Edition “1984″

Eileen Fleming is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Eileen Fleming, Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com
Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory”
Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”