Anna Von Reitz -- Sydney Powell Should Sue the US Army

Sitting on his couch at the end of a surreal week, he finally took off the gloves. His target? The Defense Department itself, the largest organization in the world–and one he has served in various ways since he was 18. “This fucking place is rotten. It’s rotten.” Miller’s gravest concern, he said, involved a bedrock principle of American democracy: civilian control of the military. “When the system is weighted towards the Joint Staff and the geographic combatant commanders against civilian control, you know, we’ve got to rethink this.” He expressed a belief that by “idolizing and fetishizing” the top brass, members of Congress had ignored an erosion over time in the chain of command.

“We’re in a crisis mode,” Cohen had told me earlier. He said he and others had discovered that the Joint Chiefs were creating their own “security compartments” containing operational planning details “for the express purpose of hiding key information from career civilian and political leaders in the Pentagon”–up to and including the secretary of Defense. Talk about a deep state. “That means that policymakers were basing their decisions on partial information. It’s very dangerous and irresponsible, and that’s something I’ve actually highlighted in my conversations with [Biden's] transition team.” I’ll admit it sounded loopy. To me it had all the elements of a Trump fever dream: The military and intelligence establishment was somehow scheming against the renegades. That is, until two other senior national security officials–with Miller and company–confirmed Cohen’s assertion.

“The entire system,” Miller stated, “the intelligence community [included], is complicit in setting up all these compartments–so that only very select people actually have perspective and access to the entire picture. And then your question is, ‘Well, who are these people that have the complete picture?’ I felt like I finally did as acting SECDEF–to a point. I’m sure there’s still some stuff that was being compartmented. But I don’t know that for a fact.”