We've already briefly noted the phenomenon of "invisible government" or "shadow government" (see section D.9), which occurs when an administration is able to bypass or weaken official government agencies or institutions to implement policies that are not officially permitted. In the US, the Reagan Administration's Iran-Contra affair is an example. During that episode the National Security Council, an arm of the executive branch, secretly funded the Contras, a mercenary counterinsurgency force in Central America, in direct violation of the Boland Amendment which Congress had passed for the specific purpose of prohibiting such funding. The fact that investigators could not prove the President's authorisation or even knowledge of the operation is a tribute to the presidential "deniability" its planners took care to build into it.
Other recent cases of invisible government in the United States involve the weakening of official government agencies to the point where they can no longer effectively carry out their mandate. Reagan's tenure in the White House again provides a number of examples. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, was for all practical purposes neutralised when employees dedicated to genuine environmental protection were removed and replaced with people loyal to corporate polluters. Evidence suggests that the Department of the Interior under Reagan-appointee James Watt was similarly co-opted. Such detours around the law are deliberate policy tools that allow presidents to exercise much more actual power than they appear to have on paper.
One of the most potent methods of invisible government in the US is the President's authority to determine foreign and domestic policy through National Security Directives that are kept secret from Congress and the American people. Such NSDs cover a virtually unlimited field of actions, shaping policy that may be radically different from what is stated publicly by the White House and involving such matters as interference with First Amendment rights, initiation of activities that could lead to war, escalation of military conflicts, and even the commitment of billions of dollars in loan guarantees — all without congressional approval or even knowledge.
According to congressional researchers, past administrations have used national security orders to intensify the war in Vietnam, send US commandos to Africa, and bribe foreign governments. The Reagan Administration wrote more than 320 secret directives on everything from the future of Micronesia to ways to keep the government running after a nuclear holocaust. Jeffrey Richelson, a leading scholar on US intelligence, says that the Bush Administration had written more than 100 NSDs as of early 1992 on subjects ranging from the drug wars to nuclear weaponry to support for guerrillas in Afghanistan to politicians in Panama. Although the subjects of such orders have been discovered by diligent reporters and researchers, none of the texts has been declassified or released to Congress. Indeed, the Bush Administration consistently refused to release even unclassified NSDs!
On October 31, 1989, nine months before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, President Bush signed NSD-26, ordering US agencies to expand political and economic ties with Iraq, giving Iraq access to US financial aid involving a billion-dollar loan guarantee as well as military technology and foodstuffs later sold for cash. Members of Congress, concerned that policy decisions involving billion-dollar commitments of funds should be made jointly with the legislature, dispatched investigators in 1991 to obtain a list of the secret directives. The White House refused to co-operate, ordering the directives kept secret "because they deal with national security." Iraq's default on the loans it obtained through NSD-26 means that American taxpayers are footing the billion-dollar bill.
The underlying authoritarianism of politicians is often belied by their words. For instance, even as Reagan claimed to favour diminished centralisation he was calling for a radical increase in his control of the budget and for extended CIA activities inside the country — with less congressional surveillance — both of which served to increase centralised power [Tom Farrer, "The Making of Reaganism," New York Review of Books, Jan 21, 1982, cited in Marilyn French, Beyond Power, p. 346]. President Clinton's recent use of an Executive Order to bail out Mexico from its debt crisis after Congress failed to appropriate the money falls right into the authoritarian tradition of running the country by fiat.
Perhaps the most disturbing revelation to emerge from the Iran-Contra affair was the Reagan administration's contingency plan for imposing martial law. Alfonso Chardy, a reporter for the Miami Herald, revealed in July 1987 that Lt. Col. Oliver North, while serving on the National Security Council's staff, had worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on a plan to suspend the Bill of Rights by imposing martial law in the event of "national opposition to a US military invasion abroad." This martial law directive was still in effect in 1988 [ Richard O. Curry, ed., Freedom at Risk: Secrecy, Censorship, and Repression in the 1980s, Temple University Press, 1988].
Former US Attorney General Edwin Meese declared that the single most important factor in implementing martial law would be "advance intelligence gathering to facilitate internment of the leaders of civil disturbances" [Ibid., p. 28}. As discussed in B.16.5, during the 1980s the FBI greatly increased its surveillance of individuals and groups judged to be potentially "subversive," thus providing the Administration with a convenient list of people who would be subject to immediate internment during civil disturbances. The Omnibus Counter-terrorism Bill now being debated in the US Congress would give the President virtually dictatorial powers, by allowing him to imprison and bankrupt dissidents by declaring their organisations "terrorist."