There is no "deep state", just the state. Calling things "the deep state" tries to partition the state in two parts, a good one and a bad one.
There is also no "deep Amazon" or "deep Meta". Amazon is Amazon, Meta is Meta and the state is the state. People working for or representing the state have their own agenda, have their cliques, have their CYA like people everywhere else. And the state as an organization prioritizes survival and self defense above all other goals it might have.
Indeed. "Deep" is a weasel word. "State" is all the operations of governance which don't change when the government changes.
However, the state is not a monolith. It's an organization of all sorts of sub-organizations run by individuals with their own agendas. They have names, faces, and honors: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304
(The honors systems is deeply problematic because about half of them are handed out to insiders for complicity in god knows what and the other half are handed out to celebrities as cover for the first half)
I'm not sure that's really fair. Within any organization there are subgroups. For instance there was an entire branch of AT&T that was dedicated to illegally spying on Americans for the NSA.
Most employees of AT&T had no idea it was even going on, so to lump every AT&T employee into the same batch of "you're bad because th company you work for was doing X" when they had no idea the company was doing X isn't really fair.
By the same vein, Stephen Miller trying to round up and cage innocent civilians just trying to live their life is a very different part of the government than Suzanne at NASA who's trying to better the future of mankind. To act as if there's no distinguishing between the two is just silly.
Whether you have an issue with the specific term "deep state" I'll leave be. But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations. The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does, but the reverse isn't true when speaking outside of their specific area of ownership.
When people say "deep state" they mean "invisible state". Not "bad state". If you realize this, suddenly you'll understand what people are talking about a lot more.
Deep State makes kind of sense here, because the U.K. Post Office, had there own Law Enforcement. They can act like the state in several ways. I think the correct term is "Private prosecution". And as fare as I understand it, the U.K. Post Office was able to have there own judge.
No, the Post Office doesn't have its own "law enforcement" (if you mean something like a police force) or its own judges.
Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law, and this was the basis for the prosecutions in question. It just means that the company pays for some of the costs involved.
Whether or not private prosecutions should be allowed is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion. Let's not muddy the waters with misinformation about the Post Office having some kind of parallel police and courts system. It just doesn't.
> Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law
That's a simplification. The Post Office has a more privileged position due to its history; it has both formal access (e.g. to police computers) and informal deference from CPS that regular companies do not enjoy.
That’s true, but it’s unclear the extent to which any of that was a factor. For example, how was the Post Office’s access to the PNC relevant here?
It may be that the CPS would have taken over these prosecutions and dropped them if the company in question had been, say, Tesco. But I don’t see how we can be sure of this.
> It may be that the CPS would have taken over these prosecutions and dropped them if the company in question had been, say, Tesco. But I don’t see how we can be sure of this.
I agree we can't know for sure. But I think it's a mistake to shrug it off and assume the fact it was the Post Office had nothing to do with how it played out.
> But I think it's a mistake to shrug it off and assume the fact it was the Post Office had nothing to do with how it played out.
I agree. My only aim here was to correct some of the wild misconceptions about the powers of the Post Office that pop up in these threads. It’s one thing to suggest that the Post Office was given special deference by the CPS and other parts of the legal system. It’s another thing to suggest that the Post Office has its own judges, or that the Post Office has some kind of unique legal power to bring private prosecutions. Unfortunately, serious factual errors of this kind tend to get passed over lightly in pile-on threads where everyone wants to vent their (justifiable) anger at the Post Office. People expend more energy responding to my factually accurate posts (probably because I don’t redundantly rant about how awful the Post Office is) than they do correcting blatant misinformation.
It refers to people in the government with a lot of power and little public exposure, and perhaps some indication of using their power against the will of the general public, and yes there’s tons of these people, and it’s quite good to have the public generally worried about them.
American political history is littered with deep state plots that turned out to be true - Iraq war being a big recent one, the insurance policy FBI agents another.
Iraq war was definitely not the work of any deep state, if you follow your definition. It was pushed by the president and his government, not faceless bureaucrats.
