The Vietnam Counterfactual Continued: Roger Hilsman, 1919-2014 in Memoriam

On the occasion of Roger Hilsman's death on February 23 (only reported this week - see New York Times obituary), I'd like to return briefly to the evidence on whether John F. Kennedy would have escalated the war in Vietnam had he lived (see my November 23 post).

Roger Hilsman, 1919-2014

Roger Hilsman was the archetypical "best and brightest" in Kennedy's New Frontier, simultaneously an insider and outsider in the military/intelligence/foreign relations community, with first-hand experience of guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia during World War II and a PhD from Yale. He epitomized all of the contradictions of the US's Cold War elite, advocating both extensive defoliation and strategic hamlets in South Vietnam while opposing the deployment of American combat troops and the bombing of North Vietnam. He was also the author of the infamous "Cable 243" in 1963 which some interpret as giving the green light to the subsequent overthrow and assassination of President Diem.

His 1967 book To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy seems to be the first published claim from someone at the center of foreign policy decision-making that President Kennedy would never have committed American troops to Vietnam, and reinforces Daniel Ellsberg's account:

Thus what General Taylor was advocating was essentially the same large-scale American commitment that Vice-President Johnson had recommended. But this did not accord with President Kennedy's own analysis of the nature of what was happening in Southeast Asia. He had read deeply after his tour of the area in 1951, and his comments on the Indochina crisis when he returned had revealed his conviction that if Communism were to be defeated in Asia it could be done only be the force of nationalism. "Without the support of the native population," he said, "there is no hope of success in any of the countries of Southeast Asia." To try to oppose Communist advances "apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure." [p. 423]

Postscript: Some further search brought up an oral history interview with Roger Hilsman from, as far as I can ascertain, the 1990s, which fully confirms John M. Newman's (JFK and Vietnam) interpretation of NSAM 263 as committing the Kennedy administration to a withdrawal of 1000 advisers by the end of 1963 (which in fact took place) and the rest by 1965:

RH: Well, as I say, he went through several stages on Vietnam, you know, I mean he... originally what... you must remember that the very first thing that happened, Ngu Dinh Diem asks for help and so Kennedy sends out General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to visit the country. They come back and in their recommendation, top secret, is not only do we give them a lot of aid, but we sent ten thousand American troops out there to form a fence, you see, between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. and Kennedy had that stricken from their cable and tried to prevent it from being circulated within the government, American government. I had a fight about that, because I was Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and I was cut out, I wasn't allowed to see it and when I heard about it, I yelled bloody murder but he was determined not to get involved with American troops. No bombing, no ground forces, and so long as he was alive, that was the policy. Then, towards the end of his life, in the fall of '63, he beat McNamara to beat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a withdrawal plan. At that time, we had only sixteen thousand five hundred Americans in the country, they were not troops, they were advisers and the plan, which was finally approved in the fall of '63, was to withdraw those, all of them. And the only troops... only people we'd have had there would be marine guards, ten of them, for the embassy. Before Kennedy was killed, the first thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred were withdrawn. If Kennedy had lived, the other sixteen thousand five hundred or fifteen thousand five hundred would have been withdrawn within three or four months.

INT: So you're pretty convinced then that Kennedy wanted to end the war?

RH: It's not that I'm convinced. This was... the documents are there, you see, and I didn't say he wanted to end the war, he said he wanted to withdraw from it. First of all, from the beginning, he was determined that it not be an American war, that he would not bomb the North, he would not send troops. But then after …you remember the Buddhist crisis in the spring of '63, this convinced Kennedy that Ngu Dinh Diem had no chance of winning and that we best we get out. So, he used that as an excuse, beat on McNamara to beat on the JCS to develop a withdrawal plan. The plan was made, he approved the plan and the first one thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred were withdrawn before Kennedy was killed. If he had lived, the other sixteen thousand would have been out of there within three or four months.

Famous Last Words: I don't do quagmires

Following up on the last post about whether Kennedy would have avoided a Vietnam quagmire, just a quote from a press conference with then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2003:

Rumsfeld: I have since gone to the dictionary. And I have looked up several things, one of which I can't immediately recapture, but one was "guerrilla war", another was "insurgency", another was "unconventional war" --
Q: "Quagmire"?
Rumsfeld: Pardon me?
Q: "Quagmire"? (Laughter.)
Rumsfeld: No. That's someone else's business. Quagmire is -- I don't do quagmires. (Laughter.)

