============================================================================ http://cyberjournal.org/cj/fresia/c5.html Toward an American Revolution Exposing the Constitution and other Illusions Jerry Fresia ------------------------------------------------ Chapter 5 ------------------------------------------------ The Constitution and Secret Government Early in 1934, Irene Du Pont and William S. Knudsen [General Mortors president] reached their explosion point over President Roosevelt. Along with friends of the Morgan Bank and General Motors, certain Du Pont backers financed a coup d'á’átat that would overthrow the President with the aid of a $3 million-funded army of terrorists, modeled on the fascist movement in Paris known as the Croix de Feu...[Roosevelt] knew that in view of the backing from high banking sources, this matter could not be dismissed as some crackpot enterprise...On the other hand, Roosevelt also knew that if he were to arrest the leaders of the houses of Morgan and Du Pont, it would create an unthinkable national crisis...Not for the first or last time in his career, he was aware that there were powers greater than he in the United States. -Charles Higham1 The bicentennial year was more than a celebration of the Constitution. It was a year of political crisis in which several congressional investigations and a widely followed law suit filed by the Christic Institute exposed what many have called a "secret team."2 It is through this secret team, we have learned, that the federal government continues to assassinate political opponents despite declarations and statutes to the contrary, collaborates with transnational criminal organizations in drug dealing for the purpose of covert financing, and systematically promulgates disinformation about its political opponents and its own policies.3 The general response to the dirty work of the secret team (which we shall detail below), from mainstream and progressive leaders alike, has been that these deeds are a direct violation of the Constitution.4 Only Congress has the power to declare war (Article I Section 8) we are constantly reminded. The message is clear: this crisis does not mean that it is time to depart from or transform our political economic structure; it means that it is time to get back to the Constitution. In light of the secret team revelations, how does one explain the rush to defend the Constitution on the part of many progressives? Perhaps it is this: it stems from the desire to protect the liberal ideal which the Framers used to cloak their defense of private power and their quest for private empire by separating it from the structures of private power and the reality of private empire. It emerges, ultimately, from a desire to protect the myth of innocence: we are a self-governed nation of the people, where individual freedom is extended to all, where no one is above the law, and where the right to dissent is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But in order to preserve the innocence of the liberal ideal, we must ignore the fact that the Constitution is more than a design for a political system; we must ignore that it is a design for a political economic system. As has been shown, the political system which the Constitution created was intended to support private power ("freedom") in a private economy ("free" enterprise) and that today its purpose is to support and protect a capitalist empire, indeed, the largest empire on earth. The vision of the Framers has been realized, and then some. That is the crux of the problem. The Constitution is not a neutral instrument, it is an active element within a political economic structure organized around private power within a private economy. For example, following Harry Magdoff, we can identify three distinct stages in the drive to empire and in each the state has played a crucial role: during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the state was used to help private elites market food and raw materials to the rest of the world, assist the importation of capital, and protect maritime commercial interests. By the late nineteenth century, the state was helping a small number of industrial and financial giants compete internationally in the export of manufactured goods and capital. Following World War II, the function of the state was to protect and support what had become the major, dominant capitalist economy, the largest manufacturer, foreign investor, trader, the world's banker, and the dollar which in turn had become the key international currency.5 Furthermore, the expansion of our private economy may be viewed as the expansion of power, the imposition of the will and needs of those who own concentrated wealth upon the lives of those people who do not own land or factories and who live dependent lives (what Rosa Luxemburg has called "capital's blustering violence"). Therefore, the use of military force by the state in the service of private power has been a constant feature of the expansion of our economy. According to a 1969 study, the United States has been engaged in warlike activity during three-fourths of its history (in 1,782 out of 2,340 months).6 To put this dynamic in a constitutional context, persistent acts of war have been sponsored by the federal government because in order to validate the state debt, protect private property, provide military and diplomatic representation abroad, suppress insurrections and do the other things that the Constitution requires the state to do to help property owners control productive activity and markets on a global scale, the state repeatedly has had to take the side of the few who seek control against the many who resist it. In this defense of "freedom," the probability of state sponsored violence and terror is always high. Here we come to the heart of the problem of secret government. The United States is nearly always at war because the United States is nearly always using violence to support the few who are rich against the many who are poor. It is the few who are rich (those who own vast amounts of wealth producing property), then, who have real power in our society because it is their private interests (the "national interest") that need to be served if economic expansion is to take place. Working through their own private organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Committee for Economic Development, and such "think tanks" as the American Enterprise Institute, these elites become an unaccountable governing force that can become a secret government if