OMNI US
My blog: It's the War
Department
Newsletters:
Index:
See: Imperialism, Militarism, National Security
State
Contents
Priest and Arkin, Top
Secret America
Trevor Paglen, 2 Books
Invisible
Blank Spots
Moyers, Reagan and Contras
Wise, Johnson, Nixon,
and VN War
Greenberg, Wikileaks, Hacckers for Transparency
Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters:
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
JEREMY SCAHILL, DIRTY WARS, BOOK AND DOCUMENTARY 2013
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HOME
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THE BOOK
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THE FILM
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TRAILER
About
Jeremy Scahill
"Scahill is a one-man truth squad." Bill Moyers
JEREMY SCAHILL is National Security Correspondent for The
Nation magazine
and is a Puffin Foundation
Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute.
Scahill is author of
the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful
Mercenary Army (Nation
Books, 2007). Nation Books will release Scahill's second book, Dirty Wars: The
World Is a Battlefield, on April 23, 2013.
He is the writer, with
David Riker, and a producer of the documentary feature film, Dirty
Wars, which won the Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2013.
IFC Films releases Dirty Wars in theaters June 7 throughout the United States
Scahill
has reported from
Scahill’s work has sparked
several Congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest
honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998
for foreign reporting and in 2008 for his book Blackwater.
In 2013, Scahill was named
one of nine recipients of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University
Scahill is a member of
the Writers Guild of
America, East.
Join our mailing list
@dirtywars
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DirtyWars: London
14 May
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DirtyWars: London
14 May
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© 2013 Dirty Wars
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Contact
Charles P. Pierce, “The Cost of America
Pierce writes: "This is what
secret wars are about. Secret wars are still wars. There will be atrocities.
And, because this is the nature of all governments in all wars, these
atrocities will be covered up and lied about. But the problem with secret wars is not that they are secret from
the people on whom they are waged, or the people who simply live in the country
where they are waged. As Doonesbury once memorably pointed out, the 'secret
bombing' of Cambodia
READ MORE http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8755-the-cost-of-americas-secret-wars-then-and-now
TOP SECRET AMERICA
COMMENTARY ON WASHINGTON
National Security Inc.
Private Contractors
In June, a stone carver from Manassas chiseled another perfect star into a
marble wall at CIA headquarters, one of 22 for agency workers killed in the
global war initiated by the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage
of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story
about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at
all. They were private contractors.
To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are
carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal
rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently
government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence
and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington
What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist
attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the
federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather
than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of
its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such
concerns.
The Post
investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United
States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public
view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is
impossible to determine.
It is also a system in which contractors are playing an ever
more important role. The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with
top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. There is no better example of
the government's dependency on them than at the CIA, the one place in government that exists to do things overseas
that no other U.S.
agency is allowed to do.
Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies
in Iraq , paid bribes for
information in Afghanistan
and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped
snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy ,
interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over
defectors holed up in the Washington
suburbs. At Langley
headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency's training
facility in Virginia ,
they are helping mold a new generation of American spies.
Through the federal budget process, the George W. Bush
administration and Congress made it much easier for the CIA and other agencies
involved in counterterrorism to hire more contractors than civil servants. They
did this to limit the size of the permanent workforce, to hire employees more
quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought -
wrongly, it turned out - that contractors would be less expensive. . . . .
Contractors can offer more money - often twice as much - to
experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And
because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so
great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as
Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.
The idea that the government would save money on a contract
workforce "is a false economy," said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former
senior CIA official and now president of his own intelligence training academy.
As companies raid federal agencies of talent, the government
has been left with the youngest intelligence staffs ever while more experienced
employees move into the private sector. This is true at the CIA, where
employees from 114 firms account for roughly a third of the workforce, or about
10,000 positions. Many of them are temporary hires, often former military or
intelligence agency employees who left government service to work less and earn
more while drawing a federal pension.
Across the government, such workers are used in every
conceivable way.
Contractors kill enemy fighters. They spy on foreign
governments and eavesdrop on terrorist networks. They help craft war plans.
They gather information on local factions in war zones. They are the
historians, the architects, the recruiters in the nation's most secretive
agencies. They staff watch centers across the Washington area. They are among the most
trusted advisers to the four-star generals leading the nation's wars.
So great is the government's appetite for private
contractors with top-secret clearances that there are now more than 300
companies, often nicknamed "body shops," that specialize in finding
candidates, often for a fee that approaches $50,000 a person, according to
those in the business.
Making it more difficult to replace contractors with federal
employees: The government doesn't know how many are on the federal payroll.
Gates said he wants to reduce the number of defense contractors by about 13
percent, to pre-9/11 levels, but he's having a hard time even getting a basic
head count.
"This is a terrible confession," he said. "I
can't get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary
of Defense," referring to the department's civilian leadership.
The role of private contractors
As Top Secret America has grown, the government has become
more dependent on contractors with matching security clearances.