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer III

Countering the Counterfactual: Would Kennedy Have Avoided the Vietnam Quagmire? Reflections 50 Years After the Facts

President Kennedy meeting with Taylor and McNamara on Oct. 2, 1963, when withdrawal of American military "advisers" was supposedly decided. This was formalized on Oct. 5, according to White House tapes, and issued as National Security Action Memorandum 263 on Oct. 11.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination it seems appropriate to reexamine one of the preeminent historical counterfactuals: whether Kennedy would have avoided the US escalation of the war in Vietnam had he lived and been reelected to the presidency. Or are quagmires (like meltdowns) politically seemingly inevitable?

Ian Buruma makes the rather extreme claim in a recent commemorative piece "The Kennedy Temptation" that

Some of Kennedy’s most ardent admirers still like to believe that he would have prevented the escalation of the Vietnam War had he lived longer. But there is no evidence for that at all.

While I have limited patience with Oliver Stone-like revisionist historiography, there is rather serious evidence in the historical record that Kennedy had in fact already committed the US to unconditional withdrawal of the first 1000 American military "advisers" by the end of 1963 and the rest of the 17,000 by the end of 1965, on Oct. 2, 1963, six weeks before his death. This has been known to serious historians since the 1990s, and has been confirmed by many contemporaries who had been close to Kennedy. Moreover, he had always been firmly opposed to sending any combat troops to Vietnam, against the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he was given as early as 1961. Whether he would have stuck to this decision under later circumstances is ultimately metaphysically unknowable, but to say that there is no evidence at all strikes me as willful historical blindness.

Let me just point to the serious sources which, whether you agree with their interpretations or not, at least refute Ian Buruma's claim that "there is no evidence at all":

Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy, Doubleday, 1967.

John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, Warner Books, 1992 (and see the book review "What Would He Have Done?" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Times).

Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Vintage Books, 1995.

Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War, Oxford University Press, 2003.

James K. Galbraith, "Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam," Boston Review 01 Sept 2003 (and see the exchange between Noam Chomsky and Galbraith in the Boston Review 01 Dec 2003).

James G. Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.

While McNamara suggested to Kennedy that he make an immediate public announcement of the withdrawals to make them irreversible (which Kennedy's press secretary Salinger did at a press conference on Oct. 2), Kennedy seemed intent on obfuscating the unconditional and complete nature of this withdrawal to not seem to be putting pressure on Diem and interfere with his own reelection by creating a "who lost [Indo]China issue", or so these authors suggest.

I will not enter the debate on what this evidential record does or does not prove. Suffice it to say that there is such a record which cannot be dismissed out of hand. Instead I would like to point out two other sources that have not been mentioned in this context.

1. Daniel Ellsberg, originally as convinced a Cold Warrior as Kennedy, whose creditentials as a whistleblower on American duplicity during the Cold War and in particular in Vietnam does not need to be established here, based on confidential conversations with Robert Kennedy before his death, reports in his book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking Penguin, 2002, pp. 194-7) that John Kennedy was adamantly opposed to sending combat troups to Vietnam. According to Ellsberg, Robert Kennedy said "We didn't want to lose in Vietnam or get out. We wanted to win if we could. But my brother was determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam." If the war proved to be unwinnable, according to Bobby, President Kennedy would have aimed for a "Laotian" compromise neutrality solution (p. 195). This deep aversion to US combat involvement was based on Kennedy's one-day visit to Vietnam in 1951, where the hopeless and self-delusional French position was something he never wanted the US to find itself in (pp. 196-7). Apparently he had been informed by the American consular official Edmund Gullion that "The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. There's no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The home front is lost. The same thing would happen to us." (p. 196, and this three years before the final French defeat at Dien Bien Phu!).

2. The morning edition of the New York Times of 22 Nov. 1963 (just hours before the assassination) carried the headline "Kennedy plans to withdraw US advisors from Vietnam" (I may be paraphrasing here). This is not what you will find if you now search the Times' digital archives for that date, but my cynical journalist father (then working for the pre-Murdoch New York Post) stashed away a copy in our basement in New York that I later chanced upon (subsequently destroyed in a basement flood) for reasons of his own. If any reader can retrieve a copy of this morning edition with this headline, I would much appreciate being informed.

Ultimately, counterfactual history is an unscientific enterprise -- there is no possibility of proof or refutation. However, that does not imply that it is completely futile to try to marshall evidence.

