September 7, 2004

A NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ACADEMY

How Can Intelligence
Break the Fishbowl?

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

If you chose to vacation in the Sahara Desert, do not blame the weatherman for the lack of rain.

—Lyndon LaRouche

It’s the economy, stupid!

—James Carville, 1992

Editor’s Note: This is a reprint of Lyndon LaRouche’s article first published under the title, “Intelligence Organization: How Can Intelligence Serve An Un-Intelligible President?” in EIR Vol. 31, No. 36, September 17, 2004. Embedded links have been added.

 

I watch the discussions among those members of the Senate and others, who are currently rushing in panic to so-called intelligence reforms. Yet, I see, on the positive side, that a number of them do present, nonetheless, a certain level of relevant expertise, and also, often, not only show good sense, but sometimes surprise me pleasantly with their insights on some matters, if only respecting relevant matters of detail. Yet, those happier aspects of the current proceedings acknowledged, all so far, including the representatives of the spokesmen for the “9/11” commission, have missed the crucial point at issue. As it used to be said, so far, the best among them have missed the forest for the trees.

My qualifications in this matter, include my long record as the most successful long-range economic forecaster over four continuing decades. I have not only a matchlessly impeccable public record in that field; but the uniqueness of the method underlying my achievement in this area of specialization, has spilled over naturally into other matters of strategic assessment and foresight.

The relevance of these overlapping areas of long-range intelligence work, is typified by my forecast, first publicized in 1983, of an approximately five-year outlook for an economic collapse of the Soviet system, a forecast which I restated in my Columbus Day Berlin address of 1988, when I warned of the general collapse probably leading to the reunification of Germany, with Berlin as the future capital, beginning, probably, in Poland, in Eastern Europe, and spreading back into the Soviet Union itself. Every relevant government in Western Europe and the U.S.A. itself, missed the boat on that—until after it had already happened. They are all now missing the boat on both the global economic and general strategic crises already building up around the world today. On those and many similar issues of long-term strategic importance, nearly all of my putative rivals in forecasting have failed to grasp the essentials of the reality now before us all.

At this moment, the same types of official and other experts rushing into reckless innovations in intelligence reforms, have ignored the elephant standing in the middle of their conversation. The world as a whole has already entered a period of fundamental phase-shift, a period of a fast-approaching great storm, which will soon, and suddenly, collapse the entirety of the world’s present monetary-financial system.

A non-linear phase-shift of this type, invalidates all precedents and assumed trend-lines premised on the kind of environment which existed, even during a relatively long time before that phase-shift began. While the keepers of a mentally defective U.S. President George Bush[fn_1] continue to insist on their pathetically deluded dream of an approaching economic recovery, all too many Democrats refuse, similarly, to take up the fact of an already onrushing build-up toward early general collapse of the entire world monetary-financial system.

On this matter of forecasting, the current Bush Administration has sought to trap the Democratic Party into a pathetic debate over who will share the benefit of the promised riches of the on-rushing recovery which would, in fact, never come under the present policies of the U.S.A. as long as the nation’s and world’s present economic policies were in effect.

Meanwhile, the real question to be faced is: How could any of the presently leading proposals for sudden revision in the organization of the security institutions of the U.S.A., protect our presently self-endangered republic from those forces of inevitable self-destruction which would be surely unleashed by the mere act of re-electing President George W. Bush, Jr.? Isn’t there something very sadly wrong about the current obsession with rushing to jam through half-baked remedies of intelligence reform, remedies which are already worse than what is proposed to be the disease?

This pattern of wishful nit-picking among governments and our own national intelligence services, is the ignored “trumpeting elephant standing in the middle of the couple’s honeymoon bed,” the strategic implications of the onrushing general collapse of the world’s present monetary-financial system. This is the “elephant” which all of the visible proponents of reforms of U.S. intelligence insist on pretending isn’t there. Similarly, the recent, hysterical efforts to deny the deadly global implications of U.S., British, and other meddling in Transcaucasia, is, like the Congress’s consent to the ongoing new war in Iraq, typical of the frequent causes for catastrophic breakdown of the U.S. strategic and related intelligence functions.[fn_2] That is the elephant defecating in the middle of the bed, which the parties have habitually avoided seeing or smelling, thus far, in their proposals for intelligence reforms.

What they ignore, in fact, is the historical mission whose adoption by Benjamin Franklin’s circles produced the conspiracy which created this nation, and which has been often indispensable for our continued survival, until now. Unfortunately, there is no competent definition of the concept of strategic long-range mission in the general discussion of the matter of intelligence reform among official circles, and national press, today. That is the source of the intelligence failure which underlies both the lack of preparedness prior to September 11, 2001, and the apparent inability to comprehend the motive forces behind, and global historical implications of that calamity. This same disoriented state of the collective U.S. official mind is now being repeated in the discussion of the implications of the Beslan atrocity in leading press and related sources in the U.S. today.

As the late historian H. Graham Lowry documented this in his 1988 book, How the Nation Was Won, the building of what became that U.S. republic which emerged from World War II as the greatest producer economy on this planet, began in such locations as the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the Winthrops and Mathers, where the thrust was to develop a great new nation, across the continent of North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was to be a refuge from the oligarchical systems which reigned over Europe in that time, a new republic, cast in reflections on the memories of Solon of Athens and Plato, a bastion of freedom and hope among all mankind.

Our victory over Lord Shelburne’s predatory British East India Company, then, and our continuing, hard-fought survival against such powerful foes aiming to destroy us, such as that British and Prince Metternich’s Holy Roman Empire, defines that endless national mission which is the prime directive under which all competent national intelligence functions must be subsumed today.

We Were Not Always So Stupid

Our republic’s intelligence services once had a brilliantly appropriate definition of the sense of mission which must govern all of our republic’s policymaking, including the implicit counterintelligence functions of our diplomatic, military, and intelligence services.

