THE NATIONAL SECURITY ACT OF 1947 (and what it means…)
The National Security Act of 1947 destroyed US democracy.
Apparently, nobody knows that.
Can that be coincidence?
As summarized by the US Department of State, the National Security Act of 1947 achieved the following:
“The National Security Act of 1947 mandated a major reorganization of the foreign policy and military establishments of the U.S. Government. The act created many of the institutions that Presidents found useful when formulating and implementing foreign policy, including the National Security Council (NSC). The Council itself included the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and other members (such as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency), who met at the White House to discuss both long-term problems and more immediate national security crises…
The act also established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)…”
The Department of State, for reasons unknown, writes incongruously in the past tense. In fact, as of January 2025, the National Security Act of 1947 continues to serve as the legislative framework for the organization and coordination of U.S. national security and intelligence efforts.
But US citizens, I have found, live in utter bliss concerning the contents of the National Security Act—they’ve never heard of it.
Should they? If democracy matters to them, then yes. Because a good case can be made that this 1947 law stripped US citizens of all their democratic rights.
The National Security Act of 1947 gave US Intelligence explicit authority to begin any action, at any time, without asking anybody. Moreover, invoking an infinitely mysterious ‘national security’ principle, US Intelligence may postpone—and indefinitely—any report of such activity.
This is a recipe for absolute power, wielded clandestinely.
And who—exactly—wields it? Good question.
Below I do two things:
I quote and explain the key provisions of the National Security Act that long ago placed US Intelligence beyond the reach of democratic accountability; and
I consider the most dramatic implications of this.
The key ‘accountability’ provisions of the National Security Act
The question of “Accountability For Intelligence Activities” is addressed in Title V of the National Security Act.1 Such accountability may be summarized with one word: none.
I shall demonstrate by quoting from Title V. The mind-numbing legalese is sometimes near-incomprehensible, but I will offer translations to simple English as needed.
SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 3091] (a)(2): Nothing in this title shall be construed as requiring the approval of the congressional intelligence committees as a condition precedent to the initiation of any significant anticipated intelligence activity.
Translation: Acting like an absolute monarch, US Intelligence may initiate any action it wants, at any time, without seeking permission from the congressional representatives OF THE ‘FREE’ CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES!!!
But will US Intelligence at least inform Congress of its activities? Supposedly.
SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 3091] (a)(1): THE PRESIDENT shall ensure that the congressional intelligence committees are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity as required by this title.
SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 3091] (b): THE PRESIDENT shall ensure that any illegal intelligence activity is reported promptly to the congressional intelligence committees, as well as any corrective action that has been taken or is planned in connection with such illegal activity.
I must confess that the original text of the law does not write THE PRESIDENT, as I did above, with italicized, boldfaced, upper-case letters. I added all that because I need you to notice that it is the President who must keep Congress “fully and currently informed,” and also the President who must “report promptly” any illegal intelligence activity.
It’s a bit of a problem, that.
As a component of the Executive Branch, US Intelligence is run by people whom the President hires and fires, and who must act with the President’s authority. The buck stops there. So, if US Intelligence acted illegally, the President acted illegally. And who must report on the President’s illegal intelligence activities? This responsibility falls to the President.
So… the “accountability” for illegal intelligence activities boils down to this: we will trust the President to tell on himself.
Clearly, the bosses think we’re idiots. (Are we gonna prove them right?)
Now, I’ll allow that one paragraph in Title V, should you read it distractedly in the blurry daze of a bad hangover, might perhaps seem to you—for the briefest moment—like it is requiring US Intelligence to make a full disclosure of its secret activities to the congressional intelligence committees:
SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 3091] (e): Nothing in this Act shall be construed as authority to withhold information from the congressional intelligence committees on the grounds that providing the information to the congressional intelligence committees would constitute the unauthorized disclosure of classified information or information relating to intelligence sources and methods.
But notice how, once you translate this occult gobbledygook into simple English, all it means is that US Intelligence may not say to the congressional intelligence committees, “You know what? We won’t share this information with you because that would be, you know, ‘unauthorized disclosure,’ as we call it.”