Daniel Ellsberg gives a nice summing up of the issue (Secrets, p. 195):

I believed him [Robert Kennedy], and still believe him, that his brother was strongly convinced that he should never send ground troops to Indochina, and that he was prepared to accept a "Laotian solution" if necessary to avoid that. If true, that subjective conviction and readiness would mark John F. Kennedy as significantly different in his attitude toward our stakes and appropriate strategy in Vietnam from both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, neither of whom shared this felt constraint or readiness to concede under some conditions. Whether President Kennedy, if he had survived, would have lived up to this conviction in the face of a crisis in 1965 is (as his brother acknowledged) another question, unanswered.

Tea Party Shutdown Revealed to be Chinese Plot to Destroy American Hegemony: A Creditanstalt IB Exclusive Report!

Frank Sinatra (left) in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Rep. Paul Ryan (right) speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011

The Creditanstalt Intelligence Bureau (IB), based on an exclusive leak of top-secret NSA dossiers obtained by Edward Snowden, outs the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party as covert ‘Manchurian Candidate’ agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bent on once-and-for-all destruction of American global economic and political hegemony.

The story in brief:

• Tea Party leaders, masquerading as ultrapatriotic know-nothing Americans, are actually Chinese sleeper agents wittingly or unwittingly programmed to self-destruct American power as part of a long-term CCP subterfuge program initiated by Chairman Mao Zedong in the 1960s, codenamed “Manchurian Candidate II (MCII),”  inspired by the 1959 novel and 1962 hit movie.
• Their chief media outlet, Fox News, long ago aligned itself with the Chinese MCII program after News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch reached an agreement in 1993 with the CCP to allow his Sky TV network to broadcast in mainland China (after dropping BBC from his programming and other acts of groveling self-censorship – see NY Times, NY Review of Books and Guardian revelations about Murdoch’s China connection).

Chinese President Jiang Zemin shaking hands with with Rupert Murdoch during a private meeting at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, November 2, 1997

• The wealth of the Tea Party’s chief financial backers, the Koch brothers, goes back to their father Fred’s petroleum activities in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Fred Koch disguised his communist sympathies after returning to the US by becoming a rapbid spokesman for the John Birch Society.
• Manchurian Candidate II follows upon previous failed Chinese subterfuge programs against America such as currency manipulation (now undermined by accelerating Chinese wage inflation) and the American gross obesity epidemic due to addictive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup (now undermined by McDonald’s promotion of salad bars). Both of these programs were initiated during the Nixon administration, and achieved their early success due to the subtle but effective brainwashing and heavy doses of MSG Nixon had been subjected to during his historic meetings with Mao in Beijing.
• Chinese leaders realized that they could never overtake America by economic growth alone due to their declining birthrate and the limitations of a pure catch-up strategy, as became clear after the Japanese relative stagnation in the 1990s. Their current reliance on MCII is proving to be much more cost effective while preserving the façade of a nativist, anticommunist, anti-big-government grassroots movement. 

A number of prominent commentators have pointed out that the Tea Party Republicans’ use of the debt ceiling as an instrument of political blackmail is tantamount to assisted suicide for American economic and political hegemony, and threatens the stability of the entire economic structure of the Western world (see e.g. Simon Johnson’s “The Loss of U.S. Pre-eminence,” the IMF’s Christine Lagarde’s recent speech, Kenneth Rogoff’s “America’s Endless Budget Battle” or Jonathan Freedland’s “Shutting Down the World?”; read them in the context of my 2009 web essay). While isolationists in America’s past were eager to turn their backs on the rest of the world, their Tea Party descendants actually seem willing to sabotage the foundations of their own country for the purported principle of denying their citizens access to (near but not universal) health insurance, something every other industrialized country has enjoyed for decades cheaper and more effectively than the USA. That the shutdown is not really about ‘Obamacare’ is something leading Republicans have admitted in the meantime:

“We’re not going to be disrespected,” conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., [told the Washington Examiner]. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”*

President Obama’s cancelation of his Asian trip this week to APEC and ASEAN meetings is already a notable triumph for MCII, since it decisively undermines his ‘Asian pivot’ strategy that the Chinese rightly see as targeted against their great-power aspirations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Even without the Snowden documents it is clear just on a cui bono basis alone that there can be no other rational explanation for the Tea Party’s hijacking of the Republican Party and its unprecedented flirtation with US default than China’s covert Manchurian Candidate II program. The only alternative—pure pleasure in playing a game of chicken with President Obama at the American people’s expense—is patently implausible.

