A Boing Boing reader says:
The Secret Government lives! A [90-minute] 1987 Bill Moyers report on the thinking, methods and powerful figures behind extralegal military operations and secret support in Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Laos/Cambodia, Chile, and even domestic surveillance and infiltration within the US, since the beginning of the cold war, resulting in a secret national security regime recently posted Google Video provides some key background and insight to the extremely similar situation going on around Iraq and the "War on Terror" right now. Includes some familiar characters to us today.(You can skip past that painful Jackson Browne music video at the beginning there…)
"We've turned the war powers of the United States over to… well we're never really sure who, or what they're doing, or what it costs, or who is paying for it. The one thing we are sure of is that this largely secret global war, carried on with less and less accountability to democratic institutions, has become a way of life. And now we are faced with a question brand new in our history: Can we have the permanent warfare state, and democracy too?"
"How does it happen that to be anticommunist we become antidemocratic? As if we have to subvert our society to save it? … The powers claimed by presidents for national security have become the controlling wheel of government…"
"…In the bunker of the White House, the men who serve the president put loyalty above analysis, and judgement yields to obedience…"
Seem like a familiar problem?