That was the original conception of the mission of the U.S. intelligence services during the time, after 1815, when the Marquis de Lafayette lived as the reactivated leader of our original foreign and domestic intelligence and counter-intelligence service. This was a time which featured such figures as James Fenimore Cooper and counter-intelligence specialist Edgar Allan Poe in that role. That was the conception of national mission articulated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, and by Adams’ one-time protégé and U.S. Representative, Abraham Lincoln. That was the mission pursued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt until the moment of his most untimely death, a death which allowed certain sudden bad changes in national mission, changes toward a Hobbesian world-outlook which have been the principal root of all of our nation’s major intelligence failures to the present time.

That original national mission of our republic, as selected under the body of international law founded by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, remains the proper principled guide to a national intelligence service of the U.S.A. today. It was, and remains a mission diametrically opposed to those doctrines of the Bush-Cheney Administration, which have reigned since January 2001 to the present day. It is to the degree that the currently assigned mission of national intelligence functions fails to proceed from, and be ruled by that original, specific conception of national mission, that all of the structural and principled errors made by our national intelligence and military institutions have been derived, since the birth of our republic to the present day.

Such a stated, but often overlooked, overriding principle of mission-orientation, must be, without exception, the ruling conception of design of any revision in our intelligence services and its functions today. None of the leading current proposals for legislated reform of the services has taken this most essential feature of the problem properly into account. For that reason, the one proposal is, in each case, only more foolish than the other.

That side of current official behavior can not be considered as intelligent. Forgive them, for they know not what they do!

I have been complaining, initially modestly, but more loudly and insistently since the middle to late 1960s, against systemic weaknesses in our national policy-making structures, as since my late 1956, privately circulated business forecast of a deep recession to begin during Spring 1957. That forecast had been based on studies of the way in which the influence of figures such as Arthur Burns had misled the changes in U.S. financial policy under an otherwise necessary, anti-utopian military traditionalist, President Eisenhower. It was a forecast which has been the springboard of all my outlooks on our republic’s foreign and domestic strategic policy since the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Reflection on my dedication, to that effect, over the recent forty years, has now more than fully validated that continuing concern of mine.

1. The Fallacy of Method

The most important fallacy of method in the practiced policy of our domestic and foreign intelligence services, is that they are often heirs of the sheer silliness which has been adopted as the incompetent investigative methods of some of our relevant institutions from the hands and mouth of the author of the childish Sherlock Holmes propaganda pieces, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That imported, nit-picking method of investigation promoted by Doyle’s propagandistic campaign, the elementary-school sort of Hobbesian method of Sherlock Holmes’ purely fictitious successes, typifies the most common root of the failures of relevant investigations of matters of national security interest today. The incompetent handling of the crafting of the report issued by the “9/11” Commission, is typical of the way in which popularized gumshoe methods of investigation in the small, have, unfortunately, set the pattern for strategically calamitous incompetence in matters in the large.

That fallacious method of formal inquiry is typified by an axiomatic incompetence, a formal fallacy of composition, in defining the subject of that investigation. Thus, where the report of the “9/11” commission is at its relative best, is in its emphasis on the lack of precautions which should have been in place, and which were, generally, assumed to have been in place: a massive negligence failure, as by the President and Vice-President themselves, which made possible the relative ease with which an enormously complex plan of action was executed in such a successfully, precisely coordinated way on that fateful day. For example, the Commission’s de facto toleration of the off-hand assumption that no one had considered the use of a heavily fueled aircraft in that way, was, and remains, in effect, simply an outright lie; such a risk had been inherent in the ordinary business of the trade. The military, or quasi-military use of that capability, should not have come as a surprise to any relevant institution after the preceding Genoa threat to President George W. Bush’s life, and the threat of an augmented Genoa-style, riotous incident being prepared in the Washington, D.C. area during August and early September of that year.

The more serious failing of the “9/11” Commission’s report is what it, at leisure, had intentionally refused to moot before the republic, until some time after the coming election of the next President: Who actually organized what had been clearly the finely coordinated attack of 9/11, and for what purpose? Rage, or some specific, calculated strategic effect independent of the use of terrorist methods as means? What was the tell-tale intention expressed in the characteristic features of the event itself? To what variety of beast did that horrible footprint belong?

The arbitrary assumption used to evade that more crucial part of the investigation, is the presumption that “Osama bin Laden” did it, he and his al-Qaeda, all by their lonesome. Since Osama bin Laden had been drawn into the al-Qaeda business by circles of Vice-President George H.W. Bush and Britain’s Jimmy Goldsmith, together with such wild-eyed neo-conservatives of the Iran-Contra antics as Oliver North, et al., as part of the asymmetric warfare launched by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, we can not assume that Osama bin Laden’s guilty role was not something like that of poor van der Lubbe in Nazi boss Hermann Göring’s setting fire to the German Reichstag, especially since I had warned, and that famously at the time, against precisely such a type of incident on the eve of President George W. Bush’s installation as President.

When I warned of a threatened impending event like Göring’s orchestration of the Reichstag Fire of February 1933, a fire set to motivate the immediate adoption of the fascist law doctrine of one-time Leo Strauss patron Carl Schmitt, I had no crystal ball, nor wild impulse. Anyone who knew modern history should have recognized the manner of placing George W. Bush into the Presidency as the preparation for a certain type of legalized coup d’état against our Constitution. As I emphasized at that time, before President Bush had been installed, it was the economic conditions into which the U.S. and the world had already entered, which made some attempt with the effect of what became 9/11 virtually inevitable for some time during the months then ahead.

