The Legal Erasure of a Man
Cruelty & CYA Was the Design: "I had been redacted from service"
Crossing Rubicons: John, Griobhtha, Jules Bond, & Juan Idalgo / GP&R
— a companion document for X Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy Wars
The Legal Erasure of a Man
Cruelty & Covering Ass Was the Design: How the State Built the Law to Unmake Its Own — and Why the Same Lawlessness That Disappears a Constitution Disappears a Person
“On the last day, I went in to sign the paperwork. When they showed it to me, my heart took a dive. The DD-214 had been stripped, completely... No deployments, no awards, no citations; rank was gone; time-in-service reduced. I had been redacted from service.” — Rubicon, X Rubicon: Up Against A Wall
I. The Erased Man - “Redacted From Service”
Begin with the man, because the law would rather you began with anything else.
He is older now. The wound has not faded with age; it has deepened. His right arm and hand and wrist — the arm that drove knives into other human beings, the hand that twisted a wide-blade knife in their bodies to make their dying quick — ache now in ways directly traceable to what was asked of him, what he did, more than forty years ago. When the weather turns hot and humid, he looks down at his hands and they appear to be covered in blood, and he can smell it. He has known for decades there is no blood. It appears anyway. The dead still visit him in his sleep; the woman most often, the one who whispered “baby” before she died with his knife in her heart, the one who turned out to be carrying a child she would never bear. His government has a name for what was done to her, and to her husband, and to the roughly fourteen hundred human beings he killed and helped kill in the span of thirty days while Americans were snug in their beds with visions of “power, glory, and sugarplums in their heads”. The name his government has for it is classified until 2085.
That is the first thing to understand about this man. The second thing is that, on paper, he does not exist.
When he refused to keep killing — when, following the last mission, he could no longer justify supporting right-wing death squads on the strength of a CIA officer’s word that the slaughter was righteous — the machine did not simply discharge him. It unmade him. He was stripped of the Air Force Cross, of two Silver Stars, of four Bronze Stars, of the Defense Superior Service Medal — every decoration he had been awarded for the killing, save a single Marksman ribbon his commander left him “to remind him of who he really is.” His DD-214, the discharge document that is a veteran’s only legal proof that his life in uniform happened at all, was, in his commander’s own words, redacted in toto. No deployments. No awards. No citations. Rank gone. Time-in-service reduced. And then, to set the headstone, the reason listed for his separation: “APATHY — DEFECTIVE ATTITUDE.”
He has told us, plainly, what that felt like: “I had been redacted from service.”
Sit with the verb. Not discharged. Not separated. Redacted — the word a censor uses for the lines he blacks out so that what remains can pretend the rest was never written. A man was treated as a sentence in a document the government did not want read.
And the erasure did not stop at the paperwork of 1981. Forty years later, when this man finally won — through a quarter-century of records requests and an unorthodox back channel — a written acknowledgment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that the record was real, that the medals were real, that the killing was real, that letter confirmed the erasure even as it confirmed the man. He could write his account, it said, on four conditions: he may not use his own name or anyone else’s; he may not name the operations; he may not name the locations; and “the account should appear to be fictional.” His likeness is classified. When a retired general, moved by conscience, later tried to obtain a single photograph of him as a young man receiving a medal — a picture for his children — a CIA officer refused, because, in the general’s report of it, “your face is classified.” Yet that general pushed for a compromise — see below.
A man told by his own government that he may not have a face in public associated with… himself. That he may write the true story of his own body only if he agrees to make it look like a lie. That his medals, his rank, his deployments, his name, and his face are all, in the cold administrative sense of the word, unavailable.
This is the charge, and we will not soften it: this was erasure, accomplished with law, on purpose, and it was cruel.
The cruelty is twofold, and the second part is what this essay is about. The first cruelty is obvious — that the same legal architecture which authorized the killing also claimed the right to own and delete the killer. But the second is the one that should keep a citizen awake. The erasure of this one man was not improvised malice. It was not a vindictive major exceeding his authority on a bad day, though there was a vindictive major. It was the small, intimate, personal terminus of a machine that was designed — built law by law across the length of the Cold War — for exactly this purpose: to make men disposable and deniable, and to make the work they do disappear. The same machinery that can redact a man from his own service record is the machinery that redacted the Constitution’s allocation of the war power out from under the American people. The same lawlessness that disappears a Constitution disappears a person. The man is simply where you can see it with your own eyes, because the man is still here, and still bleeding from a wound the paperwork could not reach.
