Goverment Secrecy, a Vicious Circle

Herald Tribune-- Considering how the groundbreaking work of James Bamford (The Puzzle Palace, The Shadow Factory) and Tim Weiner (Blank Check, A Legacy of Ashes) failed to raise many hackles against the massive expansion of government secrecy, Trevor Paglen’s latest addition to the bookshelf isn’t likely to create much of a stir, either. But it does arrive at a time that makes the teabagger street rallies and the protests against Big Government health care look frivolous and knuckle-headed.

Released earlier this year, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, takes yet another look at how the United States nuked Section 1, Article 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution mandating the periodic publication of “a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money.” It’s a twisted bipartisan maze that ends with roughly $60 billion (the most recent estimate) earmarked for national security projects authorized outside congressional purview. Some 70 percent of the dough winds up in the hands of private contractors.


If the scope of this thing begs the question, “Why are taxpayers protesting bank bailouts while Uncle Sam pours money down a black hole three times the size of NASA’s budget?”, the answer may lie in another one of Paglen’s revelations:

Although the federal government counts more than 1.8 million employees, some 4 million Americans hold security clearances to perform classified work. In other words, the less accountability, the greater the job security; the greater the job security, the stronger the economy, etc.

“It’s a huge contradiction,” says Paglen from Berkeley, Calif. “People don’t want big government except for defense. It’s called military Keynesianism, where theoretically, capitalism will eventually destroy itself if it goes on long enough. And the government will have to intervene.”

But how long this gravy train is allowed to roll before that happens is anyone’s guess. In fact, with statutory and judicial support for an accelerating information clampdown rooted in the dawn of the Cold war, this phenomenon may be impervious to economics altogether. Congressional attempts in the Seventies to curtail abuses committed behind the shades of state security are as quaint as rabbit-ears television.

“There was some important legislation passed, but the reforms didn’t work,” Paglen says. “They were just ignored by the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra scandal. And since nobody was really held accountable for that, they got away with it.”

So the next time you’re star-gazing beneath a clear night sky and you see what looks like a triangular-shaped UFO, it just might be an array of Naval Ocean Surveillance System satellites. The profound constriction of information didn’t stop 9/11, but in 1983 it did manage to erase the orbital schedules of military hardware on the high frontier. So you can still videotape your tax dollars at work up there, so long as you’re patriotic enough to understand that what you’ve seen doesn’t exist.

By the way, Paglen doesn’t even bother to go after legitimate UFOs. “Unfortunately, as you know, as soon as you say UFO in a FOIA they get completely bananas and don’t take you seriously and tell you to pay them $300 for things … Oh well …”

In the meantime, keep those tea parties comin’, folks.