Yes, it’s just as you suspected, your constitution’s gone. You’re not getting it back. You’re trapped in a sadistic totalitarian state under Argus-eyed surveillance. Your democracy is fake. Your government has one branch, CIA. Sorry! That’s partly my fault.
It’s not entirely my fault, of course – it’s a big job, defiling all your rights and freedoms. It got parceled out in countless bits of piecework. I did not contribute much. I didn’t work that hard. And anyway, I was a dupe.
None of the worker bees knew what the others were doing. None of them saw how the pieces might fit together. Organized crime has gone through an industrial revolution of its own. Compartmented information was the key. The greatest, gravest crimes can be broken down by division of labor and division of guilt until evil’s not merely banal but tedious, like any other sort of work.
National survival, they called it. Or COG, Continuity of Government, COOP, Continuity of Operations. The idea was, before the nuclear war got going, CIA would spread out and hunker down in major population centers, hide behind the skirts of lots of mommies. When Saddam Hussein does it, he’s using human shields. When CIA does it, that’s different. They are raising the threshold of conflict by making counter-force shade into counter-value, in the argot. The Russians can’t decapitate the government, you see? They would have to kill us all.
After the war, so the plan went, CIA would crawl out…