Every director of the NSA is a general or an admiral.
The NSA is organized under the US Dept. of Defense.
Imagine that you are a powerful player who straddles two worlds—the Dept. of Defense and the private sector where corporate defense-contractors live and flourish.
You’ve served many times in both arenas. Your name is Mr. Military Industrial Complex.
Your mission is war.
The reasons for war don’t matter. Reasons can be invented at the drop of a hat. You want endless armed conflict.
That’s how you make your money. That’s how you express your impulses. That’s your single obsession. That’s how you forward Empire.
You don’t have to justify what you do or consult your conscience. Those days, if they ever existed, are long past. You’re a war-monger and you’re proud of it.
Your basic challenge, on behalf of the military industrial complex, is working the political machinery in Washington—the Congress, the president, the two major Parties—in order to make war happen.
One day, you look around and you say, “I have a whole super-agency at my disposal. It’s organized under the Dept. of Defense. It-called the NSA. It spies on everybody all the time.”
You realize you can use the NSA to collect endless amounts of information on Congress, the White House, the president, the press, and the Democratic and Republican leadership.
Well, the NSA is already doing that.
So the question is: will you use that explosive information, that very private information gained through spying, to coerce these politicians to go to war when you want to go to war?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Of course you’ll use it. You’d be a complete fool not to.
