Senate counsel and investigator who worked on national-security oversight and black-programme accountability, and whose sentence is the one In Plain Sight builds its civics argument on: if a programme of this kind exists outside the knowledge of elected officials, then we are no longer in a democracy.
Why that sentence carries the book
The claim it makes is not about craft. It is that unaccountable compartments are a constitutional problem whether or not anything exotic is inside them, which is the version of the argument that survives even if every retrieval claim turns out to be false. Ross Coulthart presses it against his own sources’ bravado, and it is the deepest anxiety in the book: not what the objects are, but what the secrecy machinery has done to oversight.
D’Amato is reported to have looked for the programmes on the Senate’s behalf and not to have found them, which is the part of his account that both camps quote and neither can settle.
Connections
In Plain Sight · Ross Coulthart · Black Budget · Legacy Program · Senator Harry Reid · Crash Retrieval Program