Top Secret America

I’m going to slip a post or two in here before I put up my post on America’s second civil war. 

I have been waiting on this Frontline documentary for the better part of a year.  They slipped this in under my nose and had a first airing last night.  It was too late for me to post in advance but this is a must watch for all Americans.  And for anyone who understands secret societies, police states, surveillance states and abuses of secrecy and power, you will be incredibly disturbed by the war state run amok as shown in this documentary.    The mathematician and Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky outlined in his published work what constitutes a fear-based society.  The United States is fast becoming a fear-based society.  It isn’t the Soviet Union but it also isn’t a democracy.   It’s amazing how many non-thinking bureaucrats in the war state, in the political system and in the corporate for-profit military-industrial complex simply do as they are told with profit as a primary motive.   And in the process, they continue to destroy America’s liberties and our economy as we slip further into the war state’s fear-based society.  This is a prime example of the timeless truth that bureaucrats or keepers of the status quo seldom exercise their conscience or any critical judgement as to what their actions may mean.  That includes how they may be impacted by their own actions.  We have highlighted this time and again including prescient quotes from Martin Niemoller and Henry David Thoreau.  

This documentary was originally supposed to air in January of 2011 and has been delayed numerous times.  I suspect the information is so overwhelming that the producers had a hard time boiling this down to an hour.  An hour really doesn’t do justice to the level of  investigative journalism undertaken by The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin.  

The original investigative work was released almost a year ago on the Washington Post.  And there is an incredible wealth of investigative research and information on their Top Secret America portal.

The PBS Frontline web site has numerous stories as well as the hour long documentary.  These are top rate examples of investigative journalism.  Someone’s going to win some awards for this work.   The documentary is showing again tonight on local PBS stations.

In closing, your jaw will hit the floor when you see the Department of Homeland Security’s new $4 billion office complex being built in Washington.   That is in addition to thousands of other locations that have opened around the United States to support the massive security apparatus’ mission.   The new headquarters is the largest construction project in the United States today and the largest federal construction project since the Pentagon was built.  

We have a massive bureaucracy to serve the war state’s outward projection of power around the world.  And now we are putting in place another massive bureaucracy to project that power inward onto the American people.   Those who go against the war state’s outward projection of American hegemony, whether legitimately or not, live in fear.  And now that same fear-based bureaucracy is being projected inward and onto the American people. 

Democracy cannot survive when our government operates in secrecy.  Democracy is dead.  It is up to us to revive it by seeking transparency, a return to the rule of law and the Constitution and by electing people outside of the massively corrupt two party political system.