The Tea Party Caucus would like us to believe that the government shutdown and debt-ceiling showdown are a desperate but justifiable game of chicken to forestall ‘Obamacare’, big government and deficits. After the Creditanstalt IB revelations, however, we now know them to be solely in the interests of China’s strategy for world hegemony, in which Tea Party politicians are witting or unwitting pawns. (Still from Rebel Without a Cause)

[The Creditanstalt Intelligence Bureau wishes to point out to the particularly dense that the above is a (reverse) satirical exercise in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Since the game of chicken the Tea Party Caucus is pursuing is indistinguishable in its effects from the purported Chinese Manchurian Candidate II strategy outlined above, the distinction between real foreign sleeper agents and libertarian American patriots seems entirely moot.]

Terrorism as the New McCarthyism, the Independent as the New Chicago Tribune?

The Wikipedia defines McCarthyism as

the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.

Sound familiar? See any resemblance to the UK's playing "harddrive" with the Guardian, or detaining David Miranda for nine hours under section 7 of the Terrorism Act (see previous post) and subsequently justifying it by claiming that the information he may or may not have been carrying would abet terrorists (not that he himself was engaged in terrorism or had any intention of communicating sensitive information to such persons). The Home Office spokesperson went on to say that

 Those who oppose this sort of action need to think about what they are condoning.

Does this mean that criticism of illegal government detentions on human rights grounds is now itself a form of abetting terrorism? We seem to be rapidly approached the Alice-In-Wonderland, Catch-22 world where black is white and lies are truths and anyone who questions the government has already provided sufficient proof that they are "un-American," "terrorists," enemies of the state. 

By that logic the fact that I own a pressure cooker would be sufficient to justify my detainment, since said pressure cooker could easily fall into the hands of terrorists such as the Boston Marathon bombers (and in fact a hapless Long Island family's web searches led to a "perfect storm of terrorism profiling" by a police task force –which, however, did not "press [her] husband on the dilemma facing liberals over whether quinoa consumption is ethically sound – many Bolivians can no longer afford their staple food now everyone in Brooklyn is eating it.").

The wife's conclusions cut to the heart of the matter:

This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

All I know is if I'm going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I'm not doing it online.

I'm scared. And not of the right things.

We expected this of the Stasi and the KGB, we are used to this logic in the Mad Czar's and Mad Ayatollahs' realms, but now it is coming a little too close to home for comfort.

But why write about these things in a blog on Meltdown Economics and Other Complex Catastrophes? Well, I would classify what is happening as one of the classical complex catastrophes:

The Bureaucratic Black Hole

A complex organization (be it a government, a business, an international body, a union or an NGO) will always make mistakes ("stuff happens"), and will always be obsessed with preventing bad publicity about them from getting out. So its highest priority will be to cover its ass. It will become paranoid and need to control everyone on the inside and the outside. It will need to suppress dissent, bag whistleblowers, battle the press, spy on everyone and eliminate the threats of real or imagined enemies. It can become a black hole from which nothing escapes.

This is why in democracies we have constitutional checks and balances, separation of powers. This is why we have legal due process. This is why we have a free press. To nip the Bureaucratic Black Hole in the bud, to reverse its abuses before they become irreversible. Anybody still remember Locke or Montesquieu or Mill? Because the alternative is tyranny. I thought we held these truths to be self-evident. But now it seems that only fools like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden still subscribe to them (the real weakness of American education: they still teach civics as if pupils are supposed to believe this rubbish – but then, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue).

The Independent's Turning of the Screw

But the Snowden/Greenwald/Miranda story just took a further Machiavellian turn in yesterdays The Independent. Potentially damaging state secrets are being leaked, and not by Snowden, it seems, although the leak is being made to look like he had. Under the headline

Exclusive: UK’s secret Mid-East internet surveillance base is revealed in Edward Snowden leaks

The Independent reveals the existence of a secret GCHQ facility in the Middle East that captures telecommunications from undersea fiber-optic cables and relays them for analysis to the GCHQ and the NSA. The article insidiously suggests that Snowden leaked this information, but a very close reading reveals that the authors are only insinuating that this kind of information must be part of Snowden's (still undisclosed) cache of data, not that Snowden has revealed it to The Independent, or anyone else for that matter.