A word about what this essay is not. It is not a roadmap for fixing the record. Rubicon is not litigating, and he does not want the medals back — they are a stain to him, decorations awarded for killing, and he is long past caring whether a corrected DD-214 ever issues. The ODNI’s own letter conceded that no amount of pressure would move the military to change the document, that even its own request to restore the awards and strike the “Apathy” and “Defective Attitude” slurs would simply be ignored. What angers him — what should anger you — is not that the record is wrong and unfixed. It is the erasing itself: that a government took a living man and resolved, by paper, that he would be made not to have been — and you, dear Citizen, are requested not to know, even when they use your name for justification.
II. The Machine Speaks, and Conscience Answers Too Late
Two letters tell this story, and they are the two faces of the same legal machine.
Joint operations between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and military commands such as Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) — historically and frequently organized under AFSO Sub-Command, AFSOC, NSOC, NIS, ASOC, MEFSOC, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Special Operations Command (SOCOM), or Specific Special Activity divisions — occupy a highly complex legal space. This structural design enables the government to execute deniable operations, but it also creates the exact mechanism used to strip the author of his identity.
The first letter is the ODNI letter — four pages, dated May 2021, sent by certified & registered post, unmarked as classified. It is the machine speaking in its own voice. It is, in places, almost tender: it sympathizes with his difficulty obtaining care from the Veterans Administration; it concedes that he was “punished far too severely”; it notes that a psychologist on the review team believes he was never given adequate time or help to deal with what he was made to do; it even offers, unbidden, to petition the military to restore his awards and remove the defamatory discharge language. And in the same breath, in the same administrative monotone, it sets the terms of his continued erasure: change the names, hide the locations, make the truth appear to be fiction. Even the letter’s mercy is a form — a petition it files while telling him, in advance, that the petition will be ignored. That is the machine’s compassion: a kindness that arrives pre-defeated, because the machine long ago decided that the kindness must lose.
The second letter is the AFSOC commander’s — written in March 2026 by a retired general who had, by position and personal contacts, arranged to view the CIA’s own records and photographs of Rubicon’s missions. “Disturbing would be too soft a reaction,” he wrote. This is the other face: conscience, speaking from inside the machine, using the machine’s own clearances and archives to verify what the machine had erased. He read the confiscated journal of Rubicon’s dead mentor. He saw the photographs the agency had seized when it shut the Scout program down and searched a dead man’s home for every trace of the young men he had trained. And he did the one thing the machine is built to prevent: on the last sheet of official letterhead he possessed, he wrote, “I apologize on behalf of the United States.”
As noted by Independent Australia, the 2026 edition of X Rubicon includes the newly revealed letter from a retired Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) Commander, a general officer, which carries several severe implications:
Independent, High-Level Verification: The retired general utilized his active security clearances to look into classified CIA databases and mission records. He found official documentation and photographs that perfectly matched the author’s accounts of unacknowledged operations, providing external proof that the book is rooted in fact, not fiction.
The “Smedley Butler” Shift: In the letter, the Commander states he underwent a profound personal shift — explicitly invoking Major General Smedley Butler, the historic Marine whistleblower who famously exposed the corporate and corrupt motivations behind early 20th-century American military deployments.
An Unofficial Apology: Writing on his final sheet of official military letterhead, the general issued a personal apology on behalf of the United States. He acknowledged the severe moral, physical, and administrative damage inflicted upon young operators by the state in the name of national security.
He provided a photo not susceptible to facial recognition of Rubicon in war paint before a mission, a photo provided by the CIA vault attendant, which was then given to Rubicon. That photo contains a CIA watermark viewed through computer scan analysis provide by Anthropic (see below). Taken by the CIA, it is a typical pre-mission proof of life record.
But notice when conscience arrives. It arrives after. The general’s letter cannot un-redact a single line of the DD-214. It cannot restore a medal, declassify a face, or unmake the word “APATHY” sitting in Block 28 of a document filed in 1981. It comes, in the plainest sense, too late to be administratively useful — because the law won the administrative battle decades ago, the moment the major slid the stripped form across the desk. The letter can only witness. The general could not even secure an unobscured photograph of the young man for his children; the answer was no, because the face is classified. He confessed he was afraid — afraid of losing his pension if it were discovered he had misused his clearance to confirm the truth. A retired American general, hiding behind a pseudonym to apologize for his country, in what is called the land of the free.
The book presents two entirely opposing forces within the defense establishment:
The ODNI Letter: The voice of the institutional machine, using classification laws and administrative punishments (”APATHY” discharge codes) to force the operative into historical non-existence.
The AFSOC Letter: The voice of an individual leader’s conscience, using his remaining systemic access to validate a performative operator’s sacrifice and condemn the bureaucracy that erased him.