Which… almost sounds good. Except that US Intelligence may say to the congressional intelligence committees, “You know what? We won’t share this information with you because that would be, you know, ‘detrimental to national security,’ as we call it.”
See for yourself:
SEC. 507. [50 U.S.C. 3106] (d)(3)(A). “The date for the submittal of a report whose submittal is postponed under paragraph (1) or (2) may be postponed beyond the time provided for the submittal of such report under such paragraph if the official required to submit such report submits to the congressional intelligence committees a written certification that preparation and submittal of such report at such time will impede the work of officers or employees of the intelligence community in a manner that will be detrimental to the national security of the United States.”
Translation of this nauseating gobbledygook: If US Intelligence wishes to postpone indefinitely the report of some activity, all they have to do is pronounce the magical words ‘national security.’ It’s a spell.
But even should any trickle of US Intelligence activity make its way into a report presented to the congressional intelligence committees (I had to suppress a laugh), this will hardly amount, anyway, to much public oversight of US Intelligence. Why? Because these committees are themselves highly secret and mostly do not inform the public.2
I will sum this up. The National Security Act of 1947 specifies, in black and white, that US bureaucrats, after taking from the citizens of the United States their hard-earned money at the point of a gun, can then spend the money of the citizens to initiate any secret action whatever—legal or illegal—without asking anyone. And they may, moreover, indefinitely postpone, and at their own discretion, the report of any such secret activity, legal or illegal.
This is simply tremendous power. I dare say it is absolute power—a special and rather complicated kind of it, but absolute power nonetheless.
This technically absolute power is limited, of course, by the amount of money wielded by US Intelligence, for even they cannot do things they don’t have money for. But that is not much of a limitation, because enormous amounts of money are appropriated yearly for US Intelligence.
For example, just the National Intelligence Program (NIP), covering agencies like the CIA and NSA, has a budget request for Fiscal Year 2025 equal to $73.4 billion.
Has the astronomically large intelligence budget been used to corrupt democratic institutions?
How have US Intelligence monies been spent? It’s a secret—okay. But can’t we guess? What should simple logic lead us to predict?
Might the US bosses employ the clandestine powers of US Intelligence, for example, to corrupt in secret the publishers and editors who run the media in foreign countries? The university systems of foreign countries? The political and military bosses in foreign countries? Might the US bosses distort foreign markets with covert financial interventions?
I think they might, because Title V of the National Security Act in fact explicitly authorizes and encourages the bosses to employ US Intelligence, via so-called ‘covert actions,’ to corrupt and manipulate the political, media, and economic systems of foreign countries!
SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 3091] (f): As used in this section, the term ‘intelligence activities’ includes covert actions as defined in section 503(e), and includes financial intelligence activities.
SEC. 503 [50 U.S.C. 3093] (e): As used in this title [Title V], the term ‘covert action’ means an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly…
Translation: By law, the President of the United States need show zero respect for the institutions of foreign countries, and may use the might of the world’s greatest power to corrupt, distort, disrupt, and co-opt those foreign institutions in secret.
This is precisely what Udo Ulfkotte (1960–2017) alleged, shortly before his death, that US Intelligence had done.
Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist and author, best known for his work at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s leading newspapers, where he spent nearly 17 years as a political correspondent and an editor, no less. After leaving mainstream journalism, Ulfkotte became a controversial figure due to his outspoken criticism of the media and his sharp critiques of issues such as immigration and Islam in Europe. In 2014, he published the book Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists), in which he claimed that many European journalists, including himself, were covertly influenced or directly controlled by Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
Ulfkotte alleged that the CIA and other intelligence agencies regularly manipulated news coverage by using bribery, gifts, or career incentives to steer reporters and editors toward the desired narrative. He claimed that journalists were often encouraged or pressured to publish stories with particular interpretations, while suppressing or distorting other views. He even confessed that he had published countless articles under his own name that had in fact been written entirely by the CIA. He gave several interviews amplifying these allegations, saying he felt compelled to expose such practices as a form of personal redemption. He was ashamed, he said, of himself and his career, and he wanted to expiate his sins before he died, which he expected would happen soon.3
Shortly afterward, Ulfkotte indeed died in 2017. His health was bad, by his own admission. (But some believe he was murdered.4)
Okay, you may be wondering. But even if all of that has been happening, What about US institutions? Is US Intelligence authorized to treat US institutions with the same astonishing contempt? It is not. The immediately following paragraph in Title V of the National Security Act states:
SEC. 503 [50 U.S.C. 3093] (f): No covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media.
