Tony Blair, Christopher Hitchens Debate Religion

JOHN LE CARRÉ:  Now you have to bear in mind also that we are creating what American media are referring to as a deep state in this country. That is, I think I read, indeed, in the Washington Post, that 890,000-odd Americans who are not in government service are cleared for top secret and above. I don’t know to what extent that situation is replicated here, but more and more I have the feeling that the power of the counterterror market is expanding and creating a wider—an ever-widening circle of those who are initiated, indoctrinated, part of the security structure, whether directly or indirectly, and those who are not. So then it makes it possible, as at the time, for example, of the parliamentary vote on whether we should go to war in Iraq, it makes it possible for a senior MP to take a neophyte aside and say, "If you’d seen the papers that I’ve seen, you would know which lobby to go into when the vote comes up." And this suggestion that there are those in the know and those not in the know, and that those not in the know are second-class citizens, is extremely dangerous to society. And I think we have to address it all the time.

We have no idea. We don’t have a spokesman for these intelligence services, either one of them, either one of the three main intelligence services. We have inspired leaks. We have people who seem to speak with authority. But when somebody tells us suddenly that we’ve gone on to red alert, and there are tanks outside London Airport, or whatever it is, we don’t know by what process this definition reaches us. It’s very easy inside an intelligence service to develop a capsule mentality. You live inside the bubble. The one thing you begin to lose is common sense, a sense of balance. And particularly when it’s men, all together, men in a room. I always think that was the awful secret of the Bay of Pigs catastrophe. It was actually the guys telling each other who they were, and they were frightfully clever men, and they’d done amazing things, some of them horrible things, in Vietnam, and they were together, and they were conspiring, and there was nobody there to say, "Boys, just take it down a bit. Just step back. Is this sensible? Do we really believe the Cubans are going to rush down and embrace our troops when they land on the beach?"

KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost