What's Up with the Black Budget? - The $64 Question
Rick
Last updated
by Catherine Austin Fitts on 23 September 2002 from Scoop Website
"Engrave this upon my heart: There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story." - Mary Lou Kownacki
"What is relevant is what solves the problem.
If we had thought through real relevancies, we would be on Sirius by now." - Peter Medewar
It is time to deal with the 64-dollar question - the biggest crazy aunt in the living room.
The questions that need to be raised in any effort to find the truth about a significant event related to power and money in the US - and answered if we are to ever find the truth of how our world works - are:
WHAT HAS BEEN THE SIZE OF THE U. S. BLACK BUDGET OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS?
WHAT ARE THE SOURCES AND USES OF FUNDS IN THE BLACK BUDGET?
WHO GOVERNS AND MANAGES THE BLACK BUDGET AND OPERATIONS?
WHY HAVE SO MANY DECENT PEOPLE SUPPORTED AN ILLEGAL BLACK BUDGET OPERATION OF SUCH MAGNITUDE FOR SO LONG?
IS THE WAR ON TERRORISM MOVING THE BLACK BUDGET ON BUDGET?
I do not know the answer to these questions.
What I do know is that asking these questions brings up a whole pile of challenging uncertainty.
(For background on my experience dealing with black budget/slush fund operations at FHA and Ginnie Mae at the Department of Housing and Urban Development - HUD - Justice, Treasury and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, see my article, "The Myth of the Rule of Law.")
Carone Ferdinand gives his family the sense of all of the organized crime operations by CIA, Army and Mafia through the 1970's as legitimate for national security purposes that then got out of hand and turned bad in the 1980's.
That is, what started out as justifiable got out of hand.
This begs the question,
Why Were Such Activities Considered Justifiable?
The way to deal with uncertainty is with scenario design and probability - i.e. to create a framework of the possible explanations with your best estimate of the plausible scenarios and the probability (all adding up to 100%) of each one being true based on intuition.
Maintaining such a framework allows data collection on key variables and assumptions and an evolution to occur that can enlighten - even determine - concrete questions and answers over time.
So, let me tell a story, give you my framework that I use to handle the fact that I do not have the answers and invite your framework.
I am not looking to hear only what is wrong with my framework.
I am looking to improve mine or find a better one.
Or better inform my estimate of the probabilities that this one or that one is true.
Hence, I invite you to put forward your framework for managing this uncertainty.
If we had the truth of the issue I am going to introduce, I dare say we could get to the bottom of 9-11 faster.
In 1998, I was approached by John Peterson, head of the Arlington Institute, a small high quality military think tank in Washington, DC.
I had gotten to know John through Global Business Network and had been impressed by his intelligence, effectiveness and compassion.
John asked me to help him with a high-level strategic plan Arlington was planning to undertake for the Undersecretary of the Navy.
At the time I was the target of an intense smear campaign that would lead the normal person to assume that I would be in jail shortly or worse.
John explained that the Navy understood that it was all politics - they did not care.
I met with a group of high-level people in the military in the process - including the Undersecretary.
According to John, the purpose of the plan - discussed in front of several military or retired military officers and former government officials - was to help the Navy adjust their operations for a world in which it was commonly known that aliens exist and live among us.
When John explained this purpose to me, I explained that I did not know that aliens existed and lived among us.
John asked me if I would like to meet some aliens.
For the only time in my life, I declined an opportunity to learn about something important.
I was concerned that my efforts with Arlington could boomerang and be connected with the smear campaign and the effects that I was managing.
I regret that decision.
At John's suggestion I started to read books on the topic and read about 25 books over the next year on the alien question, the black budget, and alien technology.
I had to drop from the project due to the need to attend to litigation and the physical harassment and surveillance of me and some of the people helping me.
This process - which turned out to be incredibly time consuming - I now believe was connected with the black budget/slush fund activities connected with FHA and Ginnie Mae at HUD. (See, "The Myth of the Rule of Law") John then asked me if I would join the board of the Arlington Institute.
When I attended one of my first meetings, I joined in discussion with about 10 people which included James Woolsey, former head of the CIA in the Clinton Administration, Napier Collyns, founder of Global Business Network and former senior Shell executive, Joe Firmage, and other members of the Arlington board.
The main topic of discussion was whether or not the major project for the coming year should be a white paper on how to help the American people adjust to aliens existing and living among us.