The Post's estimate of 265,000 contractors doing top-secret
work was vetted by several high-ranking intelligence officials who approved of
The Post's methodology. The newspaper's Top Secret America database includes
1,931 companies that perform work at the top-secret level. More than a quarter
of them - 533 - came into being after 2001, and others that already existed
have expanded greatly. Most are thriving even as the rest of the United States
struggles with bankruptcies, unemployment and foreclosures.
The privatization of national security work has been made
possible by a nine-year "gusher" of money, as Gates recently
described national security spending since the 9/11 attacks.
With so much money to spend, managers do not always worry
about whether they are spending it effectively.
"Someone says, 'Let's do another study,' and because no
one shares information, everyone does their own study," said Elena
Mastors, who headed a team studying the al-Qaeda leadership for the Defense
Department. "It's about how many studies you can orchestrate, how many
people you can fly all over the place. Everybody's just on a spending spree. We
don't need all these people doing all this stuff."
Most of these contractors do work that is fundamental to an
agency's core mission. As a result, the government has become dependent on them
in a way few could have foreseen: wartime temps who have become a permanent
cadre.
Just last week, typing "top secret" into the
search engine of a major jobs Web site showed 1,951 unfilled positions in the
Washington area, and 19,759 nationwide: "Target analyst," Reston.
"Critical infrastructure specialist," Washington ,
D.C. "Joint expeditionary team
member," Arlington .
"We could not perform our mission without them. They
serve as our 'reserves,' providing flexibility and expertise we can't
acquire," said Ronald Sanders, who was chief of human capital for the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence before retiring in February.
"Once they are on board, we treat them as if they're a part of the total
force."
The Post's investigation is based on government documents
and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social
networking Web sites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with
intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most
requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly
or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their
concerns.
The investigation focused on top-secret work because the
amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track. A
searchable database of government organizations and private companies was built
entirely on public records. [For an explanation of the newspaper's decision
making behind this project, please see the Editor's Note.]
----
The national security industry sells the military and
intelligence agencies more than just airplanes, ships and tanks. It sells contractors'
brain power. They advise, brief and work everywhere, including 25 feet under
the Pentagon in a bunker where they can be found alongside military personnel
in battle fatigues monitoring potential crises worldwide.
Late at night, when the wide corridors of the Pentagon are
all but empty, the National
Military Command
Center U.S. forces anywhere in the world,
to granular satellite images or to the White House Situation Room.
The purpose of all this is to be able to answer any question
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might have. To be ready 24 hours a
day, every day, takes five brigadier generals, a staff of colonels and senior
noncommissioned officers - and a man wearing a pink contractor badge and a
bright purple shirt and tie.
Erik Saar's job title is "knowledge engineer." In
one of the most sensitive places in America , he is the only person in
the room who knows how to bring data from far afield, fast. Saar
and four teammates from a private company, SRA International, teach these
top-ranked staff officers to think in Web 2.0. They are trying to push a
tradition-bound culture to act differently, digitally.
Help wanted: professionals with security clearances
Recruiters for companies that hold government contracts meet
with job seekers who have security clearances at a Targeted Job Fairs event in McLean , Va.
That sometimes means asking for help in a public online chat
room or exchanging ideas on shared Web pages outside the military computer
networks dubbed .mil - things much resisted within the Pentagon's
self-sufficient culture. "Our job is to change the perception of leaders
who might drive change," Saar said.
Since 9/11, contractors have made extraordinary contributions
- and extraordinary blunders - that have changed history and clouded the
public's view of the distinction between the actions of officers sworn on
behalf of the United States
and corporate employees with little more than a security badge and a gun.
Contractor misdeeds in Iraq
and Afghanistan have hurt U.S. credibility in those countries as well as
in the Middle East . Abuse of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib, some of it done by contractors, helped ignite a call for vengeance
against the United States
that continues today. Security guards working for Blackwater added fuel to the
five-year violent chaos in Iraq
and became the symbol of an America
run amok.
Contractors in war zones, especially those who can fire
weapons, blur "the line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of
force, which is just what our enemies want," Allison Stanger, a professor
of international politics and economics at Middlebury College and the author of
"One Nation Under Contract," told the independent Commission on Wartime
Contracting at a hearing in June.
Misconduct happens, too. A defense contractor formerly
called MZM paid bribes for CIA contracts, sending Randy "Duke"
Cunningham, who was a California
congressman on the intelligence committee, to prison. Guards employed in Afghanistan by
ArmorGroup North America, a private security company, were caught on camera in
a lewd-partying scandal.
But contractors have also advanced the way the military
fights. During the bloodiest months in Iraq , the founder of Berico
Technologies, a former Army officer named Guy Filippelli, working with the
National Security Agency, invented a technology that made finding the makers of
roadside bombs easier and helped stanch the number of casualties from
improvised explosives, according to NSA officials.
Contractors have produced blueprints and equipment for the
unmanned aerial war fought by drones, which have killed the largest number of
senior al-Qaeda leaders and produced a flood of surveillance videos. A dozen
firms created the transnational digital highway that carries the drones'
real-time data on terrorist hide-outs from overseas to command posts throughout
the United States .