My warning of the likelihood of such a plot, had been premised upon my studies of the way in which that dark cartel, the financier-oligarchy-controlled Synarchist International of the 1919-1945 interval, had orchestrated the wave of fascist takeovers of the nations of Western and Central continental Europe during the 1922-1945 interval: beginning with the action of the former British intelligence asset of the “Young Turk” plot, banker Volpi di Misurata’s placing of his puppet, sometime Winston Churchill protégé Benito Mussolini into power. My studies had included the precedent of the 1934 plotted, fortunately aborted military coup against the U.S. government by financier interests of a kindred spirit from inside the U.S.A. itself. My January 2001 warnings had also taken into account my early 1980s studies, from once secret U.S. intelligence files, of the way in which Adolf Hitler, and certain complicit U.S. circles, had put Hitler’s Synarchist organization into existence in Mexico, with the intention of using that Synarchist organization, which still exists as a force there today, as part of the Nazi plot for a joint Nazi-Japan attack on the U.S. from across the Mexico border, a plot aborted then, by the U.S. victory at Midway.

My warning took into account, most emphatically, the rumblings among the heirs of the pre-1945 Synarchist International, inside the U.S. and elsewhere today. If one knows the nature and habits of a man-eating tiger, one must expect the obvious, as I did in my warning of January 2001. I had no foresight into the mode in which the attack would come, but I had a clear, and well-grounded knowledge that an attack to that effect were, as I said, virtually inevitable soon under the new Bush Administration, unless action to prevent an attack of that nature were taken.

With my explicit warning to that effect in the public domain, the intelligence services of our republic should have been alarmed to the effect of putting all relevant resources on alert for the likelihood of a kind of action against which I had warned publicly. Those services did not make those preparations. That, much more than the details of the 9/11 attack itself, should have been the starting point of the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. That should have been the subsuming premise of the recommendations to be made for reform of our intelligence services.

As I have variously authored and co-authored reports on the role of the Synarchist International cabal of global financial-oligarchical interests which were behind both the spread of fascist regimes throughout Western and Central continental Europe during the 1922-1945 interval, and as behind the neo-conservative assets of Vice-President Cheney’s circles today, no investigation of the “9/11” incidents could be considered competent, if it failed to consider the intent of a terrorist action which was clearly intended to change the global strategic situation in the direction into which Vice-President Cheney and his chickenhawk cronies had already pre-shaped U.S. intelligence, military, and security policy since long prior to events of September 2001. The characteristic intention expressed by the “9/11” atrocity was not primarily an attack on the U.S.A.; it was shown by the characteristic features of that operation itself, to be a device for panicking the U.S. population and institutions into the kind of global, “preventive nuclear warfare” which draft-dodger Dick Cheney and his chickenhawks have intended to conduct against the world since Cheney was the freakish, but officially frustrated Secretary of Defense under Bush 41.

The “9/11” report said nothing about that elephant standing, glowering, in the middle of the hearing room where the public events of the Commission were conducted.

Certain features of the 9/11 incident were unique among peace-time terrorist acts in recent history; but the existence of a global strategic intention, one inherent in the implications of the act of “9/11” itself, was, as I had detailed this in January of that year, an already undeniable fact even long before midday of that September 11, 2001.

Enter Beslan

Those implications of my forecast of something whose effect would be, and did actually become, an echo of Göring’s orchestration of the February 1933 Reichstag arson, are key to the principal danger of new coups and related wars threatening the world today.

Now, the nightmare of [September 1, 2004] mass-slaughter of children in Beslan, North Ossetia, has become a second “9/11,” this time against Russia, and with far more ominous implications than the attack on the U.S.A. in September 11, 2001; this time, a potential clash of major thermonuclear powers, and much more than that besides, is on the table. Now, unless the U.S.A. abandons its terrorist protégés in Transcaucasia, such as those associated with the Jamestown Foundation, the George Bush Administration has now put the world as a whole on a hair-trigger potential for global, thermonuclear-armed, increasingly global asymmetric warfare, a greater potential threat to the planet than at the time of the Ogarkov Plan and the asymmetric warfare which the Anglo-Americans and their puppets, such as Osama bin Laden, ran in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

That implication of Beslan is the most telling indictment of the proposal to reform U.S. intelligence functions along the lines of some parody of the report of the “9/11” Commission.

Admittedly, the fable told about “9/11” is widely accepted, chiefly because the developments of the recent thirty-odd years, or more, have transformed most of our people from citizens in the true sense of the word, into underlings, people who no longer think of this government as ours, but someone else’s government, to which the mass of our own citizen-underlings must adapt themselves, still today. If that were not so, a cringing Senate would not have unleashed an unconstitutional pathway to war in Iraq, and would have shown Vice-President Cheney the door, in one way or the other, more than a year ago.

When both the mass of the citizenry, and the majority of top-ranking members of the Congress behave like fearfully credulous chickens, as we have seen in the cases of so many crucial developments of late, it is all the more the duty of leading patriotic institutions to show courage precisely where the citizens lack the inclination to defend either their nation or themselves. A true leader, in a time of great troubles, is willing to put not only his career, but his life on the line, for the defense of the nation and its people. That was once largely the case, when Franklin Roosevelt was still President, and even later. Over the past forty years, that required quality of our leading institutions has withered away, leaving only a relative handful of senior active and retired officials and others, to carry the great tradition of our nation’s nobler years.

It is the duty of our government, especially its combined military, diplomatic, and intelligence services, to fight against such suicidal predilections of the majority of popular opinion. The relevant institutions of government must act to impel the nation, and its government, to save our citizenry even from the consequences of follies of popular opinion. The abused name of “democracy” is no excuse for the follies of official behavior. A crime is a crime, and a grievous folly a shame, especially when it is done in support of widely popularized gossip.

The problem is not merely that the citizenry no longer knows what to think; the problem is that, as a result of the build-up of a now prevalent custom of sophistry, most in our leading responsible institutions no longer know how to think about issues of strategic intelligence. They think, at best, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s cocaine-sniffing, all-too-elementary charlatan, Sherlock Holmes. They sniff out, and interpret isolated facts, and use that pretext of factualness to fabricate and adopt even wildly atrocious, implicitly lying fallacies of composition, all in the name of estimates of current popular opinion.

