"Top-Secret America" covered by Washington Post

The Washington Post Covers “Top-Secret America”

According to the official line, in order to ensure the safety of US citizens in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States government created a panoply of agencies. But, after a two-year investigation, the Washington Post--a paper known to have a considerable connections to the Central Intelligence Agency, and to actively promote opinion pieces linked to the intelligence realm-- argues that this complex of agencies and institutions “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

The particular course of recent events, which sprouted from 9/11, rhymes with those in the wake of the Reichstag burning in 1933 Germany, encompassed by the Reichstag Fire Decree (officially called the ‘Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.’) Like the Patriot Act for the American people, the Reichstag Fire Decree served to nullify most civil liberties enjoyed by the German people. “The sadistic machine simply rolls over us,” Victor Klemperer, a German Jew married to an Aryan, wrote from underneath the fledgling Nazi Regime in the early thirties.

To be sure, one notable difference between the two policies is that, while the Patriot Act has been accused of vagueness, the Reichstag Decree, according to Wikipedia, “was not accompanied by any written guideliness from the Reich government.” Now, that’s vague.

And then, when you consider what took place in those late February days of 1933, amidst the brisk air of a waning winter, one sees how the streets could grow so cold; that is, how the Reichstag Decree made way for the atrocities of the Nazi Regime.

Here are some important differences between Germany post-Reichstag fire and the US Patriot Act:

Less than two years after the Reichstag Decree, in mid-1934, a wave of terror helped to give further meaning to the Decree. This “Night of the Long Knives (Nacht der Langen Messer) successfully purged the SA (Sturmabteilung) and Nazi Party generally of those opposed to Hitler’s cult of personality and the dictatorial status of his decrees arisen from its intriguing veneer.

Moreover, long before the purge of key members of the Nazi leadership,in the months after Hitler’s appointment to Chancellor and the burning of the Reichstag, the Dachau concentration camp was already created. In this period, the “sadistic Nazi Machine” lent its support of those in its ranks who had little or no aversion to arresting Communists, Socialists, and labor leaders not in line with the Party. At Dachau, conditioning ensued to normalize the dehumanization of concentration camp prisoners.

In a parallel move designed to promote internal coordination among the Nazi leadership, Special Courts were created to try political dissidents.

For a time after 9/11, life on the domestic front in the US stayed rather politically open and economically stable, although Washington furthered its racket of war in pursuit of “full spectrum dominance” abroad. The legal framework of the United States, just as it was in Nazi Germany after the Reichstag burning, had been, nonetheless, revolutionized.

There is, to be sure, a difference in policy sequence between the two states. While the Nazi’s transformed the domestic front into an active police state, and then went to war in Europe; in the United States, foreign war policies in the Mid-East were pursued first, while a brutal crackdown on the domestic front was put on the backburner.

All the same, the US state-enterprise apparatus and the policy planners who steered it did erect a National Security State to, allegedly, ward off terrorists who were fundamentally terrorists, unable to be re-educated, and unendingly enraged at how freely we lived. The way in which the National Security State has been unraveled, on the domestic front, does differ from the way in which the similar system of Nazi Germany was unraveled there.

In the United States, incrementalism-- a theory of governance designed to lead a population towards a particular outcome, slowly so they don’t notice--has been the technique employed, in the first decade of the 21st century, to transform the state towards a neo-socialistic fascism aimed towards keeping the American population in control amidst a long-lasting economic Downturn (depression and collapse), which just so happened to be engineered by the financial wing of this governing body.

It appears that, in the most dangerous time in our world’s history, “Top-Secret America” inherits a crumbling, yet vast empire. The general attitude of this “top secret world,” as the Post refers to it, dictates our future.

Top-Secret America inherits a newly transformed legal framework, partially hidden by an incessant propaganda machine with the potential to evolve the atomized, though historically part-free American population into accepting collectivized austerity, and their role in the new dark ages. Warren Buffett defined this new role as “a nation of sharecroppers.”

The parallel government of which the Post writes--the paper refers to it as a “top-secret world,”--“amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.

The investigation found: about 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States; an estimated 854,000 people, upwards of 1.5 times more people as live in Washington D.C., have top-secret security clearances; in greater Washington, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been erected since September 2001. They stand on the equivalent of nearly three Pentagons or 22 US Capitol buildings.

More than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside in the Department of Defense. In these intelligence programs, very few senior officials - called Super Users - have access to information regarding all of the department’s and their activities.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq, was stunned by the complexity of this system.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

Direct of the CIA, Leon Panetta, said he has begun outlining a five-year plan for his agency. The reason? Spending levels since 9/11 are unsustainable.

“Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence should be doing that.”

What is this wall, to which Panetta refers? Many renowned economists and, increasingly so, mainstream economists are forecasting a continuing economic Downturn and eventual collapse in the United States. This coming collapse is helped along by the gutting of US industries over the past 20-30 years through the phenomenon popularly known as “outsourcing,” as well as unsustainable tax revenue allocation on the part of Washington and the uberclass lobbyists who run it.

According to the trickle-down theory of economics, the investments of those who hold the greatest volume of wealth in any given economic system make that society and culture. Along this line of thinking, in the present day, that uberclass which makes such investments value war and austerity for the globe.

The business plans, whose logic support these values, depend on standardization of global commerce, and a world population that continues to be consenting to coercion and manageable.

The article further details how, daily in the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors holding top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices electronically guarded by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras, and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

The Post contends: “this is not exactly Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial complex,’ which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.” Now, that the laws on the books for the US domestic front are reminiscent of those of a police state, who are the “transnational violent extremists” among us.

Most of the details about this Mission are classified, including how money is spent. Last year, the budget of US intelligence was publicly announced as $75 billion. This figure, to be sure, leaves out many military operations and/or domestic counter-terrorism programs.





Washington Post Article:

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/