Private firms have become so thoroughly entwined with the
government's most sensitive activities that without them important military and
intelligence missions would have to cease or would be jeopardized. Some
examples:
*At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the number of
contractors equals the number of federal employees. The department depends on
318 companies for essential services and personnel, including 19 staffing firms
that help DHS find and hire even more contractors. At the office that handles
intelligence, six out of 10 employees are from private industry.
*The National Security Agency, which conducts worldwide electronic
surveillance, hires private firms to come up with most of its technological
innovations. The NSA used to work with a small stable of firms; now it works
with at least 484 and is actively recruiting more.
*The National Reconnaissance Office cannot produce, launch
or maintain its large satellite surveillance systems, which photograph
countries such as China , North Korea and Iran , without the four major
contractors it works with.
*Every intelligence and military organization depends on
contract linguists to communicate overseas, translate documents and make sense
of electronic voice intercepts. The demand for native speakers is so great, and
the amount of money the government is willing to pay for them is so huge, that
56 firms compete for this business.
*Each of the 16 intelligence agencies depends on
corporations to set up its computer networks, communicate with other agencies'
networks, and fuse and mine disparate bits of information that might indicate a
terrorist plot. More than 400 companies work exclusively in this area, building
classified hardware and software systems.
Hiring contractors was supposed to save the government
money. But that has not turned out to be the case. A 2008 study published by
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that contractors made
up 29 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies but cost the
equivalent of 49 percent of their personnel budgets. Gates said that federal
workers cost the government 25 percent less than contractors.
The process of reducing the number of contractors has been
slow, if the giant Office of Naval Intelligence in Suitland
is any example. There, 2,770 people work on the round-the-clock maritime watch
floor tracking commercial vessels, or in science and engineering laboratories,
or in one of four separate intelligence centers. But it is the employees of 70
information technology companies who keep the place operating.
They store, process and analyze communications and
intelligence transmitted to and from the entire U.S. naval fleet and commercial
vessels worldwide. "Could we keep this building running without
contractors?" said the captain in charge of information technology.
"No, I don't think we could keep up with it."
Vice Adm. David J. "Jack" Dorsett, director of naval
intelligence, said he could save millions each year by converting 20 percent of
the contractor jobs at the Suitland complex to
civil servant positions. He has gotten the go-ahead, but it's been a slow
start. This year, his staff has converted one contractor job and eliminated
another - out of 589. "It's costing me an arm and a leg," Dorsett
said.
----
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says he would like to
reduce the number of defense contractors to pre-9/11 levels. (Photo by: Melina
Mara | The Washington
Post)
Of the 1,931 companies identified by The Post that work on
top-secret contracts, about 110 of them do roughly 90 percent of the work on
the corporate side of the defense-intelligence-corporate world.
GENERAL DYNAMICS
To understand how these firms have come to dominate the
post-9/11 era, there's no better place to start than the Herndon office of General Dynamics. One recent afternoon
there, Ken Pohill was watching a series of unclassified images, the first of
which showed a white truck moving across his computer monitor.
The truck was in Afghanistan ,
and a video camera bolted to the belly of a U.S. surveillance plane was
following it. Pohill could access a dozen images that might help an
intelligence analyst figure out whether the truck driver was just a truck
driver or part of a network making roadside bombs to kill American soldiers.
To do this, he clicked his computer mouse. Up popped a
picture of the truck driver's house, with notes about visitors. Another click.
Up popped infrared video of the vehicle. Click: Analysis of an object thrown
from the driver's side. Click: U-2 imagery. Click: A history of the truck's
movement. Click. A Google Earth map of friendly forces. Click: A chat box with
everyone else following the truck, too.
Ten years ago, if Pohill had worked for General Dynamics, he
probably would have had a job bending steel. Then, the company's center of
gravity was the industrial port city of Groton , Conn. , where men and
women in wet galoshes churned out submarines, the thoroughbreds of naval
warfare. Today, the firm's commercial core is made up of data tools such as the
digital imagery library in Herndon and the secure BlackBerry-like device used
by President Obama, both developed at a carpeted suburban office by employees
in loafers and heels.
The evolution of General Dynamics was based on one simple
strategy: Follow the money.
The company embraced the emerging intelligence-driven style
of warfare. It developed small-target identification systems and equipment that
could intercept an insurgent's cellphone and laptop communications. It found
ways to sort the billions of data points collected by intelligence agencies
into piles of information that a single person could analyze.
It also began gobbling up smaller companies that could help
it dominate the new intelligence landscape, just as its competitors were doing.
Between 2001 and 2010, the company acquired 11 firms specializing in
satellites, signals and geospatial intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance,
technology integration and imagery.
On Sept. 11, 2001, General Dynamics was working with nine
intelligence organizations. Now it has contracts with all 16. Its employees
fill the halls of the NSA and DHS. The corporation was paid hundreds of
millions of dollars to set up and manage DHS's new offices in 2003, including
its National Operations Center
General Dynamics' bottom line reflects its successful
transformation. It also reflects how much the U.S. government - the firm's largest
customer by far - has paid the company beyond what it costs to do the work,
which is, after all, the goal of every profit-making corporation.