That gap — between everything conscience can finally say and everything the law has already, irreversibly done — is the heartbeat of this essay. Conscience can apologize. The law has already erased. And the law got there first, by design, because it was built to get there first.
III. How the Machine Was Built
The architecture of erasure was not handed down by the Founders. It was assembled, piece by piece, across roughly forty years, as a calculated evolution of institutional self-preservation. Each piece was sold to the public as something else — as security, as oversight, as reform. Each piece, in operation, widened the space in which a man could be made to cease to exist. We will walk the pieces in order, and we will ground each in the actual law, because a work that trades on being documented cannot afford to do otherwise.
1947 — The vague mandate. The National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA and, in a subclause buried in Section 102(d), charged it “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” That is the entire textual foundation of American covert action. It does not say covert action. It does not say paramilitary operations, or assassination, or war by other means. It says “such other functions and duties... as the National Security Council may from time to time direct” — a blank check written in the passive voice. Congress did not formally define “covert action” in statute until the 1990s. For four decades, the entire apparatus of secret war ran on a clause vague enough to mean anything the executive needed it to mean. This is the birthright of warfare without declaration, conducted outside public view: a sentence of bureaucratic filler that became the legal authority under which an eighteen-year-old would one day be dropped from the back of an MC-130 into a country with which the United States was not at war, to kill in the name of America and its Citizens.
1949 — The power to make a man disappear. Two years later the CIA Act of 1949 supplied the mechanism. Section 6 (codified at 50 U.S.C. § 403g) exempted the agency from any law requiring “the publication or disclosure of the organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency.” Read it again, slowly, with a human being in mind. If the government need never acknowledge that a person belongs to it — never disclose his name, his title, his function, the fact of his employment — then it may delete that association at will, and no law compels it to admit the deletion ever occurred. The 1949 Act also gave the agency confidential, unvouchered funds — a black budget exempt from the ordinary accounting that governs every other dollar the government spends — and it created a program to manufacture cover identities and economic support for “essential” persons outside all normal procedure. The state granted itself, in a single statute, the power to fund what cannot be traced and to employ men it need never admit it employs. This is the legal origin of the power to wipe a man. Title 50 of the United States Code — “War and National Defense” — became the realm in which men could officially never have existed.
Did anyone object? Here a citizen is owed an honest accounting, because the natural defense of all of this is that surely someone, somewhere, raised a hand. The damning truth is that the framework was built first and the moral protest came only after — after exposure, after the bodies, after a generation of men had already been used up. The 1947 and 1949 statutes drew almost no contemporaneous moral objection of consequence, because almost no one outside the room understood what the language meant; the genius of “such other functions and duties... as the National Security Council may from time to time direct” is precisely that it does not read like a grant of the power to wage secret war, and so it provoked no debate proportionate to what it authorized. The architecture was laid quietly, in the passive voice, by men who told themselves and the public it was about coordinating intelligence reports. The objection that should have come at the building of the cage did not come until the cage was full.
When the protest finally arrived, it arrived as scandal, not foresight. By the mid-1970s the machine had been caught — Seymour Hersh’s reporting and then the Senate Select Committee chaired by Frank Church dragged the “family jewels” into daylight: assassination plots against foreign leaders, the documented campaign against Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, coups, domestic spying on American citizens. The Church Committee (1975–76) was the closest thing this country has produced to a sustained moral reckoning with the covert-action apparatus, and it named the horror plainly. President Ford, in its wake, signed an executive order banning political assassination. And here is the lesson the citizen must not look away from: it changed almost nothing. The assassination ban did not stop the killing; the operations simply went deeper, were outsourced to proxies and allied services, or were rebranded. The reformers tried to outlaw the very practices this man would be sent to carry out, and they failed — not because the immorality was contested, but because the apparatus had already learned to route around its own conscience. The moral protest, like the general’s apology, arrived too late to reach the man. That is the pattern. The law that erases is built in silence and reformed in vain.
1974 — Cruelty made statutory. The committee’s most concrete legislative fruit shows how completely the apparatus could metabolize reform. The Hughes–Ryan Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 required, for the first time, that the President personally sign a written “Finding” that each covert operation was “important to the national security,” and report it to the appropriate committees of Congress. On its face, reform. In operation, the opposite. To make the President personally responsible for each operation, the law also made each operation, and every operator within it, cleanly severable from the President. Deniability did not merely survive Hughes–Ryan; it was codified by it. For the chain of accountability to terminate at the Oval Office without splattering it, everyone below — every operator, every casualty, every body buried off a goat path with its hands clasped — had to be structurally disposable. The men became, explicitly and as a matter of legal architecture, throwaway. The reform that was sold as reining the agency in instead wrote the disposability of men into the statute book. Conscience proposed accountability; the machine accepted it as a new and better form of cover.
