Tom Engelhardt: The Intelligence Bureaucracy That Ate Our World!

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but not enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, J. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism - about you and me, that is, for up to five years. (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed, "will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively." Joseph K.,that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka's novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper's Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words "practically and effectively," not to speak of "mission." For most Americans, though, it was just life as we've known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it 'supposedly' involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years, or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence thinks it's even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part, and it hardly made a ripple. If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this moment, it might read "Tread on Me" and use that classic illustration of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. That, at least, would catch something of the absurdity of what the National Security Complex has decided to swallow of our "American world."