The company reported $31.9 billion in revenue in 2009, up
from $10.4 billion in 2000. Its workforce has more than doubled in that time,
from 43,300 to 91,700 employees, according to the company.
Revenue from General Dynamics' intelligence- and
information-related divisions, where the majority of its top-secret work is
done, climbed to $10 billion in the second quarter of 2009, up from $2.4
billion in 2000, accounting for 34 percent of its overall revenue last year.
The company's profitability is on display in its Falls Church
headquarters. There's a soaring, art-filled lobby, bistro meals served on china
enameled with the General Dynamics logo and an auditorium with seven rows of
white leather-upholstered seats, each with its own microphone and laptop
docking station.
General Dynamics now has operations in every corner of the
intelligence world. It helps counterintelligence operators and trains new
analysts. It has a $600 million Air Force contract to intercept communications.
It makes $1 billion a year keeping hackers out of U.S. computer networks and
encrypting military communications. It even conducts information operations,
the murky military art of trying to persuade foreigners to align their views
with U.S.
interests.
"The American intelligence community is an important
market for our company," said General Dynamics spokesman Kendell Pease.
"Over time, we have tailored our organization to deliver affordable,
best-of-breed products and services to meet those agencies' unique
requirements."
In September 2009, General Dynamics won a $10 million
contract from the U.S. Special Operations Command's psychological operations
unit to create Web sites to influence foreigners' views of U.S. policy. To
do that, the company hired writers, editors and designers to produce a set of
daily news sites tailored to five regions of the world. They appear as regular
news Web sites, with names such as "SETimes.com: The News and Views of
Southeast Europe." The first indication that they are run on behalf of the
military comes at the bottom of the home page with the word
"Disclaimer." Only by clicking on that do you learn that "the
Southeast European Times (SET) is a Web site sponsored by the United States
European Command."
What all of these contracts add up to: This year, General
Dynamics' overall revenue was $7.8 billion in the first quarter, Jay L.
Johnson, the company's chief executive and president, said at an earnings
conference call in April. "We've hit the deck running in the first
quarter," he said, "and we're on our way to another successful
year."
SMALLER COMPANIES
In the shadow of giants such as General Dynamics are 1,814
small to midsize companies that do top-secret work. About a third of them were
established after Sept. 11, 2001, to take advantage of the huge flow of
taxpayer money into the private sector. Many are led by former intelligence
agency officials who know exactly whom to approach for work.
Abraxas of Herndon, headed by a former CIA spy, quickly
became a major CIA contractor after 9/11. Its staff even recruited midlevel
managers during work hours from the CIA's cafeteria, former agency officers
recall.
Other small and medium-size firms sell niche technical
expertise such as engineering for low-orbit satellites or long-dwell sensors.
But the vast majority have not invented anything at all. Instead, they
replicate what the government's workforce already does.
A company called SGIS, founded soon after the 2001 attacks,
was one of these.
In June 2002, from the spare bedroom of his San Diego home, 30-year-old Hany Girgis put
together an information technology team that won its first Defense Department
contract four months later. By the end of the year, SGIS had opened a Tampa office close to the
U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command, had turned a profit and
had 30 employees.
An alternative geography
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the top-secret world created to respond
to the terrorist attacks has grown into an unwieldy enterprise spread over
10,000 U.S.
locations. SGIS sold the government the services of people with specialized
skills; expanding the types of teams it could put together was one key to its
growth. Eventually it offered engineers, analysts and cyber-security
specialists for military, space and intelligence agencies. By 2003, the
company's revenue was $3.7 million. By then, SGIS had become a subcontractor
for General Dynamics, working at the secret level. Satisfied with the
partnership, General Dynamics helped SGIS receive a top-secret facility
clearance, which opened the doors to more work.
By 2006, its revenue had multiplied tenfold, to $30.6
million, and the company had hired employees who specialized in government
contracting just to help it win more contracts.
"We knew that's where we wanted to play," Girgis
said in a phone interview. "There's always going to be a need to protect
the homeland."
Eight years after it began, SGIS was up to revenue of $101
million, 14 offices and 675 employees. Those with top-secret clearances worked
for 11 government agencies, according to The Post's database.
The company's marketing efforts had grown, too, both in size
and sophistication. Its Web site, for example, showed an image of Navy sailors
lined up on a battleship over the words "Proud to serve" and another
image of a Navy helicopter flying near the Statue of Liberty over the words
"Preserving freedom." And if it seemed hard to distinguish SGIS's
work from the government's, it's because they were doing so many of the same
things. SGIS employees replaced military personnel at the Pentagon's 24/7
telecommunications center. SGIS employees conducted terrorist threat analysis.
SGIS employees provided help-desk support for federal computer systems.
Still, as alike as they seemed, there were crucial
differences.
For one, unlike in government, if an SGIS employee did a
good job, he might walk into the parking lot one day and be surprised by
co-workers clapping at his latest bonus: a leased, dark-blue Mercedes
convertible. And he might say, as a video camera recorded him sliding into the
soft leather driver's seat, "Ahhhh . . . this is spectacular."
And then there was what happened to SGIS last month, when it
did the one thing the federal government can never do.
