Outside of the rhetorical zone, outside of the we-can-believe-any-feel-good-idealistic-high-minded-righteous-principles-we-want-as-long-as-we're-just-talking-comfortably zone, this is not true.

You know how politicians have a certain style of rhetoric they use when addressing the public? How when they go on talk shows or try to speak about some platform/policy they are tendering to the public, there's this whole pretense of them actually believing in not only that the policy being tendered could work after you elect them and people like them, but also they have these "American" ethics/values, or even sometimes universal ethics, which form their motivation for wanting to be in politics, and wanting to enact policy?

I'm asking if you notice the gulf between how politicians speak, and what motives they give you the impression they have, versus how they really feel on the inside. One can say I don't knows how they feel on the inside, yet we've been lied to so many times, and we have seen contradictions between their public rhetoric and their private motivations in the past, that we should actually be considered gullible / abused-victim battered-wives if we take the rhetoric and policy prescriptions for, say, the 2016 elections at face value. I can safely predict that these candidates are pushing policies with a pretense of justice and ethics, yet they are for all literal definitions lying about what they say they believe.

I used the sort of politicians you vote for as an example that you should already understand. It shouldn't be controversial that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are actually speaking words from behind a more-electable "persona" that is actually a lie. They effectively "pander" to us by talking about doing things "for America" and "for Americans". We've seen their lies in the past contradicted by their actual actions.

Anyway, military and civilian contractors in positions of power in the government need to be understood in this light.

"In what way are people who work for the NSA not American?"

Simple. No one who is not self-deceived, or deceived by others, works in that way. They are self-interested for the most part. They don't want to help everyone in America; there are millions of people in America they despise. The higher the stakes, the less altruistic they are. Give up your "hard-earned" money in taxes? In private charity? Too high of stakes. They be more likely to help other Americans if the others were "the sort of Americans" they prefer, and they prefer to leave the sort of individuals they don't like, or don't know and don't trust, to fend for themselves.

That applies to low-level workers, and it applies also applies to individuals at high levels of power. The fact that individuals at high levels have to use political-style fake rhetoric and personas to be appointed to their contracts and their stations does not mean they actually believe it. What truly motivates them is usually selfish things: attaining more wealth, ownership, control, more agency to mold their personal worlds to their will (cars, country clubs, whatever), and more agency to mold their greater civilization to their will (forcing other people to exist in ways that are more pleasing, or convenient to the powerful).

You see, there is no America, in reality. The reality that people fundamentally care about, will care about over the deceptive rhetoric when the chips are down, and that the military serves to exist, is wealth, power, and control.

We exist in a planetary civilizaion, but we presently pretend that old national civilizations are what motivate us, even as we take action year-in-and-year-out to further along the globalness of our order: we try to globalize/standardize our finance and governance system over every single individual person in every old nation.

So it's global power that motivates the ones in power, and building and preserving their own individual status in the global order that is what they are really beholden to.

That is why things like "Homeland Security" and NSA domestic information gathering exist: though the people with their hands on the levers of power here say it's to "protect America," they actually don't love all of America. "When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other, you'll see." They can't possibly save all of Americans, and they're building a lockdown-safe domestic order that will treat non-conforming Americans just as poorly as they treat non-conforming non-nationals.

They are working to protect themselves from violence, not the "Americans" they pander to. You will be protected precisely to the degree that you endorse and support the global regime, and you will be oppressed precisely to the degree that you resist and combat it.

Their professed "to protect America" motive is just a fork-tongued, or sugar-coated, rhetorical device that does not comport to the reality in their own heads when they put their heads down on their silk pillows at night. They are protecting their global economic and political order: corporate power, corporate governance, financialization, ueber alles.