After working on the MIT SAGE radar system and at the Joint Chiefs, Earnest concluded âitâs basically a money-making system, thatâs what itâs about and has nothing to do with real defenseâ â Lester Earnest on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay. This is an episode of Reality Asserts Itself, produced December 28, 2018.
STORY TRANSCRIPT
PAUL JAY: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself. Iâm Paul Jay on The Real News Network. And we are back with Lester Earnest, one of the creators of artificial intelligence, or machine language, as he would prefer to call it. Thanks again for joining us.
LESTER EARNEST: My pleasure.
PAUL JAY: So you work at MIT, and youâre part of a program which is a big fraud. Youâre finding crazy stuff going on in the technology with Bomarc missiles. One thing after another, the irrationality of this and how much of this is driven by profit-making, not actually worried about a real, an existential danger from the Soviet Union, whatâs this do to your own belief system?
LESTER EARNEST: Well, I was going downhill, getting more and more frustrated with my job. The people I was working with were good people. They had, most of them, come out of MIT. And bright. But our goals were strangely twisted. When we were working at MIT, the goal, technological goals were stated in advance, and we were assessed based on the degree to which we met those goals. Once we went into Mitre we started using the Defense Departmentâs criteria for success, the goal being to spend all the money in the budget by the end of the fiscal year. And if you did that you would likely get more, whether you accomplished anything or not. There was no assessment of success or failure other than spending the money.
PAUL JAY: And by this point thatâs your, your understanding of it, at this point. That this is no longer about defending the nation. This is about making-
LESTER EARNEST: It wasnât just my understanding. Thatâs the way it actually worked.
PAUL JAY: I believe that. But Iâm asking youâthatâs what you believed at that point, too.
LESTER EARNEST: Yeah. Yeah, I had to work toward those goals.
PAUL JAY: So everybodyâs cynically involved in all this making money, while the rest of the population thinks theyâre about to get blown up.
LESTER EARNEST: Yep. So that was a real reversal of common sense. And so all of these projects were designed to make money, not to accomplish anything. And in general, they did not accomplish anything.
PAUL JAY: All right. 1963-â64, you are questioning, I guess, everything you thought was true turns out to increasingly be a crock, and be about money; true meaning the mission of the United States, the, you know, the mission of the armed forces to defend the country, for democracy, turns out to be how do we make a lot of money. And the Vietnam Warâs really starting to unfold. When do you start to really decide that what you believe in is not true?
LESTER EARNEST: Well, I knew that I was doing dirty work from way back. And I was being well paid for it. But I was getting increasingly bothered by the fact that I was costing taxpayers a lot of money for no good at all. And this whole thing wasnât going anywhere. But I still struggled ahead a while longer. I worked in Los Angeles for several months doing a technological prediction which was supposed to help the planning. And I also criticized the way they had been building systems.
PAUL JAY: They being the armed forces.
LESTER EARNEST: Correct. But the head guy in our group, a colonel, said we canât say theyâre doing things wrong. So he took my report and censored it so that none of that got out.
I then came back to Boston and was recruited to go to Washington, DC to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, designing the so-called worldwide military command and control systemâanother giant mess. And dealing with the Joint Chiefs and their staff was no more pleasure than dealing with the rest of the folks. One of the first things I realized was that geography to the military commands is different from the rest of the worldâs view. We draw boundaries of countries and counties, states, and things. The military has command boundaries, which are quite different. Many commands cover multiple countries. So itâs all a very different system.
So the first thing I wanted to do was learn about military geography. So I sent a guy over to the Pentagon to collect that information. And an hour later I received a call from a colonel, maybe it was a general, saying get that guy out of here and never send him back. I said, whatâs the problem? He said he has a beard. We donât allow anyone with a beard in our office. So that gave me another insight.
And we went on from there. I listened to the morning briefings of the Joint Chiefs. They had, it was in a two-story room, they had a balcony enclosed, and the presentation was down below with three display screens. And other lowlifes like me were kept down on the lower level. And I saw what a fraud that was. The good stuff came from commercial news sources. The intelligence stuff was phony to the core, a lot of it. Some of it was real. But there was a whole lot of phony stuff going through there.
PAUL JAY: Yeah, we learned from our interview with Daniel Ellsberg that in 1962-63, the Air Force was telling the President and the country of this enormous missile gap; that supposedly the Soviet Union had 40-60 ICBMs aimed at the United States. And of course, this required an enormous expenditure to not only close the gap but to significantly surpass the Soviet Union. It was discoveredâEllsberg found outâthat they figured out by satellite photography, and byâI believe itâs â62 or â63âthat, in fact, the Soviet Union had four ICBMs. The whole thing was a crock created by the Air Force. In fact, the Army and the Navy had a much more accurate assessment, far, far lower than 40. Khruschev, it turned out, was bluffing that he had parity. Nowhere near parity. But the Army and Navy had more or less figured out that. But the Air Force was telling everybody, in order to spend enormous amounts of money on a whole whack of ICBMs.
And the other important part of this thing is if they only have four ICBMs, then how real is this strategy for global domination? It turns out that whole thingâs mythology. Did you start to get a sense of that? That this is more about American hegemony than it is about defense?
LESTER EARNEST: Yeah. Itâs, itâs basically a money-making system. Thatâs what itâs about. And has nothing to do with real defense.
PAUL JAY: In the next segment of our interview weâll talk about how this big fraud helped create the conditions for the internet. Please join us for the continuation of Reality Asserts Itself with Lester Earnest on The Real News Network.