It sold itself.
The new owner is a Fairfax-based company called Salient
Federal Solutions, created just last year. It is a management company and a
private-equity firm with lots of Washington
connections that, with the purchase of SGIS, it intends to parlay into
contracts.
"We have an objective," says chief executive and
President Brad Antle, "to make $500 million in five years." . . . .
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes is Trevor Paglen's long-awaited first photographic monograph.
Social scientist, artist,
writer and provocateur, Paglen has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S.
As an artist, Paglen is
interested in the idea of photography as truth-telling, but his pictures often
stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. In the series Limit
Telephotography, for example, he employs high-end optical systems to
photograph top-secret governmental sites; and in The Other Night Sky,
he uses the data of amateur satellite watchers to track and photograph
classified spacecraft in Earth's orbit. In other works Paglen transforms
documents such as passports, flight data and aliases of CIA operatives into art
objects.
Rebecca Solnit contributes a
searing essay that traces this history of clandestine military activity on the
American landscape.
“Blank Spots is an important, well-researched, and insightful expose that opens a window into the black world of secret operations. Paglen’s conclusion that ‘our own history, in large part, has become a state secret’ is both a warning and a call to arms. It is time to heed the warning and take up arms.”
—John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman
“A chillingly literal tour de force. Paglen doesn’t so much fill in the blanks as trace their outlines and give their shifting shapes a density that says as much about the future of democracy as it does about the dismal confines of the black world.”
—Derek Gregory, Professor of Geography, University of
Viewing Secrecy Through “Blank Spots on the Map”
January 30th, 2009 by Steven Aftergood , Secrecy News, http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2009/01/blank_spots-2.html
“I think that trying to understand secrecy through geography helps make the
subject more real,” writes Trevor Paglen in a
new book about secret government. “Thinking about secrecy in terms of
concrete spaces and practices helps us to see how secrecy happens and helps to
explain how secrecy grows and expands.”Paglen, a geographer, writes about secrecy at the
“The
“Rescind President Obama's
'Transparency Award' Now”
Sibel Edmonds and Coleen Rowley, Reader Supported News
Sibel Edmonds and Coleen Rowley write: "The giving of
an unmerited award, however, whether for transparency or peace, is not entirely
benign. No one knows better how destructive secrecy is for maintaining systems
of justice, ethics and democracy than these self-proclaimed 'open government'
watchdogs. Especially when such a false accolade emanates, as in this case,
from those who are supposed to serve as counters to secrecy and to retaliation
against government whistleblowers."
READ MORE http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/6269-rescind-president-obamas-transparency-award-now
Bill Moyers, The Secret
Government: The Constitution in Crisis. Seven
Locks, 1988.
Based
on an acclaimed PBS documentary, The
Secret Government (1987), analyzes the threats to constitutional government
posed by an illegitimate network of spies, profiteers, mercenaries,
ex-generals, and "superpatriots".
School Library Journal
YA--
In this adaptation of the script of a 1987 public television telecast, Moyers
develops a carefully articulated argument against the abuses of executive power
associated with the Iran-Contra affair and the Watergate break-in. He uses a
variety of expert and man-in-the-street interviews to drive home the importance
of an open, public discussion of issues and of an adherence to constitutional
principles and prescribed rules of conduct by elected officials in a democracy.
Throughout this book, Moyers traces the historical development of government
covert operations and the erosion of democratic principles associated with
covert action. Students deserve access to this well-reasoned polemic against
governmental secrecy in a representative democracy. Moyers leaves readers not
only with the information that Oliver North and others committed indictable
offenses, but also engaged in activities that undermine the fabric of our
government.-- Tom Irwin, Episcopal High School, Bellaire, Tex.
FARTHER BACK: JOHNSON
AND NIXON
excerpts from the book
The Politics of Lying
Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power
by David Wise
Random House, 1973, hardcover
p14
Large numbers of people no longer believe the government or the President. They
no longer believe the government because they have come to understand that the
government does not always tell the truth.
p14
It was official deception over the war in Vietnam
p14
The disclosures of the Pentagon Papers did demonstrate how easy it is for
government officials to use the security classification system to keep from
public view policies, decisions, and actions that are precisely the opposite of
what the public is told. In other words, through official secrecy, we now have
a system of institutionalized lying.
p18
The press's failure to question government information more vigorously, the
willingness to accept official "handouts" as fact, the tendency
toward passive reporting - what Tom Wicker has called "the press box
mentality" - has made it that much easier for government to mislead the
public.
p18
The American system is based not only upon formal checks and balances among the
three branches of government, it depends also, and perhaps more importantly, on
a delicate balance of confidence between the people and the government.
p18
The consent of the governed is basic to American democracy. If the governed are
misled, if they are not told the truth, or if through official secrecy and
deception they lack information on which to base intelligent decisions, the
system may go on - but not as a democracy.
p24
If politics is the pursuit and exercise of power over other human beings, truth
is always likely to take a secondary role to that primary objective.
