INTRODUCTION

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’s top weapons-firms such as Lockheed Martin: Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s magisterial 22 January 2015 article, «How the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet».

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’s focus is earlier than that and on the international-affairs portion of that, and on the participation of Google and other Silicon Valley firms — and Wall Street (basically the entire aristocracy) — in making it all happen.

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) disproving and exhaustively replacing the ‘historical’ (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 participated along with some major U.S. corporations, in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks. He also crucially noted (page 42) that «The only countries that openly accepted the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — all of which happen to be U.S/Western clients», but he probed in depth only into the U.S. side of the planning of the 9/11 attacks. He didn’t deny the Saudi and other foreign involvement, but he documented high-level U.S. government-and-corporate assistance in the operation’s success.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Much additional information came to light after 2002 filling in crucial details of the higher-level 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 the 9/11 attacks but 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’ aristocracies that were providing the «terrorist financing».)

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’s 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 alsoa 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) by Pakistan’s 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 (the phenomenon that terrorizes the entire world) a reality. All jihadists are fundamentalist Sunnis. And yet, the United States aristocracy and thus the government it controls 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 — 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.)

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’s ‘defense’ 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 of U.S. weaponry and much else — 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’s a market which to a large extent shapes U.S. foreign policies.

However, Nafeez Ahmed didn’t discuss the crucial support that Google (now called «Alphabet») 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; but this Google-and-U.S.-government operation is a crucial part of the U.S. aristocracy’s 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«How America Double-Crossed Russia And Shamed The West».

And here now is my selection of excerpts from Ahmed’s 25,000-word fully-documented-by-links account of what Hillary Clinton was calling (with praise) «public-private partnerships», which have produced a U.S. national government that is controlled by America’s wealthiest investors, and that does their bidding, especially in foreign affairs and the military, but also regarding control of the domestic public — a modern, sophisticated, police-state (Hillary Clinton’s 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’s 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’s 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 by means of excerpts:

ABBREVIATED VERSION OF AHMED’S ARTICLE

In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies useful for intelligence agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel came earlier, when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit.

Known as the «Highlands Forum,» this private network has operated as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American elites outside the military since the mid-1990s. Despite changes in civilian administrations, the network around the Highlands Forum has become increasingly successful in dominating US defense policy.

Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corporation [SAIC] are sometimes referred to as the ‘shadow intelligence community’ due to the revolving doors between them and government, and their capacity to simultaneously influence and profit from defense policy. But while these contractors compete for power and money, they also collaborate where it counts. The Highlands Forum has for 20 years provided an off the record space for some of the most prominent members of the shadow intelligence community to convene with senior US government officials, alongside other leaders in relevant industries. …

New Scientist magazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands Forum to elite meetings like «Davos, Ditchley and Aspen,» describing it as «far less well known, yet… arguably just as influential a talking shop». Regular Forum meetings bring together »innovative people to consider interactions between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have been in the development of high-tech network-based warfare»…

In the prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a «Highlands Forum» gathering, an «invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and information integration». This was a senior DoD post overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most powerful spy agencies including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), among others. Starting from 2003, the position was transitioned into what is now the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The Highlands Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy captain named Dick O’Neill. Delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions — «captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders» as well as «members of the DoD leadership»…

Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and co-chair of the Highlands Forum, at an early Highlands event in 1996 at the Santa Fe Institute. Marshall is retiring as of January 2015…

«Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz» — widely considered the hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics — were among Marshall’s «star protégés»…

The Highlands Forum’s influence on US defense policy has thus operated through three main channels: its sponsorship by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (around the middle of last decade this was transitioned specifically to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which is in charge of the main surveillance agencies); its direct link to Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall’s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.

According to Clippinger in A Crowd of One, «what happens at informal gatherings such as the Highlands Forum, could, over time and through unforeseen curious paths of influence, have enormous impact, not just within the DoD but throughout the world». He wrote that the Forum’s ideas have «moved from being heretical to mainstream. Ideas that were anathema in 1999 had been adopted as policy just three years later» …

The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way ‘influence bridge’: on the one hand, for the shadow network of private contractors to influence the formulation of information operations policy across US military intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to influence what is going on in the private sector…

O’Neill’s proposed strategy identified three categories of targets for IW [Information Warfare]: adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable; potential partners, »so they perceive the cause [of war] as just»; and finally, civilian populations and the political leadership so they «perceive the cost as worth the effort». A secret briefing based on O’Neill’s work «made its way to the top leadership» at DoD. «They acknowledged that O’Neill was right and told him to bury it. [Ahmed here presumes that a reader understands what this means: that the Pentagon agreed but wanted O’Neill’s proposed strategy never to become publicly known.]

Except the DoD didn’t bury it. Around 1994, the Highlands Group was founded by O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry — who went on to join SAIC’s board of directors after retiring from government in 2003. …

In 1998, the Highlands «Group» became a «Forum». According to O’Neill, this was to avoid subjecting Highlands Forums meetings to »bureaucratic restrictions». What he was alluding to was the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which regulates the way the US government can formally solicit the advice of special interests.

Known as the «open government» law, FACA requires that US government officials cannot hold closed-door or secret consultations with people outside government to develop policy… In bypassing FACA, the Pentagon overrode even the loose restrictions of FACA, by permanently excluding any possibility of public engagement…

Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 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.

Other participants have included senior media professionals: David Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Post and at the time the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman, long-time New York Times columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at Washington Times and United Press International; Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and now chief tech editor at Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the New York Times.

Due to its current sponsorship by the OSD’s 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’s policy research task forces.

(continued in Part Two of Three)