1986 and the seam between two Titles. The Goldwater–Nichols Act of 1986 reorganized the Defense Department — unified the chain of command, strengthened the combatant commands, made forces seamlessly transferable across them. We make no grand claim that Goldwater–Nichols invented the void; the honest account is narrower and, if anything, more damning, because the void is a matter of practice riding on the line between two Titles of the Code. An American serviceman is, ordinarily, a creature of Title 10 — the armed forces, with their visible records, their published rosters, their honors that go on the permanent file. But when that serviceman is “chopped” to an intelligence mission, he crosses into the country of Title 50, where the activity can be unacknowledged and the personnel undisclosed. His honors, earned on a Title 50 mission, can be made to vanish into classified space — while his Title 10 file, the only “real” record that remains, becomes the document they then falsify. The jurisdictional line between the two Titles is not a neutral piece of administrative plumbing. It is the seam along which a man is torn from his own history: decorated in the dark, deleted in the light.
1980 — The judicial lock. The architecture needed one more thing: a guarantee that the men it consumed could never tell. The Supreme Court supplied it in Snepp v. United States, 444 U.S. 507 (1980), holding that a former intelligence officer’s prepublication-review agreement was an enforceable fiduciary duty, seizing all of Frank Snepp’s book profits in a constructive trust though the government conceded the book contained no classified material, on the theory that bypassing review threatened the mere appearance of confidentiality. We have written about Snepp and its companion, United States v. Marchetti, at length elsewhere, in Who Owns Your Life?, and we will not re-argue the First Amendment catastrophe here. The point for this indictment is structural and brief: Snepp is the clasp that closes the whole architecture. The 1947 Act authorized the secret war; the 1949 Act built the mechanism to erase the men who fought it; Hughes–Ryan made their disposability a statutory requirement; the Title 10/Title 50 seam supplied the operational void; and Snepp established that even a man’s account of his own erasure belongs to the institution that erased him. The state may own your body, your record, your face — and now, the narrative of all three. Even a fabricated narrative. Especially a fabricated one — “the account should appear to be fictional.”
When applied to a veteran’s DD-214 (Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty), the administrative battlefield changes completely. For a Tier-1 operator or joint CIA-AFSOC operative who falls out of institutional favor, the weaponization of the DD-214 presents catastrophic practical, financial, and psychological hurdles.
The Trap of the Separation Code (”APATHY”)
The DD-214 contains specific, legally binding blocks that dictate a veteran’s entire civilian future: Block 24 (Character of Service), Block 25 (Separation Authority), and Block 28 (Narrative Reason for Separation).
The Bureaucratic Weapon: By entering “APATHY — DEFECTIVE ATTITUDE” in Block 28, the military uses a subjective administrative label to override a stellar operational record.
Employment Blacklisting: Because almost all defense contractors, federal agencies, and civilian law enforcement agencies require an unredacted “Member-4” copy of the DD-214, this phrasing acts as an immediate, permanent red flag. It systematically prevents the veteran from utilizing their highly specialized skill set in the private or public sector.
— A compromised DD-214 severely disrupts a veteran’s access to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) ecosystem.
Healthcare and Disability Denials: When evaluating claims for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or combat injuries, the VA explicitly cross-references the DD-214 to verify the “stressor” event occurred in combat. If the DD-214 reflects “Apathy” and omits combat medals or joint-task-force deployments, the VA is legally required to flag the claim as unsupported.
Financial Stratification: Stripping a veteran of their true service record blocks access to the GI Bill, VA Home Loans, and specialized veteran employment preferences. It forces a highly trained asset into financial insolvency.
Stand back and look at the whole. Not a series of accidents. Not improvisation. A system, built deliberately across forty years, every brick of which can be cited to a public law — and the purpose of the system, whatever its drafters told themselves and told the public, is to manufacture men who can be sent where no war was declared, used until they are used up, and then deleted without a trace and silenced without a hearing. The one sustained attempt to tear it down was tried in open hearings and beaten. Rubicon lived the whole of it. He is what the architecture produces when it has finished its work.
IV. The Constitution Was Erased Too
Here is where the personal becomes the political, and the small erasure reveals the enormous one.