We must end a false tradition, under which influential institutions indoctrinate government and the governed in “what to think,” to the degree that, often, none of these seem to know “how to think.”

2. The ’Fishbowl Principle’

The foundations of competent strategic intelligence in European culture still today, have been the adoption of those foundations of such needed wisdom in the studies of ancient Greece, from Homer to the Athens of Solon, Socrates, and Plato, of what we know today as ancient Greece’s persistent, inbred tragedy, from the Trojan Wars which preceded ancient Greece’s ensuing dark age, through the self-doom of Greece’s independence wrought by the folly of the Peloponnesian War. All great European tragedians, from Aeschylus and Plato, through Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, have presented us the essence of actual history as historically grounded Classical drama on the stage.

That Classical tragedy always deals with the matter of the role of leading figures of entire societies in shaping the tragic destiny of nations and even entire cultures. The intended function of those tragedies, is to compel the little citizen of today to take the tragedies of actual history as a lesson in the way the minds of the most powerful figures of a society bring about the tragic calamities of entire nations and cultures. In this way, the passion of the ordinary member of the theater’s audience is impelled to wish that the tragic error of the powerful leaders of that historical case had not occurred. Thus, as the ordinary member of the audience’s society is impelled to adopt a passionate concern for the qualities of a society’s ruling leaders, the ordinary person is transformed into a true citizen, rather than a greedy, grubbing underling of his nation, rather than the poor, often self-doomed fool, who despises the big issues which determine the fate of the nation, in favor of considering nothing so much as “my neighborhood,” “my little personal gripe,” “my money.”

Therefore, Classical Greek tragedies, and the introduction of the Sublime to tragedy, by Plato’s repertoire of Socratic dialogues, typifies the absolutely mandatory foundation of all modern strategic intelligence functions. Thus, the primary work of the truly qualified statesman, and the military, diplomatic, and intelligence functions which assist him in this mission, is twofold. First, to be aware of the contemporary expressions of that principle of tragedy to which I have referred here. Second, to impart that knowledge to the mind of the citizen in the way in which the Classical tragedian uses the stage to elevate the habituated underlings into the state of mind of true citizens.

As the argument for the existence of the Noösphere by the scientist Vladimir I. Vernadsky has presented the Classical conception of science of ancient Greece in modern terms, there is the absolute distinction of the human mind from that of lower forms of life, such as apes.

Vernadsky’s concepts of Biosphere and Noösphere, for example, restated the ancient Classical Greek concept of the Pythagoreans and Plato, of the distinction among non-living, living, and human noëtic principles. Vernadsky’s treatment of a geobiochemical notion of “fossils” points to a great demonstration of the absolute distinction of the human mind from the lower forms of life, and thus provides a uniquely interesting proof that the noëtic functions of the human mind reflect a higher quality in the person than possessed by mortal life itself. This reflected what was already emphasized by Plato in such locations as his Timaeus. It was a notion already implicit in the work of the founders of ancient scientific thinking, the Pythagoreans.

In my own program for self-education of a youth movement of, predominantly, the 18-25 age-interval, I presented two cornerstones of the building-up of a body of knowledge. The first was Carl Gauss’s attack on the intrinsic fallacies of the form of reductionism known as empiricism, as typified by the systemic fallacies of Euler, Lagrange, et al., as Gauss did this in his first, 1799 exposition of the “Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.” The second was training in the methods of counterpoint of J.S. Bach. The latter program combined the essential prerequisite of a Florentine bel canto program of training of the singing voice, without which Bach’s works such as his set of motets, for example, would be botched in performance. I proposed the adopted program of development of the choral performance of Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude, as the acid test of the music program, one both challenging enough, and yet within practical reach, for this purpose.

My intention in defining a program of educational development for a youth movement in this way, was to afford those young adults of voting age a practicable means for understanding, and resisting those commonplace ideologies that I have often identified as expressing “a fishbowl syndrome.”

The relevance of this same approach to intelligence work is the aspect of that educational program being emphasized here, a program which should be mandatory for training and qualification of all future supervisory staff occupied with intelligence functions.

I explain.

Fallacy of Composition

After we take into account the most common source of faulty intelligence, pure and simple lying about matters of fact, the chief remaining source of incompetence, such as that which I have complained against in respect to the flaws of omission in the 9/11 Commission’s report, is what is termed, in technical language, as “fallacy of composition.”

Fallacy of composition is usually expressed in two categorically distinct ways: (a) Fallacy of composition of selection of category of facts. This includes both the omission of essential categories of facts, and the addition of irrelevant categories of facts. (b) Fallacy of composition of category of principles which define the functional relationship among facts: both exclusion of relevant true principles, or concealment of those principles’ employment, or, also, the active or covert addition of false categories of principles into the “equation.” It is the second category of fallacy of composition which defines what I have commonly termed “the fishbowl syndrome.”

In teaching the relevant matters of principle, I usually begin with the subject of Cartesian geometry as a model for defining the rudiments of a “fishbowl syndrome.” In making that point sufficiently clear at this juncture for the purposes of the subject of intelligence policy at hand in this location, I am obliged to explain, in summary, what will be regarded as a contentious point, but nonetheless a point which my experience in studying intelligence work has shown me to be the most important category of failure of well-meaning intelligence assessments adopted by our government or relevant comparable institutions.

The Classical Root of Our Constitution

The origin of systematic intelligence in the known history of now globally extended European culture, is located in pre-Aristotle Greece, especially in Athens and Magna Graecia of that time. The key points of known or estimable, datable reference include the Ionian Thales (ca. 624-547 B.C.) and, later, Heraclitus (ca. 540-480 B.C.); Solon of Athens (ca. 630-590 B.C.); Pythagoras (born ca. 529 B.C.) and his followers; and Plato (ca. 428-348 B.C.). The characteristic distinction of these founders of European scientific and other Classical culture, is their included emphasis on a pre-Sophist, pre-Aristotelean scientific method known as Sphaerics, a method adopted from the astronomy of Egypt, which had been the world’s most advanced known scientific culture of the time of Classical Greece’s emergence from a preceding dark age. Plato’s Socratic dialogues and his Laws, are the benchmark of reference for defining a well-ordered historian’s approach to competent modern intelligence practice.

