A Commonplace Book

When Congress created the CIA, in 1947, it conferred upon the agency the power to collect intelligence and also to "perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." "Affecting the national security" was intended as an "important limiting phrase," according to Clark Clifford, one of the authors of the law. Over the years, however, that phrase, instead of serving to sift out all activities except those deemed critical to the nation's survival, came to encompass matters that were simply too controversial or too inconvenient to disclose. Secrecy gradually turned into a convenience, and "national security" came to serve the executive branch as an immense loophole.... Eventually, this manuipulation of the notion of national security helped promote a profoundly anti-democratic notion of truth: truth became something dangerous to the country -- something to be stamped "Top Secret" and handled only by a small number of privileged officials who enjoy the highest security clearances.... Covert actions, which were originally understood to be operations that secretly lent spport to America's official foreign policy -- a policy formulated and developed in public debate -- became a means of escaping the constraints of the Constitution....secrecy didn't conceal the Administrations' invovlement but merely prevented public debate that might have succeeded in putting an end to it.