It can be argued,(too,)that lying and secrecy are basic to any government; that it is only human nature for political leaders to tend to conceal the truth, hide their mistakes or wrongdoing, and mislead the public. That easy rationale is not acceptable, however, in a democracy, which depends upon an informed public.
p24
When in 1830 President Andrew Jackson approved a brutal policy to remove all
Indians to lands west of the Mississippi, he announced that the Indians were
not happy living among whites, anyway., Once we "open the eyes of those
children of the forest to their true condition," Jackson said, the Indians
would realize "the policy of the general government toward the red man is
not only liberal, but generous." The statement sounded as if it had been
scripted by W.C. Fields. The Black Hawk War and the long struggle to subdue the
Seminoles indicated that for the Indians at least, Jackson
In 1846 James K. Polk asked Congress to
declare war against Mexico ,
which it did, because Mexico
had crossed "the boundary of the United States Rio
Grande and the Nueces
River Tonkin
Gulf Kentucky
Lincoln, who once conceded that his own
impulse for dealing with the slavery problem was to "send them to Liberia Lincoln
McKinley, who once assailed annexation of
the Philippines as "criminal
aggression," thought differently when the Spanish-American war brought the
islands within reach of America America
Wilson Wilson Wilson
Wilson's promises found their echo in Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous pledge in Boston, six days before the election of 1940: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."
p26
Many Americans can remember growing up in a time when people assumed that if
the government said something, it was true. That era is gone, and faith in
government belongs to the nostalgia for a vanished American past.
Distrust of government is, of course,
deeply rooted in much broader social, political, and cultural forces at work in
postwar America Vietnam
Against such a background of turbulence and political and personal alienation, the loss of public confidence in government cannot, obviously, be attributed solely to government lying and secrecy. Yet these are terribly important factors, meriting separate attention, for they threaten the democratic process.
It is not only that government misinformation has been perceived relatively recently as a political danger, and credibility recognized as a political issue. Quantitatively as well, the amount of government misinformation today is far greater than it was prior to World War II.
The United States America
p25
Often, in the foreign policy and national security area, what the government
says is the news. The Tonkin
Gulf Vietnam
In short, in the crucial field of national security, the government controls almost all the important channels of information. And where government controls the channels of information, there is a greater possibility that information will be distorted. In the foreign policy Lea, therefore, the potential for government lying is high.
p29
Where government controls access to both events and documents, information
becomes a commodity, a tool of policy. It is shaped and packaged by the
government, and sold to the public through the media.
p29
Television has not only increased the impact of news and the speed of
communication, it has also increased the ease and effectiveness of information
distortion by the government.
p30
Along with technology, the rise of policy-making elites, particularly in the
national security area, has exacerbated the credibility problem. The policy makers
and crisis managers, drawn largely from ' the universities and the upper
echelons of the bureaucracy, typically and arrogantly believe that only they
possess the necessary intellect and skills to manage the nation's foreign
policy. Moreover, they routinely receive secret intelligence information and
other classified data on a daily basis, and such information is heady
knowledge. As a result, it is easy for such officials to assume that the
ordinary citizen is not equipped to understand complex issues of war and peace.
From such an attitude, it is but a short step to justify misleading the public.
The last three Presidential assistants for national security - McGeorge Bundy, former Harvard dean, later president of the Ford Foundation; economic historian and Vietnam hawk Walt W. Rostow; and Henry A. Kissinger, Harvard government professor and nuclear strategist - have symbolized the new breed of elite policy makers. From their offices in the White House basement, they have wielded enormous personal power.
p31
Government lying has resulted from the growth of a huge intelligence
establishment since 1947. This invisible government, with the CIA at its
center, has frequently engaged in secret operations that have led the United States
... The intelligence practitioners are apparently unconcerned with the long-range effect on American democracy of government lying; their concern is much narrower and pragmatic; they speak of confining intelligence operations to those that are "plausibly deniable." Thus the standard is not truth, but fashioning lies that will be believed.
p339
President Richard M. Nixon, March 8, 1972
When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and - eventually - incapable of determining their own destinies.
p343
The emergence of the United
States
As a concomitant of expanded American global power, the government has increasingly gained control over channels of information about military, diplomatic, and intelligence events. Frequently the press and public, unable to check the events independently, can only await the appearance of the President on the television screen to announce the official version of reality, be it the Bay of Pigs, Tonkin Gulf, or Laos, or Cambodia, or Vietnam.
Because of official secrecy on a scale unprecedented in our history, the government's capacity to distort information in order to preserve its own political power is almost limitless. Although General Lavelle could not find a way to convert lies into truth, the government has been more successful. Increasingly in recent years it has used the alchemy of power to brew synthetic truths and to shape our perception of events to fit predetermined policies.
If information is power, the ability to distort and control information will be used more often than not to preserve and perpetuate that power. But the national security policy makers, the crisis managers of the nuclear age,, are frequently men of considerable intellectual abilities who have gone to the right schools. They pride themselves not only on their social graces, but on their rationality and morality. For such men, the preservation of partisan political power would not be a seemly rationale for official deception (although it might be entirely sufficient for the President whom they serve). National security provides the acceptable alternative, the end that justifies all means, the end that permits men who pondered the good, the true, and the beautiful as undergraduates at Harvard and Princeton to sit in air-conditioned rooms in Washington twenty years later and make decisions that result in blood and agony half a world away. It is the rationale that permits decent men to make indecent decisions.