The implicit distinction adducible from close examination of the scientific method of these ancient Classical Greeks, is their emphasis on a notion of physical geometry which depended upon an experimental approach to all things from the standpoint of reference provided by the view of the astronomical universe, later resurrected from the decadent science of Rome by the followers of Nicholas of Cusa such as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and the founder of modern systematic mathematical physics, Johannes Kepler. [fn_3] Instead of the reductionist fallacy of “action at a distance,” as introduced by founder of empiricism Paolo Sarpi’s house-lackey Galileo Galilei, the Classical Greek practice of Sphaerics[fn_4] located the elementary form of human physical-scientific knowledge in those singularities which arise as the characteristic forms of action of change (e.g., Heraclitus, Archytas, Plato). Implicitly, this view by those relevant ancients already anticipated both Gottfried Leibniz’s uniquely original discovery (ca. 1676, in Paris) of an infinitesimal calculus, and Leibniz’s later refinement of that discovery, in collaboration with Jean Bernouilli, as a catenary-cued universal principle of physical least action. The latter discovery was the first systematic modern mathematical definition of the principle expressed by that physical-geometric concept of the complex domain developed through the contributions of Gauss, Abel, Dirichlet, and Riemann, most notably.

The modern significance of this development is found within European culture, from the practice of Sphaerics (e.g., spherical harmonics, such as the proof, by construction of the five Platonic Solids), whose work bridges the development of this traditional mathematical physics, from the Pythagoreans through Plato, by the modern developments of anti-reductionist science associated with the work of Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, et al. on the subject of the functions of the complex domain.

The physical significance of the complex domain is that it represents the mathematical-functional expression of the bridging of the efficient power of unseen universal physical principles upon the domain of sense-perceptual experience. This conception is of crucial importance for all serious intelligence work, not only in the domain of mathematical physics, but respecting the ordering of human behavior in general. It is from this vantage-point, alone, that a clear understanding of the implications of the “fishbowl” syndrome can be efficiently understood.

The crucial point for all more serious tasks of intelligence work, is, that what we perceive with our verifiable sense-experience, is not the real universe, but a shadow which the real, unseen universe casts upon what the human mind comprehends as our sense-experience. This demands a rigorous, experimental verification of what we are to recognize rightfully as universal physical and related principles of action.

These universal principles, as associated with both physical experience as such, and also with those higher order of experience of human social interactions we should associate with principles of truly Classical forms of artistic composition, are defined as definite objects of thought by the same principled notion of experimental proof required for what are considered universal physical principles per se. This notion of principles, as applicable to both so-called physical and social interactions, is known from the Pythagoreans et al. as powers (Gr. dynamis), rather than a cause of ostensibly percussive actions in naive notions of sense-experience (e.g., “action at a distance”). This notion of powers corresponds to Heraclitus’ famous aphorism, that nothing exists as constant (e.g., “permanent”) except change per se. This is a notion of a universal principle, as the English translation of Kepler defines the function of intention underlying the efficiency of universal gravitation. E.g., it is the efficient intention expressed in such forms as the pre-determined shape of the planetary orbit is continuously determined by the efficiently active principle of the Solar System as a whole, rather than a reductionist’s notion of a percussive, implicitly linear impulse associated with a resulting trajectory.

From the standpoint of Sphaerics as developed by the Pythagoreans on the foundations of Egyptian astronomy, this acceptance of the efficient universe as the basis for the notion of universal physical laws, it is those principles adduced thus as universal, through proof by appropriate experimental methods, which define the proper intention of the term universal physical laws, and also discoverable universal laws of social processes.

By “mechanisms” analogous to those which Gestalt psychologists after Wolfgang Köhler attributed to the formation of object-like mental perceptions of higher apes, the individual human mind is capable of expressing the experience of a discovery of a universal physical principle as a mental object. In terms of the Gauss-Riemann complex domain, the existence of a universal physical principle is an object in the domain of analysis situs, rather than a mere string of calculations associated with the name of a putative discoverer. This notion of such higher forms of mental objects is the characteristic feature of the theses presented in, most notably, Riemann’s 1854 habilitation dissertation, “On the Hypotheses which Lie at the Foundations of Geometry,” and his 1857 Theory of Abelian Functions.

The same restrictions of meaning must be applied to the definition of actual principles of Classical artistic composition, as distinct from all other forms of composition. Leibniz’s principle of “the pursuit of happiness,” as this appears in the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the same notion of the superior authority of natural law embodied in the Preamble of the Federal Constitution, are examples of the imprint of universal principles of Classical artistic composition upon the domain of social relations.

In physical science, especially since the noted work of Riemann, the standpoint of work is the return to the ancient notion of Sphaerics as employed by the Pythagoreans and Plato, but from a higher modern standpoint in detailed expressions of practical knowledge. In this approach, the treatment of all notions of physical principle conforms to notions of physical geometry, rather than a reductionist standpoint for an arithmetic. By means of the complex domain, so situated conceptually, the human mind is greatly aided in taking into account the efficient nature of the connection between the unseen mental objects represented by universal physical principles, and the action of those principles upon the shadow-world of the adumbrated, ordinary sense-perceptual domain.

From this standpoint, the significance of the “Fishbowl” syndrome can be more clearly seen by the superior intelligence specialist. The best service of our republic demands the training and development of such specialists for the appreciation of the higher practical implications for national policy-making of relevant products of investigations.