I said nothing - just listened.
Not that long after, I dropped from the board due to the continued demands related to litigation with the Department of Justice and their informant.
To cut a series of additional long stories short, when I talk with my few sources from the military and intelligence community, I hear the same themes:
Aliens exist and live among us.
In part for this reason as well the accumulated investment over the last 50 years, the technology we have access to through the black budget is far more advanced than is commonly understood.
The black budget/slush fund construct was created to deal with this issue, which is why reasonable people thought selling drugs to the children who were US citizens was the better of several options - including the option of telling the American public the truth and funding the expenses on budget.
As a result of these experiences, here is my framework for dealing with this very large pile of uncertainty.
ONE OF THE THREE FOLLOWING POSSIBLE SCENARIOS MUST BE TRUE
SCENARIO #1. ENTRE NOUS:
The alien question is the single largest and most expensive disinformation campaign in the history of our race.
A portion of the human race has advanced technologically so far beyond the rest of us - and is attributing various things to aliens as a way of managing their resulting risk - that we have become as aliens to each other.
To fully understand this scenario, we need to try to understand the use of individual mind control such as criminal hypnosis to effect financial and government fraud and corruption and the truth, whatever it is, of wider subliminal programming and brainwashing.
These are slippery subjects for most people to deal with unless they have the training and ability to do so.
% PROBABILITY SCENARIO #1 IS TRUE ______ (You fill in)
SCENARIO #2 - HOLY COW!:
Aliens exist and live among us.
Planet earth is subject to the politics, economics and laws and/or lawlessness of a larger system or systems.
The transfer of advanced technology into a society that has not evolved governance and legal systems to manage a world with the presence of such technology and the influence of such other system(s) helps to explain current events.
To fully understand this scenario, we must also try to understand the use of individual mind control such as criminal hypnosis to effect financial and government fraud and corruption and the truth, whatever it is, of wide subliminal programming and brainwashing.
Again, these are slippery subjects for most people to deal with unless they have the training and ability to do so.
% PROBABILITY SCENARIO #2 IS TRUE ______ (You fill in)
SCENARIO #3 - MUDDLED: Some combination of (1) and (2) above.
% PROBABILITY SCENARIO #3 IS TRUE ______ (You fill in)
TOTAL % PROBABILITY OF SCENARIOS #1, 2 & 3 BEING TRUE 100%
Could my experiences with Arlington and the Navy or any subsequent contacts fit with a disinformation scenario?
Absolutely.
I have no evidence to support any scenario.
The only evidence I believe I have is my experience dealing with tremendous amounts of money siphoned off over the years, whether through Iran-Contra S&L, HUD and BCCI fraud, or the latest round of money missing from the federal government in the last five years.
This is all documented in the articles below.
This cash flow and the operations and syndicates it appears to fund are important to what drives the governance and allocation of resources in this country and around the globe.
There is a reason that power and money are centralizing, and the rich are getting richer.
I want to know what it is.
Whichever scenario is true - and I do not know which one is - if we had the truth, it would help us grapple with 9-11 and the War on Terrorism.
It would also help us better understand all the efforts to press for centralization of economic and political power that have grown as the black budget has grown since WWII.
The reality is the possibilities of why 9-11 occurred and how it was operationalized are impacted by the facts of the US black budget and the advanced technology it has developed.
Why would sane and even decent people think it was the best option for the good of the whole?
We must sit in the shoes of the person or people who gave the order - whoever they may be and wherever they may be - and understand how their power and money worked.
Why would a group with the operational and financial capacity to affect a 9-11 operation give the green light to plan 9-11, finance 9-11, do 9-11, stand down so 9-11 could happen, take advantage of 9-11 or to make sure the truth was not illuminated?
My experience in Washington and Wall Street would indicate that there is a reasonable chance that all these various people and many in the food chain Are Not Bad or Irrational People.
That is, we have a better chance of finding the truth if for purposes of our explorations we assume that the people involved in all these roles were people like you and me - just with a different map of certain parts of the world and dealing with a variety of stress and pressures trying to build cooperation or achieve goals that we do not understand.
Watching the federal government contract announcements and without benefit of seeing the full budget and assuming The Disclosure Project allegations regarding the estimates of the black budget size, if I had to guess today my guess would be that 9-11 has been highly successful in permitting the black budget to be moved on budget, partly in the normal budget and partly in the budget that is only disclosed to the Congressional intelligence committees.