The excuse for secrecy and deception most frequently given by those in power is that the American people must sometimes be misled in order to mislead the enemy. This justification is unacceptable on moral and philosophic grounds, and often it simply isn't true. Frequently the "enemy" knows what is going on, but the American public does not.
For example, for several years, until
details were publicized by a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, the United States
government waged a secret war in Laos
When Lyndon Johnson issued his National
Security Action Memorandum of April 6, 1965, which ordered that the commitment
of American combat troops in Vietnam be kept secret, his actions were patently
not designed to fool Hanoi or the Viet Cong, who would find out quickly enough
who was shooting at them; it was designed to conceal the facts from the American
electorate. The memorandum ordered that the troops be deployed "in ways
that should minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy," a
concern that was clearly tailored more to domestic audiences than to public
opinion in Hanoi
The elitists who make national security policy have combined "the arrogance of power," as Hannah Arendt has noted, with "the arrogance of mind." They have increasingly come to feel that they alone possess the necessary information and competence to deal with foreign policy crises and problems. Leslie H. Gelb, director of the task force that produced the Pentagon Papers, has written that "most of our elected and appointed leaders in the national security establishment felt they had the right - and beyond that the obligation - to manipulate the American public in the national interest as they defined it."
The elite policy makers have thus found an easy justification for both deception and secrecy. They are the only ones who "read the cables" and the intelligence reports and "have the information". Ordinary citizens, they believe, cannot understand complex foreign policy problems; ergo the policy makers have the right, so they think, to mislead the public for its own good.
In its baldest terms, this philosophy has been stated as "the right to lie." Even if officials feel compelled to mislead the public - and it is unlikely that total virtue will ever find its way into the councils of government - to proclaim that right is to place an official imprimatur on a policy of deception and distrust.
"It is sophistry to pretend that in a free country a man has some sort of inalienable or constitutional right to deceive his fellow men," Walter Lippmann has noted. "There is no more right to deceive than there is a right to swindle, to cheat, or to pick pockets."
The result of more than two decades of deception has been to shred the fabric of trust between people and government. It is not only that people no longer believe what a President tells them; the mistrust has seeped outward. It has spread, and pervaded other institutions. In the courts, for example, the government has discovered it increasingly difficult to convict peace activists or others who dissent from established policy because juries tend to disbelieve the uncorroborated testimony of government witnesses.
Within the Executive Branch itself, the
lying has had an insidious effect, for in time, policy makers begin to believe
their own lies. The deception designed for the public in the end becomes
self-deception, as the lesson of Vietnam
One of the most damaging aspects of
government lying is that even if the truth later emerges, it seldom does so in
time to influence public opinion or public policy. The extent of the
government's deception over Tonkin
Gulf
And the effect of lying is cumulative; it is doubtless true, and possibly comforting, that the American public is less gullible today than twenty years ago, because it has learned that the government is not always credible. But this increased public sophistication has been earned at a terribly high price; there is now a tendency to disbelieve the government even when it is telling the truth. Like the reaction of the jury to the witness who admits perjury but insists that his new testimony is the absolute truth, the public responds to the government: "Yes, but when did you stop lying?"
Unfortunately, the remedies for government
deception and secrecy are as much in the realm of morality as of politics. The
only "solution" to government lying is for government to tell the
truth. But given the combination of factors that has led to government
deception in America
Any hope of change, therefore, must come through the political process. The need is to make the political cost of lying too high; to make political power rest, at least in some measure, on truth. The process of public education that began with the U-2 affair is perhaps slowly leading in that direction; paradoxically, the "credibility gap" may contain the seeds of its own destruction. The disclosures of the Pentagon Papers and the gradually dawning realization by the public that it has been systematically misled may in time have beneficial political consequences. If political leaders come to realize, through mass opinion and election returns, that deceiving the public carries greater political risks than telling the truth, the politics of lying may gradually be replaced by the politics of truth.
This may seem entirely too optimistic, and perhaps it is, but there are some signs pointing in this direction. Lyndon Johnson's low credibility quotient certainly helped to bring about his retirement. Government deception, truth, and trust were low-key issues in the 1968 Presidential campaign, but they were considerably more visible issues in 1972, despite George McGovern's failure to convert them into votes.
The fact that an issue is discussed in a Presidential campaign does not, of course, automatically guarantee any change whatsoever. In 1968 Richard Nixon seemed to recognize credibility as an important political issue; he promised to provide open government and tell the truth. After his election he followed much the same manipulative policies as had his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. Nixon widened and deepened the credibility gap while warning against it.
Unless deception and secrecy are clearly recognized and identified as political issues of major importance, unless the President of the United States and his successors take personal steps to bring about and sustain a new atmosphere of candor and trust, there is little possibility of change, and there will be continuing danger to our political institutions. . . .