The Pathological Euclid

To understand the degeneration in ancient Greek science from the level typified by the work of the Pythagoreans and Plato, toward relevant decadent levels of Latin-speaking culture, we must take into account the close relationship of the essentially exoteric, doctrinaire tradition of Aristotle; we must also take into account the influence of the Egyptian Euclid of the late Hellenistic period of Archimedes and Eratosthenes upon the famous neo-Aristotelean hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy. This intrinsically pathological, reductionist method, of Aristotle, Euclid, and Claudius Ptolemy, is expressed in modern times by such followers of the founder of modern empiricism Paolo Sarpi, as the British and French Eighteenth-century “Enlightenment,” as best typified by the principal targets of Gauss’s 1799 attack, the Voltaire crony D’Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, and empiricist turned quasi-neo-Aristotelean, Immanuel Kant (aka, “I Can’t!”). The Cartesian approach to matters of physical science, is the typification of the course taken by the most notable among our republic’s earliest philosophical enemies of the existence of our United States, the Eighteenth-Century British and French “Enlightenment.”

Most notable, for the epistemological standpoint of the higher quality of contemporary intelligence specialist, is the social origins of the shift from the ancient standpoint of Sphaerics to the relatively decadent standpoint of the reductionism expressed, already in ancient times, in various forms and degrees by the Eleatics, Sophists, and Aristoteleans. The surviving second part of Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy, Prometheus Bound, gives the show away.

Throughout the known history and pre-history of mankind, society in general has been characterized by the rule of a minority over a majority of mankind composed chiefly of herded or hunted human cattle. As the putative original “greenie,” the Olympian Zeus of the trilogy attests, what Zeus alleged to be the crime of Prometheus, was to share knowledge of the existence of universal physical principles of progress of the human condition with the underling humans. The transition from the Pythagoreans and Plato to the reductionists such as the Eleatics, Sophists, and Aristotle, represents, as does the later “code” specified by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, a condemnation of ordinary folk to live as mere animals, condemned to do nothing to improve their customary practice above the fixed set of behaviorisms practiced by their ancestors.

The establishment of our constitutional republic represents the only clearly principled break with the rubble of that oppressive and inherently tragic tradition associated with ancient Greece’s mythological Olympus cult. This tradition of our republic defines the principle which must be proffered by us to our descendants here, and to those hungry for freedom in their own sovereign states, in other parts of the human family as a whole.

The functional distinction between the truly sovereign individual citizen and a mass of people, such as our own lower eighty percentile of family-income brackets today, is the opportunity to practice the kind of progress for all mankind which the tradition of the Olympian Zeus prohibits still today. To substitute the name of “democracy” for this is a travesty, an acceptance of the equality of free man and the man shackled with the burdens of being, by his own definition of the limits of his vision and behavior, a specimen of a mass of human cattle.

The quality of true freedom, which surpasses the condition of so-called democracy, is, as Frederick Douglass posed this for the American in and emerging from slavery, the development of the creative powers of the individual mind, which, unleashed, will soon bring about the true freedom of the slave or ex-slave in the living flesh. It is that freedom which we must assure to all of our people. It is the freedom to be something absolutely above and beyond the quality of mere sense-perceptual knowledge of the beast, or self-inflicted philosophical reductionist.

This desired quality of true individual freedom of the mind, is located essentially in the transfer of the sense of personal identity of the individual from locating himself or herself in the beast-like sense-certainties of the mere living flesh, to the immortality of the individual mind linked in perpetuity to the struggles for progress of mankind of past and future generations alike. The object must be to discover an individual sense of identity located in the permanence of a process of discovery of universal principles, rather than the beast-like form of existence in the bounds of a perception of only one’s flesh.

This problem is associated famously, with the case of the figure of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the brave and efficient fighter who trembles in a disgusting exhibition, as in that Third Act soliloquy, out of fearful impotence which suddenly strikes him at the thought of what might await him after death. He lacks a sense of an efficiently immortal existence, and immortal action which lives within the fleshly bounds of the souls which come after him, as Jeanne d’Arc and the Reverend Martin Luther King dedicated their imperilled mortal existence to the permanence of what they contributed to the cause of the future nation, and also civilization more generally. The life of the happy human individual is confidence in one’s own efficient commitment to the discovery and perpetuation of true universal principles, thus honoring the past and enriching the future of mankind as a whole.

It is the individual who can locate his or her identity within the complex domain of science and Classical artistic principles of composition, who is the true citizen. It is our essential national mission, embedded in the passions and circumstances of our nation’s birth, to be that kind of nation among nations, for the advantage of humanity as a whole. With that power of justified self-confidence, we can make miracles for the benefit of our future generations, and for humanity as a whole. To do this, we must see ourselves as the common principles of the Pythagoreans, Plato, and the modern science of Cusa, Leonardo, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann typify our powers, and our true identity. We must become a happy, and therefore powerful people, a people of great power to do good for others, not to conquer them.

The source of needed strength for our republic, in this most perilous moment of modern history of the planet as a whole, is to discover that nobler identity in ourselves. It is what many mistakenly regard as the merely intangible aspect of the higher reaches of intelligence practice, which must be the guide for shaping the policies of practice to our institutions of government.

Life in a Fishbowl

The state of mind induced by submission to the false axioms suited to the role of human cattle, is typified as to form by the case of the Cartesian model. Whereas Riemann expunges all so-called a priori assumptions respecting geometry and physical science from science, and replaces these only with experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principle, the slave-mentality sees physical reality only in terms of the delusory, a priori form of assumptions typified by the work of Aristotle, Euclid, and the modern empiricists. Thus, the victim of such a set of delusions, may be physically able to react appropriately to the real universe, but his mind will, ordinarily, not permit him to wander beyond the electric-fence-like boundaries defined by his adopted a priori assumptions.

That is what I mean by a “fishbowl syndrome”: a condition in which the human mind behaves like that of a (mythical) goldfish habituated to the boundaries represented by a glass container within which waters he swims.

