Heart of Darkness

Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad.

--James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798

A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
--Madison in a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822,

The fourth U.S. president and primary author of articles I through VII of the Constitution was an avid student of history, and fully familiar with tyrants' tendencies to use foreign threats as a pretext for the suppression of their own people and persecution of their political enemies. He also knew the dangers raised by government secrecy -- secret trials, secret imprisonments, secret police, secret policies, and secret expenditures.

To the extent that we've forgotten both Madison and his warnings, his worst fears have been realized, and his precious Constitution has been trashed and relegated to the museum of political artifacts, only to be replaced by the executive dictatorship Madison and the other founders feared and worked tirelessly to try to prevent.

Nowhere is the reach and scope of this dictatorship more evident than in the "black" budgets of agencies under the control of the executive branch -- the CIA, the FBI, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), FEMA, and many programs undertaken by the Pentagon, over which the Department of Defense presides and the president is commander in chief.

For example, when Congress votes annually to approve the CIA budget, its members have no idea what they're approving, since the amount disbursed and the purposes to which it is put are both top secret, in spite of the Constitution's admonition that "a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time" (Article I, Section 9, paragraph 7)(emphasis mine). "Congressional oversight of the agency," declares author and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson, "...is at best a theatrical performance designed to distract and mislead the few Americans left who are concerned about constitutional government."

The total size of the black budgets of these various agencies is hard to estimate, since funds appropriated to departments other than Defense are sometimes funneled to secret programs. But Las Vegas Sun reporter Lisa Mascara, in a February, 2007 article maintained that "As military spending has come to dominate the Bush budget since the 9/11 attacks, the amount of money being funneled to the black budget has risen sharply. Experts believe that $45 billion will flow this year into the secret budget, to pay for, among other things, secret weapons systems and some of the U.S. intelligence community's 16 agencies."

An overview of the $45 billion flowing into black programs seems to indicate that most of these secret expenditures serve three possible purposes. First, the main activities of the intelligence agencies are spying (the NSA electronic eavesdropping program comes to mind) and covert activities such as assassination, sabotage, and support of client governments and their militaries overseas. Secondly, the purpose behind the secrecy of much of the Pentagon budget appears to be directed at hiding large-scale corruption. Finally, there is wide-ranging speculation, difficult to prove, that the growing black budget of FEMA is directed toward organizing the apparatus of a "shadow" government, one that could seamlessly transition to running the country and controlling the U.S. population in the event of an emergency such as, for example, declaration of martial law.

In its March 16 issue, the Los Angeles Free Press ran an article on U.S. detention camps, built for FEMA over the last few years by Halliburton, mostly in the western states, and currently standing empty. Whether the Bush administration has specific plans for these camps is unknown, but their existence has been confirmed by eyewitnesses, and as the paper reported, "FEMA's budget for dealing with (natural) disasters is in the millions, but its total annual budget is billions." The bulk of this budget is secret, and the article also notes that FEMA is beyond the reach of congressional supervision or oversight because the agency was created by a series of executive orders rather than the normal channel of legislation.

Probably the lion's share of the black budgets' money goes for secret weapons programs, many of which are associated with Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program, later redesignated as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and whose existence seems to serve no other purpose than simple theft of government funds. In his latest book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," Chalmers Johnson asks, "Did the Bush administration and its Republican associates in Congress actually intend to build a missile defense system or were they only interested in a plausile public relations cover for using the defense budget to funnel huge amounts of money to military industrial aerospace corporations?" Calling secret weapons programs "a nearly perfect setting for official corruption," Johnson maintains that "the military-industrial complex (is) meshing with powerful congressional lobbies that want to bring space-oriented industries to their districts and perpetuate their own safe seats in Congress..."

The financing of secret intelligence programs is probably the aspect of black budget fundings the public is most familiar with, and since the current administration seized power with the connivance of the Supreme Court in 2001, the number and scope of these programs has increased significantly. One need only recall the public shock that greeted revelation of the NSA's new electronic eavesdropping programs, news of which dominated the media recently. Even though it has faded from the headlines, NSA's secret and illegal spying on Americans has not been curtailed, and we have now learned that a number of its efforts have been contracted out to private companies. A diarist at DailyKos notes that "One of the most important of these corporations is Vertint, an Israel-based electronic communications surveillance outfit, which in alliance with VeriSign, the operator of the .com, .net, and .edu registries, monitors most of the sites on the World Wide Web." In fact, says the diarist Leveymg, "If you're viewing this article on a dot.com, NETDISCOVERY -- the Internet surveillance system developed jointly by Verint and VeriSign -- is monitoring your on-line experience at this very moment."

I'd only add that if you're reading this in print form, your activity is probably not being monitored, but a copy of the newspaper has already been filed away in a "suspicious activities" folder somewhere in the bowels of the FBI, and its contents entered into a database of potentially subversive opinion. But where is the Constitutional authority authorizing the cataloging of suspicious activities and the multi-billion dollar black budgets? It doesn't exist, of course, and we can only sadly conclude that the Constitution is no longer "the law of the land," as it declares itself to be.

It's time to give the country a new name, for this is no longer the United States we read about in the history books. It's now nothing more than a military dictatorship, ruled by secrecy, shot through with corruption, and haunted by paranoid obsessions. I just can't think of what a good name would be.