Without Consent of the Governed

What began with a bang, ended with a soft pop. After months of investigation, weeks of television coverage, and days of high drama which made captive audiences forget about their favorite soap operas, the Iran-Contra committee issued its report, or rather its reports.

A majority report (issued by the Democrats and a few Republicans) said that a "cabal of zealots" had taken control of foreign policy in some key areas, that the constitutional process had been thwarted, the letter and spirit of the law violated, and that the president failed in his constitutional responsibility to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." But the Iran-Contra affair, reported the committee, "resulted from the failure of individuals to observe the law, not from deficiencies in existing law or in our system of government."

A minority report (issued by most of the Republicans) admits that some mistakes were made and some people did some things a little too secretly. But the president did nothing wrong, the excesses were committed in pursuit of lofty goals, and, in the end, it was the Democrats' political agenda and the media hype that really created the scandal.

So, the majority committee report said the problem was a few bad apples in the barrel, and the president should have gotten rid of them. The minority said if there were any bad apples they were self-serving Democrats, the press, and a cowardly Congress.

The problem is that neither report really got to the heart of the problem. But someone finally did. On November 4, the week before the committee reports were published, Bill Moyers issued his own report on PBS titled "The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis."

With Washington's famous monuments in the background, Moyers stated, "For 40 years a secret government has been growing behind these stately tributes to American ideals, growing like a cancer on the Constitution ... The hearings revealed a wholesale policy of secrecy shrouded in lies, of passion cloaked in fiction and deception."

Moyers gets to the truth of the real relationship between the contras and Ronald Reagan. "The contras: Ronald Reagan compared them to our founding fathers. In reality, Ronald Reagan and CIA director William Casey were their founding fathers."

Throughout his "personal essay," Moyers did what journalists almost never do: He focused on the human cost of political decisions. "While profits were being made, lives were being lost." Missiles supplied to Iran have already killed Iraqi people, and in Nicaragua the contras are fighting "a terrorist war ... against peasants."

MOYERS SUMS UP the Iran-Contra scandal and answers the question -- Why? "All this -- the contempt for Congress, the defiance of law, the huge markups and profits, the secret bank accounts, the shady characters, the shakedown of foreign governments, the complicity in death and destruction -- they did all this in the dark, because it would never stand the light of day. Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of; no watchman to check the door, no accountant to check the books, no judge to check the law. The secret government has no constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up."

The United States' secret government has a long and bloody history to which Moyers turns his attention. The National Security Act of 1947 established the foundations and framework for what has become the national security state. It gave us both the National Security Council and the CIA and virtually "invented" the concept of national security which has justified our many national sins.

Moyers recites and documents with extraordinary eyewitness accounts a depressing litany of secret government interventions, aggression, and violence around the world. He describes how the CIA, for the sake of oil, overthrew the legitimate and popular prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq; reinstated the Shah of Iran, who subjected the Iranian people to 25 years of brutal dictatorship, terror, and torture; and established SAVAK, the shah's secret police that murdered thousands.

In 1954, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala because it embarked on a massive land reform program which threatened the vast land holdings of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company. The United States then established a succession of repressive military dictators whose bloody rule over the next 30 years was responsible for the death of 100,000 Guatemalan citizens. And in Chile, a CIA coup overthrew and assassinated democratically elected president Salvador Allende because he ran afoul of U.S. multinational corporations IT&T and Anaconda Copper.

The Vietnam War began as a secret operation by the CIA and never became a constitutionally declared war. Said Moyers, "The men who wrote our Constitution tried to make it hard to go to war. Human life was at stake, they knew, and the character of our republic. War should be soberly decided, publicly debated, and mutually determined by the people's representatives. It is the people, after all, who must fight, pay, and die, once the choice is made. The Constitution was to protect them from dying for the wrong reasons. It was to protect them from killing for the wrong reasons."

Moyers asks, "How does it happen that to be anti-communist we become undemocratic?" It is the existence of the national security state itself and the secret government that are the heart of the great national danger and constitutional crisis revealed by the Iran-Contra affair. The Iran-Contra hearings once again urgently demonstrated the need to restore constitutional government and return political authority to the "consent of the governed" as originally and wisely conceived.

Bill Moyers concluded with words that would make a good sermon. "The people who wrote this Constitution lived in a world more dangerous than ours. They were surrounded by territory controlled by hostile powers, on the edge of a vast wilderness. Yet they understood that even in perilous times, the strength of self-government was public debate and public consensus. To put aside these basic values out of fear, to imitate the foe in order to defeat him, is to shred the distinction that makes us different ...

"In the end, not only our values but our methods separate us from the enemies of freedom in the world. The decisions we make are inherent in the methods that produce them. An open society cannot survive a secret government. Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us."

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.