TOP SECRET AMERICA
I'm trying not to photobleach my rhodopsin, for no particular reason. Did you know there are more than 800,000 people in the United States of America who hold top-secret security clearances? Not confidential clearances, not secret clearances, but
top secret clearances? More than 800,000! It's amazing, mind-boggling and thoroughly bamboozling; yet it's true. "What," you may rightly ask, "do all those people do that's so damned top secret?" Ah, that's the question!
If you're sincerely wondering what those 800,000-plus folks do (and who's paying them to do it) I suggest you start your enquiry here:
Top Secret America | washingtonpost.comWashington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin's investigation of the government's response to 9/11. Top Secret America explores what they found.Or take a peek at this:
Top Secret America | FRONTLINE | PBSOr this:
A Spotlight on “Top Secret America” | Secrecy NewsMost people can vaguely recall that there was once no U.S. Department of Homeland Security and that there was a time when you didn't have to take your shoes off....Or perhaps even this:
Top Secret America - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Please read this book. Thank you.Once upon a time, I too was a member of the Top Secret Club. That's my name on the temporary-duty orders shown below, which sent me from one air base to another on "PRIORITY ONE" status to "Coordinate operational matters." Notice the words "TOP SECRET" to the right of my name. (I've blacked out the name of the guy who traveled with me.)
There were shower facilities with hot running water at Tan Son Nhut Air Base!Compared to those days of remotest antiquity, it's obvious that nowadays they're handing out top-secret clearances like candy at a parade! Why? To make a long story short, this is due to the fact we're supposedly at war with the whole world: It's the Global War on Terrorism, don't you know? (Even the Israelis, who know something about security, laugh at our demeaning and unfocused airport-screening methods.) But, hey, thousands of corporations are making untold billions of dollars off Uncle Sam (
i.e., the U.S. citizenry) to "fight" this global war of ours. That's a cash-cow tsunami nobody's going to stop, least of all bribe-taking politicians.
Irrelevant identity card gratuitously introduced to beguile readers into thinking I was important.Although the corporate mainstream media-of-communication's "remember 9/11" machinery is kicking into high gear even as we speak, do yourself a favor and either read
Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest and William Arkin (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2011) or peruse those Web pages/sites I've hyperlinked above. There's much, much more to the mendacious "terrorists are everywhere" scare talk coming from the military-industrial-congressional complex than meets the eye.
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