Certainly the pressure on them and the “intel” they saw on WMD was in part the work of the deep state, that the president was captured by them is sort of the point.
The CIA was very clear that there was nothing there, and the publicly appointed leadership (Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, etc) badgered them until they gave in and made some wishy-washy statement that Powell could pretend was real.
The war was led from the top - Sec Def and VP. That Bush was a moron and appointed liars to Sec Def and VP is on him. Cheney and Rumsfeld had a long history of making things up, going back to the 70s.
Source being that ridiculous fanfic Cheney movie? You’re even further off than me, even high level CIA was divided, along many other orgs that supported it. Where did Colin Powell get his evidence from? And the OSP?
Even if we agreed Iraq wasn’t a good example, it’s irrelevant to the point as I don’t think anyone actually thinks there aren’t powerful and largely behind the scenes figures - defense, lobbying, billionaires, and so on that aren’t actively steering the government away from the will of the people.
That shows some set of intelligence had some sources that told them they don’t, far from proof of anything let alone anything relevant here. And we know several high up yet largely unknown to the public defense ops claimed the opposite, ie, the deep state.
No. The source being that Cheney and Rumsfeld had form going back to the 70's with Team B.
And just like Iraq, they didn't like the story coming out of the CIA that the USSR was a decrepit aging empire that was struggling to maintain parity with NATO. Cheney and Rumsfeld were SURE there were whole secret programs, with secret bases, and secret funding. So they badgered Ford into appointing a parallel team to produce different estimates. That was the whole "missile gap" scare.
Sound familiar? And guess what? It was all bullshit. Just like Iraq turned out to be.
I believe in conspiracies. The 20c was defined by conspiracies! Bolshevism, Naziism, Fascism, Maoism, Scientology, Heavens Gate, etc. The soviets really did fund post-modernism. The CIA really did run the National Review. Those are well documented.
What I don't believe is that Iraq every had even the beginning of a nuclear weapons program. Nobody with any sense did either. All the evidence came from known liars.
As for Powell's evidence: he was a lib, trying to keep the post-war order intact, while Cheney and Bolton were working to blow it up.
Powell knew it was bullshit, but he thought it was a better grade of bullshit that wouldn't make him look like such a moron. All he needed was enough of a figleaf to get either the UN or a compliant Nato to join in. Turns out, the yellow-cake story was such low-grade bullshit he'll never live it down.
There is no fancy latin name for giving known paranoids fantasists like Cheney and Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt. But there really should be.
I'll grant that Cheney and Rumsfeld have networks in the agencies they could lean on to muddy things. And that deservers the name deep-state. Invisible, and unaccountable.
But you can't really call the gang that led this deep state when they are confirmed by congress, and go on TV.
You've got it backwards, at least in your description.
They went after the intel they wanted to find to justify their position. It didn't matter if it was real or true, it just needed to come from the intelligence apparatus.
My argument is that these are not deep state plots, these are just plots. This are plots that states are doing. This is the state. This is an organization of millions of people. There is no deep state. The state is just like any other large organization.
Take for example the eBay stalking scandal.
"The eBay stalking scandal was a campaign conducted in 2019 by eBay and contractors. The scandal involved the aggressive stalking and harassment of two e-commerce bloggers, Ina and David Steiner, who wrote frequent commentary about eBay on their website EcommerceBytes"
There is no "deep eBay", there is just eBay. We don't use the phrase "deep eBay" for a reason. And in the same way "deep State" does not make any sense.
Fair. I use the term to refer to the parts of the state that are somehow buried deep, beyond most people's awareness. In this case the problems started with a government contractor, and were then covered up by people inside the post office. It wasn't a top-down conspiracy of politicians, or of civil servants following their orders.
There is also no "deep Amazon" or "deep Meta". Amazon is Amazon, Meta is Meta and the state is the state. People working for or representing the state have their own agenda, have their cliques, have their CYA like people everywhere else. And the state as an organization prioritizes survival and self defense above all other goals it might have.