MORE http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Wise_David/Politics_Of_Lying.html
From Amazon.com:
Jesse Ventura's New Book: 63 Documents the
Government Doesn't Want You to Read
Release Date: April 1, 2011
Product Description
There’s the Freedom of Information Act, and then there’s Ventura ’s way.
The official spin on numerous government programs is
flat-out bull****, according to Jesse Ventura. In this incredible collection of
actual government documents, Ventura ,
the ultimate non- partisan truth-seeker, proves it beyond any doubt. He and
Dick Russell walk readers through 63 of the most incriminating programs to
reveal what really happens behind the closed doors. In addition to providing
original government data, Ventura
discusses what it really means and how regular Americans can stop criminal
behavior at the top levels of government and in the media.
Among the cases discussed:
• The CIA’s top-secret program to control human behavior
• Operation Northwoods—the military plan to hijack airplanes
and blame it on Cuban terrorists
• The discovery of a secret Afghan archive—information that
never left the boardroom
• Potentially deadly healthcare cover-ups, including a
dengue fever outbreak
• What the Department of Defense knows about our food
supply—but is keeping mum
Although these documents are now in the public domain, the
powers that be would just as soon they stay under wraps. Ventura ’s research and commentary sheds new
light on what they’re not telling you—and why it matters.
About the AuthorJesse Ventura is the former governor of Minnesota and author of
several bestselling books, including Don’t
Start the Revolution Without Me! and American
Conspiracies. Ventura
is the host of the television show Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura on
truTV. He lives in Minnesota and Mexico .
Dick Russell is a nationally respected activist,
environmentalist, and author of critically acclaimed books, including, with
Jesse Ventura, The New York Times bestsellers Don't Start the Revolution
Without Me!and American Conspiracies. He is also the author of On the Trail of
the JFK Assassins and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Russell is a prolific
publisher in many of the nation's top magazines and has been a
guest on many national TV and radio programs, including the
Joan Rivers Show and NBC Nightly News. He lives in Los Angeles , California
-----------------------------------------------------------
From the website of Lew Rockwell:
The Official Spin On Top-Secret Government
Programs?
Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies!
63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read
By Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever
will be, secure, when the transactions of their
rulers may be concealed from them." – Patrick Henry
Fifty years ago, even before the dubious reign of Lyndon B.
Johnson and Richard Nixon, we the
American people knew our government was dishonest.
Politicians can act anonymously, in
secrecy, and behave unethically. In 63 Documents the
Government Doesn’t Want You to Read,
Jesse Ventura – Navy SEAL, wrestler, actor, governor, TV
personality, and bestselling author –
embarks on a pursuit for truth to unveil what our government
is doing behind closed doors. "I’ve
put together this book in the same spirit as the WikiLeaks’
disclosures – to reveal the truth."
within and it’s been going on for a long time." This
collection is actual government data; written
examples of criminal activity that Ventura hopes will inspire or infuriate
readers to "wake up and
start demanding accountability [from guilty government
figures]."
In 63 Documents, Ventura
scandalous behavior and gives an energetic, no-holds-barred
approach to each topic:
Section #1: Links between past government perpetrations and
today’s political agendas.
Such as the CIA’s Secret Assassination Manual: "Maybe
they should change the name to the CIA’s ‘secret first degree murder manual.’
How is that we are allowed to kill other people if we’re not in a declared war
with them?
"Section #2: Delves into a series of government,
military, and corporate secrets. Many
veterans of the first Gulf War suffer adverse health
conditions, yet the government denies the validity of Gulf War Syndrome.
"What’s it going to take for our leaders to consider the real cost of
these endless wars?"
Section #3: A history of "shady" White Houses.
Including an internal war "between Nixon and Richard Helms, director of
the CIA... Time and again, the CIA thumbs its nose even at presidents. So who
runs this agency if the president doesn’t?"
Section #4: The truth about the terrible events of Sept. 11,
2001. "The question that’s haunted me from day one is, how come the
world’s biggest military superpower was somehow oblivious to rogue airliners in
American air space for more than an hour?"
Section #5: Examines the War on Terror. Such as the CIA’s
destruction of detainee torture videos, "which makes you wonder what else
is being covered up." History has
shown it is impossible to enforce accountability and honesty from inside the
government.
Jesse Ventura is a strong advocate for any source acting as
a check on governmental integrity – including WikiLeaks,
which he considers heroic: "I say let the chips fall where they may as
WikiLeaks puts the truth out there...WikiLeaks is exposing our government
officials for the frauds that they are." Similar to his previous New York
Times bestselling book, American Conspiracies, the latest research and
commentary in 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read sheds new
light on what politicians are not telling you – and why it matters.
Jesse Ventura implores all Americans to challenge
unnecessary secrecy; government leaders will show greater ethical consideration
in the future if we remove their masks today.
Lew Rockwell - January 26, 2011
FARTHER, FARTHER BACK, US
LIES TOLD BY US GOVERNMENT
Napolitano, Andrew. Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power,
and Deception in American History. Centuries
of government deception resulting in the deterioration of US freedom up to the
economic and military crises of today.
·
This Machine Kills Secrets: How Wikileakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists
Aim to Free the World's Information by Andy Greenberg
END US
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