Happy birthday to the ever-expanding national security state

Seventy-nine years ago this month, President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which quickly morphed into today’s metastasizing, often abusive, national security state.

With the stroke of his pen, Truman blessed the creation of the National Security Council to advise him and future executives on the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies related to national security, ensured that each military branch retained its own intelligence functions, and created a new organization to coordinate and unify intelligence activities: the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA.

Within a decade the CIA and existing intelligence organizations were joined by the Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR) in the State Department, the Air Force Security Service (USAFSS) and Office of Special Investigations (OSI), and the National Security Agency (NSA).

Today, we often think these secretive organizations were inevitable outcomes of World War II and the Cold War. The U.S. government presumably leveraged secrecy, surveillance, and espionage to delay or thwart the Soviet Union’s atomic ambitions.

Without a doubt, the Soviet threat was critical in establishing the national security state. But don’t give Stalin, Khrushchev, or the Soviet Union’s first nuclear tests all the credit. The National Security Act and what followed were also spawned by naked opportunism.

Historians note that Truman’s push for an integrated national security apparatus “came about because a determined president who wanted to reshape the national security establishment took full advantage of the opportunity provided him in the wake of the largest war in history.” Though his intentions weren’t nefarious, the consequences have been disastrous, particularly for civil liberty.

Examples are plentiful.

Truman’s centralization of the national security state would allow for increased migration of German scientists into the United States, including individuals responsible for war crimes against political prisoners, Romani (often referred to as often referred to as “gypsies”), and Jews. These same individuals, along with other academics granted access to funding and “restricted data” courtesy of collaborations between the Atomic Energy Commission and the surveillance state, continued to experiment on human beings in the United States. The “subjects” included uninformed and non-consenting U.S. service members, pregnant women, prisoners, and mentally disabled children.

U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI, CIA and NSA, routinely abused their government-granted secrecy to surveil Americans domestically, from civil-rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and antiwar protestors during the Vietnam War, to other possible “subversives” like Albert Einstein and Aretha Franklin, along with journalists, actors, elected officials, and other Nobel laureates.

These abuses were so egregious that, in 1976, a special Senate committee — the Church Committee — required seven volumes and six books to adequately report the scale and scope of the CIA, FBI and NSA abuses it had uncovered.

As a result, Congress passedCongress passed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978 to establish strict judicial oversight over government surveillance. The Church Church Committee’s findings resulted in the creation of a permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to monitor national security entities. An executive order banned any “employee” of the United States government from conspiring or engaging in political assassinations. (Not to worry, actively destabilizing regimes, supporting coups, and providing ample support to armed guerrilla groups remain firmly on the table.)

Questions about national security abuses are often met with eye rolls, accusations of paranoia, claims that concerns are the result of “baseless hysteria,” or with assurances that the national security state is, in the words of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, “carefully drawn to target a narrow class of individuals.”

To ensure our safety and security, noted late CIA Director Richard Helms, “the nation must…take it on faith that we too are honorable men devoted to [the nation’s] service.” We should also be comforted that our oversight needs are “adequately served” by congressional committees.

Helms’ “honor,” it’s worth noting, prompted him to order the destruction of thousands of files related to the CIA’s support for illegal human experiments. As for the “adequacy” of oversight, multiple revelations related to unscrupulous surveillance activities, including blatant constitutional violations post-9/11, suggest there’s ample room for improvement, to put it mildly. They also suggest that safeguards like FISA have lost their teeth.

The United States is not free of enemies. But the machinery constructed nearly 80 years ago to confront them has been consistently abused. The question is not whether the national security state “works.” The question is why Americans continue to pretend it works for them.