and when they acquire positions within the government which enable them to link military and intelligence capability with specific corporate needs. Fletcher Prouty, a former officer within the Defense Intelligence Agency, describes those who run the secret government this way: they are "security-cleared individuals in and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency..." whose power derives from the "vast intra-governmental undercover infrastructure and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including foreign and domestic publishing houses." During the post-World War II era, states Prouty, "more and more control over military and diplomatic operations at home and abroad" was assumed by elites "whose activities are secret, whose budget is secret, whose very identities as often as not are secret..."7 The fundamental issue which underlies secret government (and the secret teams which they field to carry out "special" covert operations) is injustice. The American people must not know that their government acts violently and unjustly on a regular basis. But there is an additional twist. The injustice in question is purposeful. It is a feature of economic expansion, privilege, and private empire. It is in the interest of private elites. All of this is quite consistent with the values of the Framers, the way they understood and explained inequality, and the purposes to which the Constitution was committed. To be sure, the Framers had no way of knowing the dimension of the political problem that would confront their descendants following 1945 when the empire was fully realized. They had no way of knowing that the checks and balances outlined within the Constitution might not be sufficient to protect private power against the rapid upward swell of political activism following World War II and on into the 1960s and 1970s. They had no way of knowing that the suppression of insurrections, shifted to a global scale, would take the form of virulent anti-communism, Nazi collaboration, and state sponsored terrorism. This set of sins was not especially more wicked than the acts of human enslavement and genocide committed by the Framers. But against the standards of decency that had emerged by the mid-twentieth century, the blustering and impersonal violence of capitalist expansion could not be legitimated as easily. Instead, new methods of insulating the policymaking of private elites from interested majorities had to be invented. Thus, the real issue today is not whether the dirty work of the secret team violates the Constitution, it is whether the work of the Framers is sufficient to protect corporate power from the people in the wake of yet another "crisis of democracy," whether called feminism, Black Power, student protest, environmentalism, peace, the New Age or simply the "Vietnam syndrome." ------------------------------------------------ The Power of the President and the Role of Congress Much has been written about the increasing power of the presidency vis-áŠá-vis Congress since World War II. This is not quite right. What should be said is that the power of the Executive branch vis-áŠá-vis Congress has increased. The distinction is an important one because it suggests that what is increasing is not necessarily the power of the president as much as are the various agencies (primarily military and intelligence) within the Executive branch to which private elites have ready access and insulation from popular pressure (often expressed through Congress). In other words, as the government has been drawn into the economy, private power has been protected from direct public interference from the Congress and from the president, if need be, through the construction of layers of bureaucratic insulation within the Executive branch. Pundits have looked at the Iran-Contra affair and have cried foul play: a private foreign policy has been conducted behind the back of Congress (and possibly the president). What they should have said is that the dependent status of public officials generally with regard to private power and the specific distrust of Congress is nothing new. From the point view of the Framers, it is the correct relationship between public and private power. Article II states that Executive power is invested in a president. That power is not defined but John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government argued that in the conduct of foreign affairs, the executive does not simply execute laws passed by the legislature, rather the executive exercises a wholly separate function, particularly with regard to the "power of war and peace." Thomas Jefferson similarly stated that "foreign affairs are executive altogether." In one instance, Jefferson, by executive order and without consulting Congress, returned to France certain "prizes" taken at sea by American warships. Discussing this action in a letter to Madison, Jefferson stated that "the executive, charged with our exterior relations, seems bound, is satisfied of the fact, to do right to the foreign nations, and take on itself the risque [sic] of justification."8 Does this mean that something like the Iran-Contra affair could have happened with someone like Jefferson as president? The answer is yes, because it did. In 1803, the United States found itself at the mercy of fundamentalist Muslims who were holding U.S. citizens hostage. In addition, they were asking and getting ransom from the U.S. government. Jefferson's response was a covert plan to secretly overthrow the government (a state in the region near present day Libya) and replace it with one which would be more congenial to U.S. interests. On December 10, 1803, Jefferson held a secret meeting in the White House with with Captain William Eaton. They worked out a plan in which Eaton would be given $40,000 from the State Department and 1,000 rifles. Eaton was then detached from the State Department and loaned to the Navy where he was given the title "Agent for the United States Fleet in the Mediterranean," a post never heard of before. Covertly and behind the back of Congress, Eaton eventually was sent to Egypt with eleven Marines where he organized a mercenary army and achieved some military success but was unable to destabilize the government in question.