The pathological (i.e., a priori) set of definitions of a Euclidean or Cartesian geometry of space and time, are merely typical of a much broader array of conditioned mental behavior, more or less a priori conditions which act like an array of electrical cattle-prods and fences to regulate the rather typical behavior of the majority of U.S. citizens, in particular, today.

Typical is the doctrine known variously as laissez-faire, or “free trade.” In fact, those doctrines are not merely absurd scientifically, but maliciously so, as shown by the post-1964 degeneration of the U.S. from the world’s leading producer society, to the mass of “post-industrial” bread and circuses dump of today. These malignant, but widespread articles of ignorant blind faith in a-prioristic assumptions, imply a set of little green men operating from under the floorboards of reality, maliciously casting crooked dice to determine the fate of real, living human individuals dwelling above those floorboards.

Thus, the successive applications of those arbitrarily embedded false doctrines have prompted a nation seeking goods at the lowest price, to drive prices below the level at which productive households can exist, and at which the essential capital of production of goods by our consuming nations could avoid being scrapped. As we have witnessed, this systemic destruction of the economy, and conditions of life, during the sweep of the recent forty years of “floating exchange-rate” systems, of the lunacy of post-industrial utopianism, and Paul Volcker-led collapse of our economic system, have degraded a once-great nation to a degenerate, suppurating role as a “mass entertainment society.”

We have a people hedged in, as by electric fences, by habituated delusions of popularized kinds of definitions, axioms, and postulates of human individual and social behavior. Unless we seize quickly the opportunity presented by the now onrushing early expectation of a general collapse of the present ideological system, to reinstall true, positive values, including those which made us the world’s most productive power, the likelihood of the survival of our constitutional republic is virtually zero.

The same kind of problem confronts us in other nations, and in the cultural integument of the interplay among social systems of various nations and cultures.

Competent intelligence practice at the higher level of national estimates and policy formation, must not degrade itself to the mere Sherlock Holmes-like farce of interpreting facts in an empiricist’s way. We must always focus upon the sets of variously real and merely fictitious notions of controlling principles, which define a kind of physical geometry, a physical geometry, false or true, but nonetheless believed, which controls human mass-behavior to the effect of defining the likely, characteristic form of action governing responses within that social system, either within, or among nations.

It is decisions, on estimates and proposed policies of practice, made at that indicated higher level of intelligence functions, which must subsume decisions on interpretation of developments, such as the case of 9/11, and proposed strategic and comparable actions. This requires a cadre of professional intelligence specialists who operate competently at that level of overview of the processes considered.

The world has lately entered a period of increasing turbulence, an increasingly stormy interaction between old habits of institutional belief and practice, and emergence of increasingly urgent demand for a revolutionary replacement of much of the old, by newly adopted guidelines of national practice. These kinds of problems can not be mastered by an ordinary sort of practical approach; safe transit requires higher skills among the leading cadres of our national intelligence function, as I have outlined the nature of that challenge in the foregoing portions of this section of my report.

Hence the pressing need for a national intelligence institution, to afford the rigorous form of higher education which meets the requirements of a national intelligence service, as I have just indicated the principled characteristics of the challenge, above.

3. The Needed Remedy

The long-ranging objective which underlay the creation of our still wonderfully unique system of Federal Constitutional Republic, was that implicit in the adoption of the central principle of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, that peace among peoples is dependent upon commitment to a principle of “the advantage of the other,” the benefit of the other. This affirmation of the same principle of the sovereign nation-state, as opposed to all forms of empire, and to those “Towers of Babel” known as schemes for dissolving nations into a kind of common, “globalized” minestrone, was the laid cornerstone of all modern international law, as opposed to Hobbesian and kindred forms of global bestiality.

That was the commitment of the founders of the U.S. republic from the beginning, the precept expressed by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ crafting of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, and of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s explicitly prescribed intention, contrary to that of his successor, Harry Truman, for the reconstruction of the post-war world freed of colonialism, empire, and their vestiges: a global community of respectively perfectly sovereign nation-states under a body of international law echoing the intention of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

The most essential features of our constitutional republic demand, that we pursue that course as expressing our most vital self-interest as a nation and its posterity. That is the argument of natural law, including the absolute rejection of John Locke’s doctrine, in favor of Leibniz’s explicit “the pursuit of happiness,” upon which the creation of our nation was premised. That is the subsuming statement of governing principle, expressed as the Preamble of our Federal Constitution. That is the basis on which the principle of our Presidential republic is premised, in rejection of the characteristically tragic failures lurking, embedded in the design of states based on Parliamentary government.

It was these distinctions of our constitutional republic which enabled us to avoid the spread of fascist tyrannies which the financier-oligarchy of the 1922-1945 interval imposed upon the states of Western and Central continental Europe. It was the summoning of that deep-rooted national character of our republic’s creation, in the form of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency, which enabled us to escape going under the imposition of fascist rule by our financier oligarchy, and which enabled us to provide the decisive margin of victory for freeing the world from the threat of a Hitler-regime-led, intended fascist world empire, saving us from the intended universal fascist tyranny of an Allgemeine-SS state.

Our national enemies are not other nations as such, but rather those attempts which threaten the establishment and security of a system of respectively absolutely sovereign nation-states under a natural form of international law traced to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. It is that principle which we must be prepared to defend, and to act to defend, as necessary. That pertains to the properly assigned mission of our military, diplomatic, and national intelligence functions.

Therefore, it became my concern, born of experience with the post-war world, that certain reforms of our national intelligence institutions must occur. I proposed the establishment of a national intelligence academy, paralleling the original intents of the establishment and development of the West Point and Annapolis academies. The intent of such a new institution must be, both to inculcate a historically informed sense of the mission-orientation of our republic’s existence, and to equip the matriculants in that knowledge and use of those skills appropriate for the long-ranging historically determined essential interests of our nation’s republic, interests coincident with the conception of an international law premised upon the principle of the benefit of the other.