I think the above prose, once again, is evidence that the bosses consider us idiots. (Are they right?)
It is obvious (or at least it ought to be) that no citizen of the US should find SEC. 503 (f) of the National Security Act in the least reassuring. For if the President—the boss of US Intelligence—chooses to secretly corrupt policy, public opinion, media, or political processes in the United States, which is clearly forbidden by SEC. 503 (f), the responsibility to inform Congress of the President’s illegal activity will fall... TO THE PRESIDENT (see above). And the President can avoid fulfilling that responsibility merely by ritually speaking the words “national security”—a solemn spell to cloak his every illegal deed (see above).
Question: What do you have when you give the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, effective power to corrupt in secret any US institutions, and you make it so that, to be discovered, the President must tell on himself?
Answer: The opposite of a mechanism to prevent the corruption of US institutions. This is an invitation to do it.
Okay, but has this happened? Have US institutions been corrupted by US Intelligence? Well, let us consider the following question:
What might be the personality and ideological orientation of those wielding this tremendous clandestine power?
As Lord Acton famously taught, power itself tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In other words, a taste for power invites people to shed their scruples. Those with zero scruples are called psychopaths. By Lord Acton’s dictum, then, the proportion of psychopaths among the bosses is likely to be considerably higher than it is in the general population (a claim that, as you might expect, enjoys an ample consensus in modern psychiatry).
Purely on logical grounds, then, I submit the following obvious hypothesis: the National Security Act has given tremendous clandestine power to a group of psychopaths.
But what about the evidence? Does the historical record contain empirical confirmation of the psychopathy of US bosses?
Well, yes. Such evidence is in fact abundant. For example, we have evidence aplenty to establish that the biggest US bosses have been hard at work undermining Western democracy since that system was first established, in fits and starts, after the revolutions of 1848. At MOR, we’ve taken a partial look at this:
An especially important effort of the big bosses in the United States and Great Britain was the eugenics movement, which later became German Nazism.
This evidence, we believe, must be considered in combination with the profoundly important facts documented by historian Christopher Simpson in 1988, with material released via the US Freedom of Information Act. Simpson documented that, immediately after World War II, US bosses created US Intelligence by absorbing and redeploying (at least) tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals.
So who wields the awesome—essentially absolute—clandestine power of US Intelligence? You have the answer: the Nazi bosses and their hirelings.
Naturally, the Nazis running US Intelligence have never informed the congressional committees of the atrocities they commit in secret. In the decades after WWII, however, suspicion of such activities nevertheless grew (it is hard to keep everything perfectly contained). And in 1967, Ramparts magazine, a relatively small and apparently independent publication, blew it all wide open when it published an exposé documenting that the National Student Association—the largest of its kind in the United States, with a strong presence in university campuses all over the country, and in possession of a vast publishing enterprise—was a CIA front.
Ramparts had opened the door just a small crack, allowing the merest peek to what lay behind: a gigantic, octopus-like structure of systematic institutional corruption that engulfed everything, penetrating down to the smallest nook and cranny of US society. But that glimpse was enough to give the entire structure jitters, and it began leaking.
Years of shocking revelations followed, and the citizens learned that the CIA had been corrupting all manner of institutions all over the United States. The details became so overwhelming, and the reluctance of the Executive Branch to share them so obvious, that Senator Frank Church established, in 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (better known as the Church Committee).
What did the Church Committee discover? I give you two examples.
US Intelligence violently destroyed the lives of countless innocent persons in the US and elsewhere by conducting experiments on them meant to discover laws of ‘mind control’ that could turn human beings into ‘Manchurian candidates’—perfect assassins activated at a distance and with no subsequent memory of their actions (hence, immune to interrogation). You’ll remember this from some of the Hollywood interpretations of this (the Bourne series, for example). This program was the sort of thing you might expect from a totalitarian nightmare State such as North Korea—or indeed from the Nazis, such as were in fact mass-recruited to form US Intelligence. The mind-control gambit was called Project MK-Ultra.