* *This information was reported by National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" on July 7, 1987. The piece was entitled "Barbary Coast Wars." The essential differences between the "secret team" of 1803 and the secret team of 1987 have less to do with violations of constitutional principles than with the way those principles must be expressed, given the very different stages (from fledgling nation to declining empire) of economic development. And what has been the role of Congress with regard to covert action? As we noted earlier, Veron L. Parrington has stated that the Constitution represented the first written safeguard against tyranny, "but it was aimed at the encroachments of agrarian majorities rather than at Tory minorities...An honest appeal to the people was the last thing desired by the Federalists..." Allen Smith similarly adds that "[I]t was the almost unanimous sentiment of the Convention that the less the people had to do with the government the better."9 The Framers would have been pleased, then, if they had watched the congressional investigation of the Iran-Contra affair this summer. Congress limited the scope of the investigation, provided a platform for anti-communist ideologues, covered up the most controversial acts such as drug-running, and effectively kept the public misinformed.10 This is what Madison meant when he said that the purpose of a representative system was "to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country...and if pronounced by the people themselves..." The Constitution states that only Congress shall declare war. But notice it does not say which branch of government can or cannot make war nor does it say that acts of war must be declared. Congress, in defining the true interest of the country, has seen fit to declare war only four times despite nearly 1,800 months of fighting and nearly 200 known instances of United States armed interventions abroad.11 In addition to formal declarations, however, numerous congressional acts have been intended to legitimize acts of war. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which permitted the prosecution of the Vietnam war is one. The repeated funding of the Contras is another. But the task of covering up "capital's blustering violence" since the empire gained world dominance has become considerably more difficult than it was during the early nineteenth century when Congress could, without widespread public protest, open the West to economic penetration and the Native Americans to genocide by passing legislation which called for measures that would lead Native Americans to "agriculture, to manufactures, and civilization." After more than a century and a half of varied social movements, Congress in 1947 felt compelled to create a new level of government that better insulated private elites from the public pressures of policy making. The National Security Act of 1947, which gave birth to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council (NSC) among other agencies and departments, enabled corporate elites to more directly and more secretly control war making policies essential for global economic expansion and stability. It was the stronger centralization, the more severe set of checks and balances against public power that many of the more conservative members of the Constitutional Convention such as Hamilton had argued for in 1787. Moreover, the act created a new kind of transnational army within the CIA suitable for suppressing insurrections and overthrowing governments ("such other functions and duties") on a global scale just as the Framers had created a national army in 1787 to suppress insurrections on a state or regional scale. Funding measures have also kept pace with the Framers' original intentions. Although the Constitution states that "All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives" (Article I Section 7) in the interest of ensuring "perfect secrecy," the Framers provided George Washington with a secret slush fund (see Chapter 6). Thus covert financing originated with the Framers. As the government became more deeply involved in economic matters (a situation the Framers could not foresee), the overriding need to insulate key economic decisions from public pressures forced Congress to pass on revenue decisionmaking to the executive and beyond. Following the "Red Scare" in 1921, the Bureau of the Budget was created which permitted the coordination of departmental funding requests. The Bureau was moved to the Executive Office of the President in 1939 and later became the Office of Management and Budget, enabling private elites and the president to originate revenue bills and use the budget to control executive bureaucracies. Moreover, the NSC sets budgetary guidelines for the Defense Department and in 1949 Congress gave permission to the CIA to "transfer to and receive from other government agencies such sums as may be approved by the Office of Management and Budget, for the performance of any functions or activities authorized...and any other government agency is authorized to transfer or receive from the agency such sums without regard to any provisions of law limiting or prohibiting transfers between appropriations." In other words, much of the actual U.S. war making agencies are above the law because Congress has so stipulated. Indeed, the CIA's real charter, its "secret charter," was not shown to Congressional "oversight" committees until July 1973. The public has no way of knowing if the CIA is exceeding its mandate because there is no way of knowing what the mandate is. We see here that Madison's insight that "the danger of disturbing the public tranquility by interesting too strongly the public passions is a still more serious objection against a frequent reference of constitutional questions to the decisions of the whole society," is one that is shared by elites today. Taking added precaution, presidents have "regularly enlarged the functions of the CIA by executive fiat...And sometimes...have acted without informing...[the] normally indulgent congressional `watchdogs.' " Periodically members of Congress complain that they are not really involved in the secret government in the way that they should be. But most congressional watchdogs share the view of Senator Leverett Saltonstall who in 1966 said, "It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a Member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have."12 Statements such as these capture well our collective need to deny what we have become. But what is it that our government does that citizens, because they are members of that government, would prefer not to know? ------------------------------------------------ Coming next: The Secret Government and the Rise of Nazi Germany
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