And that is exactly what Greenwald and Snowden reply in The Guardian: neither he nor Snowden are the source of this information, and both have been exceedingly careful to avoid leaking anything that could harm anyone or damage legitimate national interests.

So who leaked this information and why? Since the purpose rather obviously seems to be to discredit Greenwald and Snowden as potential traitors and abettors of terrorism, one can only conclude that it is the UK government itself, a conclusion Snowden also comes to:

It appears that the UK government is now seeking to create an appearance that the Guardian and Washington Post's disclosures are harmful, and they are doing so by intentionally leaking harmful information to The Independent and attributing it to others. The UK government should explain the reasoning behind this decision to disclose information that, were it released by a private citizen, they would argue is a criminal act.

The Bureaucratic Black Hole working to the second power? Not for the first time have intelligence gathering and disinformation campaigns been compared to a House of Mirrors. But if the UK government is voluntarily leaking its crown jewels (which may not have been so crown or jewels, however) and wantonly damaging the ostensible national security in a silly and transparent attempt to take revenge on Greenwald and Snowden, who should be punished for treason? David Cameron and The Independent?

For history buffs there is a strange precedent for a newspaper leaking a vital national secret that might abet the nation's enemies, and the legal prosecution that followed: the Chicago Tribune's leak of Battle of Midway intelligence in 1942.  The Chicago Tribune was a fiercely anti-Roosevelt newspaper (and vice versa), but not unpatriotic. It revealed that the US Navy had advance knowledge of the disposition and intentions of the Japanese, which it exploited to overwhelming effect in the decisive Battle of Midway, knowledge that could only have been obtained (although the Tribune did not say this explicitly) by cryptanalysis of Japanese radio communications. In any but a narrow legal sense it was treasonous (the censorship rules at that time did not apply to leaking information about enemy plans, even if that information had been obtained by secret cryptanalysis, something which was soon changed). Fortunately for the US, Japanese intelligence did not deign to read the Chicago Tribune (or the Congressional Record, for that matter, where the affair had been discussed in open session), apparently falling victim to that other bureaucratic vice, closure, thinking their codes unbreakable. While the Roosevelt administration brought charges before a grand jury against the Chicago Tribune for treason, the Navy Department eventually pressed to have them dropped, since pursuing the case would have meant officially disclosing the cryptanalytic breaking of the Japanese codes. Something similar was involved in the persecution of the Rosenbergs for espionage. Although the case was not dropped, the decisive evidence based on the VENONA decrypts could not be revealed in the public record.

Is the Midway case an example of freedom of press, as the Tribune claimed at the time, or treason and potential disaster gone unpunished for even higher national security reasons? It differs from the Independent's case, so it seems, because the leak was against the government's wishes rather than in its Machiavellian interests (the Tribune's "embedded" reporter Stanley Johnston had accidentally seen Admiral Nimitz' secret message about Japanese dispositions on a ship returning from the Battle of the Coral Sea, something the Tribune did not acknowledge at the time and certainly was a violation of military secrecy*). It also was not disclosing secret information of public interest to right alleged government abuses, Snowden's and Ellsberg's defence. It was simply a scoop.

The Chicago Tribune has recently engaged in some self-reflection on its role in the Midway reporting 71 years ago following the Snowden revelations (but before the parallel Independent case), and while still unapologetic as to the treason charges, tends to the cautionary side about condemning whistleblowers and their supporting newspapers.

Final historical footnote on the House of Mirrors question: If you read Dina Goran's excellent paper (p. 681) on the Tribune/Midway scandal closely, you'll find another example of extreme Machiavellianism that the UK government might want to study further to hone its badly deteriorated skills. On Dec. 4, 1941 (three days before Pearl Harbor), the Chicago Times (also a vociferously isolationist paper) had published a scoop with Roosevelt's plans for Army mobilization. In turns out (only revealed in 1976) that the Tribune obtained a copy of those plans from a deliberate plant of the Political Warfare Department of BSC (British Security Coordination) and the FBI, apparently to discredit the isolationists!

*[Postedit 27 Aug 2013]: For more on how the Tribune's reporter Stanley Johnston may have obtained access to Nimitz' dispatch about the Japanese order of battle before Midway, see this Naval History site.

Are we getting sucked into the security state's Bureaucratic Black Hole?

Will we be manipulated into losing our way in the House of Mirrors?

