"Top Secret America": The Rest Of The Story
By Chuck Baldwin
July 27, 2010


This column is archived at
http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?p=1926


The Monday, July 19, 2010, edition of The Washington Post featured an
investigative report entitled "Top Secret America," with the subtitle, "A
hidden world, growing beyond control." The report begins, "The top-secret
world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, 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.

"These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The
Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of
the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking
in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and
growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States
safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

"The investigation's other findings include:

*Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on
programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in
about 10,000 locations across the United States.

*An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in
Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

*In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for
top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since
September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three
Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings--about 17 million square feet of
space.

*Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating
redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military
commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from
terrorist networks.

*Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign
and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence
reports each year--a volume so large that many are routinely ignored."

On the surface, the Post report appears to be a valiant effort by a major
mainstream newspaper (second in influence to only the New York Times) to
expose widespread government abuse and chicanery. But don't get too excited
yet.

In Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief (July 23, 2010), Skousen writes, "The
[Post] series has just enough tantalizing information to sell a lot of
papers, but almost nothing that exposes the illicit side of US operations--a
large portion of which is involved in recruiting, training, and running
covert agents--only a small portion of which are spying on real enemies. A
lot of spying targets our allies and patriotic Americans who the government
worries could someday provide a source of rebellion against the growing
totalitarian state."

Skousen further charges that there is a "dark side" to "each agency of
[federal] law enforcement." This "dark side" involves "a lot of
compartmentalization, front activities, hidden budgets and false stories in
order to keep honest government employees and agents from knowing what's
going on behind their backs."

Skousen continues: "What few do get a glimpse into government's dark side
are warned off with threats, some subtle and some lethal--threats which send
a chilling message to others to not 'ask too many questions.'" Skousen then
quotes the Post report as saying that since 9/11, the NSA (National Security
Agency) has grown to where it now consumes "1.7 billion pieces of
intercepted communications every 24 hours: emails, bulletin board postings,
instant messages, IP addresses, phone numbers, telephone calls and cellular
conversations."

Concerning all those government organizations and private companies working
on counterterrorism projects that the Post report refers to, Skousen writes,
"Once again, the series tells us nothing about the substance of what they
do, much of which is unsavory and illegal."

Skousen goes on to say, "What [the Post report] won't tell you is that
almost a third of these [NSA] operations are dedicated to black operations
against Americans and other Western governments who need to be surveilled in
order to control them and keep them from resisting the agenda of the New
World Order. Much expense is allocated to spying on the unsavory private
behavior of Congressmen, and even State officials--building compromising
dossiers on people who influence the political process so they can be
coerced into compliance when necessary."

Skousen also chides the Post report for failing "to show how connected
certain companies are to the mercenary contractor explosion that is growing
into a force that will eventually be used to threaten individual liberties
at home. The Powers That Be don't need to hire foreign armies to clamp down
on American dissidents. They are training hundreds of thousands of mercenary
Americans to do it and using foreign wars to sort out who is ruthless enough
or unprincipled enough to take orders without questions--similar to the way
the Nazis sorted and selected those who would form the Brownshirt and SS
brigades."

See Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief at:

http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/

See The Washington Post report at:

http://tinyurl.com/washpost-hidden-world

In short, while claiming to expose the federal government's "hidden world,"
the Post report actually does little to uncover the illegal and dark
activities that Washington employs against the US citizenry, and by so doing
serves more to cover up this sinister activity. Even so, do you not find it
more than a little interesting just how few media sources did anything to
pick up the Post report? Did you read any of this in your local paper? Did
you see anything of this on CNN or Fox News? Come on, folks! You are aware
that most of the media outlets (including network television) in this
country obtain the vast majority of their "news" from The New York Times and
The Washington Post, are you not? So, how convenient is it that this report
(such as it is) was virtually ignored?

As I've said in speaking engagements--both large and small--all over
America, We have more to fear from Washington, D.C., than from Tehran or
Baghdad, or from any other foreign entity. America's founders understood
this and tried to warn the American people accordingly. For example, Daniel
Webster warned, "There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish
our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another
quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their
government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do
apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence
in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that
in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the
instruments of their own undoing."

The protection of the people from the totalitarian tendencies of their own
central government in Washington, D.C., is why the framers of the
Constitution included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights. The Second
Amendment was never about duck hunting or target shooting; it was all about
the American citizenry being prepared to defend itself against its own
federal government. The founders' distrust of the central government is why
they attempted to divide the power and authority of government into three
separate branches. They expected the three branches to compete against each
other and to hold each other in check and balance against governmental
abuse. And this is also why the individual states each maintained their own
sovereignty and independence when creating the central government in 1787,
because, at the end of the day, it is going to be the states that form the
final fortress for freedom.

For all intents and purposes, the three branches of the federal government
have done nothing to prevent the massive expansion of unconstitutional
governance by Washington, D.C. The passage of the Seventeenth Amendment was
the beginning of the end, as far as separated power was concerned. Neither
has it made much difference which political party was in power in DC. The
unlawful expansion of federal power has continued under both. This means
that there are only two remaining protections against absolute federal
tyranny: 1) strong, independent, and defiant State governments, and, 2) a
determined and fully armed citizenry.

The Washington Post report (for all its failures) should serve to remind the
American people of just how vulnerable we are (and have always been) to
totalitarian government, how fragile liberty and freedom are, and how
necessary it is that we remain eternally vigilant to resist the machinations
of power-mad Machiavellians in Washington, D.C...