The proper mission of our republic, to that end, must be rooted in an appreciation of those principles which set the individual person absolutely above all other forms of life. We must know that the possibility of durable peace among peoples will be secured only to the degree that the individual is freed from the still prevalent condition of being virtual human cattle, until the emergence of a still distant state of world affairs, in which there comes the prevalence of the true citizen, freed of those shackles on the mind which the “fishbowl” syndrome expresses.

Until that happy state of the individual can be made prevalent, a danger remains. However, we must combat that danger within and among nations, by choices of means which are consistent in intent of application with the promotion of that principle itself. Despite undeniable abuses, during and following World War II, that was the attitude expressed widely by the Roosevelt Administration and by most of the ordinary soldiers during and immediately following that war. The ugliness came back in the Truman Administration’s rejection of President Roosevelt’s policy, by such means as backing of the British imperial efforts to re-enforce colonialism in places such as Indo-China and Indonesia, and the imposition of a witch-hunt atmosphere here at home.

Therein lie the pluses and minuses of our appropriate national-security, military, and diplomatic policy. That must be the efficient mission-orientation of the career of the individual intelligence officer graduated from our national intelligence academy.

The Organization of Intelligence

There is probably little disagreement among our intelligence professionals, in particular, that the practice of combining a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and a Director of Intelligence (DI) in the same person, has been a mistake. What must be made clearly understood, is that many of the proposals for dividing the present, nominal or practised functions represent cures which are worse than the disease. None of those heard recent proposals would be relevant to having prevented the grave lapse of intelligence performance preceding the events of 9/11. Perhaps we might not have prevented the attack itself, but we should have prevented those attested lapses, noticed in the report, which were willfully perpetrated by both the President and Vice-President, which assuredly aided in the adversary’s ability to bring about that horrible result.

We do not need a potential Heinrich Himmler for the United States. The proposals generally heard so far, do nothing to prevent the virtual inevitability of such an effect were the proposed “czar” functioning under a re-elected Bush-Cheney government.

We require an institution which has no principal mission but the discovery of the truth about the current and prospective future developments affecting the security of the U.S.A. in the performance of its continuing mission, from administration to administration. It must, first of all, provide forewarning, and otherwise advise the instruments of the Federal government, respecting the developing shape of world history. As an extension of that, it must assist appropriate functions of government in the missions of investigation which are either inherent in its primary function, or are assigned, as standing or ad hoc duties consistent with the intelligence function, by relevant other institutions of government.

I point to work I have studied, of the functioning of U.S. military and other intelligence in the matter of the operations against the U.S.A. and Mexico, by the Nazi and related operations of Synarchist International during the interval between 1935 and the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, especially those conducted against operations in progress under Hitler, his flunky Francisco Franco, and Japan, prior to the U.S. military victory at Midway. These and related precedents, as determinants for rules of undercover engagement, for the special roles of intelligence functions, are still relevant for today. That is, provided those actions do not violate the constitutional intention of the U.S.A. and its partnership in those principles of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which might be administered among nations through the appropriately defined duties of cooperation among perfectly sovereign nation-states assigned to a UNO.

The organization of our national intelligence function for this mission must reflect the interchangeable aspects of national command requirements for the alternate conditions of general warfare or peace. This must be pivoted in the form of a direct accountability for, and also by, the President as war-time commander-in-chief. This pivot on which those alternating roles of the national-intelligence swings, serves primarily as the arm of the President, but also as the role of the Presidency as a whole in checking as well as, otherwise, strengthening the President as a whole.

Suppose, for example, a President were discovered to be insane. Obviously, the power to impeach such a President lies with the Congress; but, the first step for such a case must be the influence of the leading elements of the Presidency upon the President himself, and by such means to avoid impeachment except as a last resort.

For that and comparable reasons, there must be the least-action shift from a DI and DCI in the same person, to a DI as the coordinating official bringing together the sundry functions of the military, diplomatic establishment, and intelligence functions in a coordinated way. This function of the DI ought to be situated as the function associated with direct access to the President, but also regular access to the proceedings of the Cabinet. The other divisions of the intelligence establishment as a whole (military, diplomatic, DCI-directed intelligence, national law enforcement’s intelligence functions), report in an ordinary way to the DI, but are not denied written or oral forms of direct access to the President when this is requested. An easily defined reporting to the Congress, is also needed. Thus, there must be checks-and-balances in the intelligence system as a whole, for both positive and negative reasons.

The axis of the functioning of this intelligence system as a whole, must be the location of a newly established national intelligence institute, comparable to the original intention of West Point and Annapolis Academies, which must be the shaping of the conscience and associated skills of the core of the cadres who join the regular ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency, or may be seconded for special educational programs of this type among military and diplomatic cadres.

Beyond such reforms, there is an additional requirement. For such a form of intelligence organization to function effectively, the nation must adopt a reformed affirmation of the sense of national, multi-generational mission to which I have referred earlier here.

In life, there is truly no set of permanently established sets of rules which might properly govern decision-making over successive generations. That function must be assigned to a higher level of policy-shaping, to the intent of a process of change through self-development of national practice, as changes in conditions and new opportunities for progress suggest such change. One of the appropriate institutions for coordinating studies of such processes would be the faculty of a national intelligence academy, which can serve as a rallying-point for the promotion and digestion of this advisory function.

It is also important to stress the need to establish the concept of a general staff function, a function of officers assigned to reach beyond the envelope of ordinary command, to explore new dimensions not adequately addressed by the regular order of command. This is especially required for all those intelligence functions whose authorities and duties bear on discovery of principles and special situations which arise beyond the ordinary line of command, the function of well-trained officials acting for a time as the mavericks who reach beyond the envelope of ordinary practice, to places from which the effective flanking of otherwise stubborn problems of function may be effected.

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