Right after World War II, US bosses protected the Japanese fascist criminal doctor Shiro Ishii, counterpart to the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, who had conducted medical experiments on prisoners of war during World War II. They used his data to advance the US biological weapons program. The US Army conducted (at least) hundreds of secret, open-air, biowarfare ‘tests’ on millions of US citizens, spraying them with experimental bioweapons as if they were lab rats. Again, it’s the sort of thing you expect from Nazis.
Now, if they do that, won’t they corrupt the media and the universities? Of course they will. But you could have deduced that just from how these meaning-making institutions are constantly telling us that any suspicion that US Intelligence is an evil group of organizations working to destroy democracy is just ‘conspiracy theory’—meaning, according to them, that such suspicions are nonsense. Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!
In any case, there is scant need to speculate. US Intelligence has been several times caught red-handed violating the rights of US citizens and corrupting media and educational institutions in the United States. The obvious purpose of this corruption is to manage our reality.
The latest revelations of such abuses came recently, with Edward Snowden’s leak concerning how the NSA spies on everybody, and Matt Taibbi & Michael Schellenberger’s Twitter-Files investigation that resulted from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X), which revealed that US Intelligence was engaging in widespread censorship and misinformation by intervening social-media companies.
Ah, but here is a long tradition of this sort of thing.
For example, way back in the 1970s, the Church Committee found extensive penetration of US Intelligence in media and academia—a finding that was suppressed even by the Church Committee itself, as Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) would later point out. And the Iran-Contra investigation found the same again a decade later—likewise suppressed from the official Iran-Contra congressional report.
But if these outrages were at least documented, doesn’t that mean that US citizens took their democracy back? No, it doesn’t, because unfortunately nothing was done. Not only was the information on these outrages softly suppressed and silenced (by never mentioning it again), but everyone involved in these crimes got away with them scot-free. Not one person went to jail or was even fired for destroying innocent US citizens with psychological experiments, or for spraying bioweapons on them, or for corrupting their democratic institutions.
The controlled meaning-making system (media and academia) just told people that the matter was being corrected, and then the entire thing was hushed up so that a new round of corruption could begin. A few years later, everybody had forgotten about it. We explain this aspect of reality management here:
It is because nothing was done and everything was forgotten that two investigations, barely a decade apart—Church Committee and Iran-Contra—both found that the CIA had extensively corrupted media and academia. The first investigation had achieved nothing! And the same is true for the second. CIA control of the meaning-making system was not even interrupted.
This is obvious from how our meaning-making institutions are always telling us that, while (sure…) some limited conspiracies may, from time to time, happen, any conspiracy theory on the Grand-Show level—where our entire political reality is a carefully constructed mirage—is just too ‘complex’ to set up. The argument employed to thus distract us, however, relies on the wrong metaphor of complexity, as we’ve explained here:
In fact, the clandestine takeover of an organization can be done by corrupting just a few individuals at the top, plus narrative control for the rest, as the Ramparts revelations empirically showed.
It ain’t that complex.
So, yes, US Intelligence can take control of the entire meaning-making system if it is allowed to spend US citizen monies, which is precisely what the National Security Act of 1947 indeed allows.
Naturally, the bosses in charge of US Intelligence, to secure their own power, will want to control, first and foremost, the political parties. For once under their control, electoral politics in the US can be turned into a Grand Show, managed so that US citizens, each time, become attached to one or the other candidate, becoming invested enough to vote. The bosses, pulling the strings of both presidential candidates, can then make sure that, fundamentally, nothing will ever change in the so-called ‘Deep State.’
This Grand-Show model is precisely the hypothesis that we asked our readers to consider in our previous piece, which is about Donald Trump:
Maurice Joly—he said it first
All of this—the whole thing—was explained in the 19th century by the great political theorist Maurice Joly. If democratic citizens were to allow their governments to create secret intelligence services, he said, their democracies would undoubtedly and instantly be destroyed. It was guaranteed, he insisted, that the bosses would use any clandestine powers granted to corrupt anything they could, keeping the façade of democracy while pulling all the institutional strings in secret. They would manage our reality.