The solution to continued growth and funding of the black budget may have been to steal as much money and assets as possible from the federal budget and then to move the black budget on budget when control of media, Congress, Justice and Securities & Exchange Commission ensured that the legal budget was non-transparent, controlled by private government contractors and could not be harmed or fiddled with by Congress.
(See various stories on the disappearance of over $3.3 trillion from the federal government from fiscal 1998-2001)
Grossly oversimplified, by the end of the 2004 fiscal year, covert operations and the black budget may be fully legal, run and controlled by corporations and banks without interference from knowledgeable career civil service, taxpayer funded, and non-transparent.
Why do I say all of this?
We do not have time to pay attention to people who use smears like "conspiracy theorist" to waste our time.
Money
budgets
finance
these are all facts.
If something does not work, and it continues to not work, there is a reason.
Systems have a logic.
They have a rationale.
Money helps explain and illuminate that rationale.
Anyone who would smear a serious researcher or writer for trying to understand where a great deal of money is disappearing to as a "conspiracy theorist" is someone who would never be taken seriously or associated with in the circles in which I travel.
The exception is if the person doing the smearing is a professional being paid to smear those who have the scent of "the real deal" - Cointelpro or related public relations.
The number of people paid to do such things are many and growing.
9-11 was an operation that was implemented by a conspiracy.
To get to the bottom of what happened and why one must develop and use conspiracy theories to research in what can only be described as a conspiracy reality.
We know in regard to 9-11 one of two scenarios must be true - some portion of the US military and intelligence are:
complicit and/or
guilty of criminal gross negligence
We also know that the official story is not truthful. Either scenario and the reality of the official story beg the question, "why?"
This course always leads us to consider the fact that US military and intelligence have enjoyed significant expansion of their budgets and powers as a result of 9-11.
We are rewarding failure. 9-11 was great for business.
Lockheed Martin's stock is up over 50% in a falling stock market.
The oil companies have their pipeline.
When a system does not work and continues to not work, there is something that prevents its learning.
Ultimately what we must understand that the problem is not that the system does not work and that it is not learning.
The problem is that the system is controlled and operated by the most powerful forces in that system and that the system is indeed working and learning in the general direction they want it to go.
This happens in a manner that is highly organic and requires lots of planning, trial and error and factionalism that involves competition and cooperation over time in the pursuit of the system's real goals.
Hence, the system is working and is learning.
It is our construct that is wrong.
We do not understand the system and the goals of the system.
Once we are clear that the system is working and is learning, once we stop falling back on scapegoating as a technique to explain events, we can start to understand the real system that we are a part of.
This is how power and money work in reality.
The amount of money and power spent to keep the general population from understanding this - and focused on things like scapegoating which keep us from building a good map of "the real deal" or gaining the power to impact events by using our money and time as a vote in the marketplace in which the banks and corporations must thrive - is immense.
That is why I strongly encourage reading Jon Rappoport's back interviews on his Infomonster and becoming a subscriber for his ongoing interviews.
For those would like to know more, I would refer you to articles on all the money missing from the US Treasury and the manipulation of the gold markets as well as the Disclosure Project video of their event at the National Press Club.
That is why I am so appreciative of efforts like UnAnswered Questions and the effort of researchers networking and collaborating globally to illuminate, research and answer the right questions.
Let me close with the unanswered questions with which I began and which I believe are critical to our ongoing collaboration:
WHAT HAS BEEN THE SIZE OF THE U. S. BLACK BUDGET OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS?
WHAT ARE THE SOURCES AND USES OF FUNDS IN THE BLACK BUDGET?
WHO GOVERNS AND MANAGES THE BLACK BUDGET BUDGET AND OPERATIONS?
WHY HAVE SO MANY DECENT PEOPLE SUPPORTED AN ILLEGAL BLACK BUDGET OPERATION OF SUCH MAGNITUDE FOR SO LONG?
IS THE WAR ON TERRORISM MOVING THE BLACK BUDGET ON BUDGET?
Catherine Austin Fitts is the President of Solari, Inc., a former Assistant Secretary of Housing – Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration and a former partner and member of the board of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc and President of Hamilton Securities.
She is a member of the advisory board of Sanders Research Associates