Edward Snowden at the Mad Czar's Polonium Tea Party

The 'Creditanstalt' Intelligence Bureau has obtained an exclusive photo of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's life in his newly adopted country.

Snowden is shown here being entertained by his hosts at the posh Pine Bar of the Hotel Lux in the manner befitting his political status.

Mad Czar (standing on the right): Take some more sugar with your Polonium* tea, dear?

Edward Snowden (seated at left): How can I take more sugar when all the sugar was used up in Ryazan*?

*Guide to the perplexed: the 'Creditanstalt' Intelligence Bureau recommends this site for background material and a documentary video, as well as John Dunlop's site for the most recent in-depth analysis and David Satter's recent ruminations [postedit 13.9.2016].

The 'Creditanstalt' is an equal opportunity satirical website.

"You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." The Surveillance State Crosses the Rubicon and Starts Playing Harddrive

     "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back."

This is how a high representative of the UK's government threatened The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridge, to get back the NSA material Edward Snowden has been leaking to The Guardian's reporter Glenn Greenwald.

But now the surveillance state really seems to have crossed the Rubicon. Not only have British authorities subjected Greenwald's Brazilian companion David Miranda to nine hours of illegal interrogation under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act while in transit through Heathrow Airport, but according to Rusbridge they have also started playing "harddrive" with The Guardian:

And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

The surveillance state really seems to have finally crossed the Rubicon here, where it is no longer protecting us, the citizens, but primarily itself (although early NSA whistleblower William Binney's 2007 arrest by the FBI at gunpoint in the shower may be the first adumbration of such a crossing). Although who is having fun at whose expense is unclear, since if the GCHQ "security experts" really thought they had plugged the security leak by physically destroying some hard drives they were displaying gross incompetence in this digitally networked age (more likely they were just trying to live up to the intimidating goons from all the Hollywood action films they watch down there in Cheltenham on boring winter evenings).

Lord Acton was right: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A surveillance state that has the ability to monitor all of its citizens without constitutional due process will sooner or later deliberately abuse that power for its own ends, if only to cover its own ass that it has this secret and unconstitutional power in the first place. The nightmare of human rights activists and NSA whistleblowers has come true, and the Orwellian chickens have finally come home to roost. The era of star chambers (think FISA court) and lettres de cachet (think section 7), when rulers could arbitrarily arrest and torture their subjects at their whim according to edicts that no one could even know, let alone challenge in a court of law, seems to have returned with a vengeance.

Meanwhile, back here at this blog, I have also been "having my fun" at the NSA's expense with my satirical blogs about the NSA's SWIFT program (see posts 1, 2, 3, 4, in case you missed them).

But this is getting really serious, and the threat to freedom of speech and the press is no longer a joking matter. So in the possibly few remaining moments of freedom still vouchsafed us I will indulge my satirical evil demon one last time and give you the 'Creditanstalt' Intelligence Bureau's take on the Miranda scandal:

The Inside Story on the David Miranda Interrogation: Nine Excruciating Hours on the Loo

While it is clear that David Miranda, Brazilian companion and sometime courier for Guardian reporter Glenn Grennwald, was not legitimately detained by British authorities at Heathrow airport last Sunday under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, it has been a mystery until now why he needed to be detained for all of the legally permitted nine hours if the authorities really only wanted to confiscate his electronic devices.

The 'Creditanstalt' Intelligence Bureau has now learned the real reasons for this long detention. While the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) claims that Miranda had been offered legal representation and was attended by a solicitor, in fact he was attended to by renowned British physician John Wesley (a contemporary of our beloved Jonathan Swift and author of the standard textbook Primitive Physick Or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases), who attempted to apply his acclaimed purgative to extract data thumb sticks Miranda had hidden in private parts of his person. Informants tell us, however, that Miranda was so constipated from his flight from Berlin that the process was not complete even after the nine hours permitted by the law.

However, the MPS did manage to obtain small samples of stool that have now been shipped to the NSA's reactivated Kellogg laboratories for analysis. By drawing on all of the NSA's SWIFT program resources, the MPS hopes to be able to determine whether Miranda does in fact entertain insurrectionary thoughts that would permit the retroactive application of section 7 of the Terrorism Act and justify his detention.

Noted British physician John Wesley (left) preparing to apply
his celebrated physick to our hard-won civil liberties (right) at the Heathrow Transit Lounge.