The most interesting aspect of what Joly wrote is that he was not theorizing in a vacuum; he was, rather, describing what Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was already doing in the Second French Republic with the vast intelligence services that he was allowed by French citizens to create. Since this was at the very birth of modern democracy, there was instant and dramatic confirmation of Joly’s main thesis: democracy cannot survive if the bureaucrats are given authority to spend citizen monies in secret.
Can this be turned around?
Sure. But it won’t happen if ordinary citizens continue to sleepwalk, allowing the bosses to manage their reality. We need, first of all, a citizen science that investigates how the management of reality works. This must all be done outside of the university system, where the prohibition on doing conspiracy theory has been turned into a sacred taboo. And we need to make the results of these citizen investigations widely known.
MOR is putting a grain of sand towards all that (you can, too, by supporting us with sharing of articles, and, if possible for you, by becoming a paid subscriber).
Once political consciousness of our present predicament has reached critical mass, we the people must leverage that consciousness to demand a profound constitutional reform: NO MORE SECRETS.
The abolition of all clandestine services across the entire democratic West—or, put another way, the requirement that government may not spend a single cent of citizen monies without immediate and total transparency—is the only way that we can reasonably protect ourselves from psychopathic bureaucrats who will otherwise corrupt our democratic institutions and do us great harm.
Stay free.
You may read the text of the National Security Act of 1947 here:
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/ic-legal-reference-book/national-security-act-of-1947
Bear in mind that the references to paragraphs of the Act are the same as in my text above, because those will never change. But the references given to the US Code are not the most up-to-date references. The most current references are the ones I use in my text, above.
National Security Act; SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 413] (d): “The House of Representatives and the Senate shall each establish, by rule or resolution of such House, procedures to protect from unauthorized disclosure all classified information, and all information relating to intelligence sources and methods, that is furnished to the congressional intelligence committees or to Members of Congress under this title. Such procedures shall be established in consultation with the Director of Central Intelligence. In accordance with such procedures, each of the congressional intelligence committees shall promptly call to the attention of its respective House, or to any appropriate committee or committees of its respective House, any matter relating to intelligence activities requiring the attention of such House or such committee or committees.”
“Editor of major newspaper says he planted stories for CIA”; Digital Journal; 26 Jan 2015; by Ralph Lopez
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/editor-of-major-german-newspaper-says-he-planted-stories-for-cia/article/424470#ixzz492IqwAKq
“German journo: European media writing pro-US stories under CIA pressure (VIDEO)”; Russia Today; 18 Oct 2015.
https://www.rt.com/news/196984-german-journlaist-cia-pressure/
This is very complex. In principle, you are 100% correct. But at the same time, a perfect democracy would be an absolute disaster. The average person is not qualified to make a judgement call on most issues of state. Now, if you are going to expect to have citizens give their input on every major issue, or set up citizen groups to act on their behalf, every time a decision needs to be made, the Government would grind to a halt. A room full of democrats seldom reaches a happy consensus. Often it's a case of he who shouts loudest wins the day. More than that, imagine scenarios such as war. While you are debating whether to fight back against a perceived threat, you've already been invaded and occupied.
Then consider that over time population group percentages of the total will change. You already see an influx of Latino's, Middle Eastern refugees, and so on. It can therefore only be expected that opinion will change accordingly.
Agreed, what goes on now is not acceptable but exactly where do you find the balance? In my opinion, totalitarian regimes have the advantage in that they can make quick decisions. It sounds like that's exactly the behind-the-scenes under-the-covers scenario in American politics as well. But heck, these are people we are talking about. Human nature as we know it is far from perfect and the standards you are expecting are beyond anything that's likely been before us and lies ahead of us.
That doesn't mean that I disagree with your intent. We must always strive to improve. But let's understand that perfection is not possible. Some compromise of sorts will have to happen and the people at the top will have to have some kind of licence to make quick decisions on matters they consider urgent. The emphasis should rather be on putting trustworthy people in positions of authority. With the advent of modern technology, surely machines that can read minds can't be far off. We'll probably find that no one is clean enough to be President, but that's for another day.