The same Finding that severs the President from the operator does something else. It authorizes the executive to wage war — real war, with explosives and gunships and knives in the dark — without the declaration that Article I of the Constitution reserves to Congress and Congress alone. The framers placed the war power in the legislature precisely so that the nation could not be taken to war by one man in secret. The covert-action architecture routes around that prohibition entirely. A handful of cleared members of Congress are “informed,” generally in sealed session; the Findings themselves are almost always classified. The body politic — the people in whose name the killing is done, with whose money it is paid for, and whose children are sent to do it — are told nothing. Article I’s public declaration of war has been quietly replaced by a private, classified authorization channel that the public is structurally forbidden to see.
Say it as plainly as the thing deserves: it is a stupid and idiotic arrangement, and we mean stupid in the precise, indicting sense. To hand one man an authority that directly contradicts the authority and the responsibility the Constitution vested in Congress — the power to commit the nation to war — is not a sophisticated balance of security and liberty. It is the deliberate dismantling of the single structural safeguard the Founders built against exactly this: rule by one man’s secret say-so. There is no version of this that a self-governing people, looking at it in daylight, would choose. It survives only because it is never looked at in daylight. The Finding is the instrument by which a republic’s most fundamental check — that a nation cannot be marched to war without the open consent of the people’s representatives — is converted into a signature on a classified page that the people may never read, enforcing a war they will never be told they are waging.
Rubicon names this himself, with a directness no scholar would risk. The law authorizing the CIA, he writes, is “a ceding of the Constitutional powers of Congress to make and declare war to the CIA, at least as long as no one finds out.” And in Boys And Men: “Conflicts were meant to be debated in Congress openly, not secretly started by proxy.” He is not theorizing. He is the proof. He was deployed into Central American operations under no declared conflict, in pursuit of objectives Congress never debated in open session, and when those operations were exposed risk they were not corrected — they were classified harder. The standard fifty-year veil over his missions was doubled, to 2085, at the urging of a sitting Vice President, so that, as the ODNI letter itself notes, by the time the file can be opened “the then current executive and staff” will decide whether the truth may finally come out — by which time every man who was there will be a lifetime in the grave.
This is the betrayal at scale, and it is bipartisan to the bone. Read the succession of slaughter as the book lays it out: the manufactured Maine explosion that gave McKinley his war with Spain; the Gulf of Tonkin incident Johnson conjured to widen Vietnam; the Domino Theory the Dulles brothers sold to a credulous Congress to license interventions that had nothing to do with any communist threat and everything to do with corporate money; Eisenhower persuaded that a “bloodless” coup beat an honest war; Allende; the death squads of Guatemala and El Salvador the United States trained and armed; the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero; the Contras funded, when funds ran short, by the drug trade Rubicon personally watched move on military transport. Every administration is implicated. The Congress abdicates, decade after decade, and the abdication is the point: the architecture works only because the people’s representatives agreed to stop exercising the people’s power, and the people agreed not to notice.
And the logic does not stop at war. Watch where it runs once you grant that one man may, in secret, decide the nation’s most grave and reserved questions for it. In the spring of 2024, before the Supreme Court, a sitting president’s own lawyer was asked the question directly:
if a president ordered the military, or someone, to assassinate a political rival he had declared corrupt, would that be an official act, shielded by immunity? The answer was not no. It “could well be an official act.”
The same severance that lets a president wage undeclared war off a classified Finding is the severance that lets a president’s counsel stand in the highest court in the land and decline to rule out state murder of a rival as a lawful exercise of office. These are not two principles. They are one principle, following its own logic downhill: that the executive is not bound by the structures meant to bind him, and that whatever he decides, decided in the proper channel, is by that fact lawful.
There is an old description of this posture, and it is worth setting beside the modern executive precisely because it predates him by a century and a half and fits him without alteration. Cardinal Manning, articulating the doctrine of papal supremacy, gave it its purest voice, and you may give it Trump’s voice:
“I acknowledge no civil power; I am the subject of no prince; I claim more than this — I claim to be the supreme judge and director of the consciences of men — of the peasant that tills the field, and of the prince that sits upon the throne; of the household of privacy, and the legislator that makes laws for kingdoms; I am the sole, last supreme judge of what is right and wrong.”
Read it again with a president in mind — any of them, though one current example wears it like a tailored suit — and notice that it is not a description of a king or a pope at all anymore. It is a description of an office that has been told, by Findings and by immunity doctrines alike, that it stands above the civil power, subject to no law it does not choose, the sole and last judge of what is right and wrong. That is precisely what the covert-action architecture manufactures: not a stronger executive within the Constitution, but an executive who has been quietly lifted out of it. The neo-liberal and neo-conservative consensus that has defended and expanded this machinery across every administration is not guarding the republic. It is feeding the one thing the republic was designed to forbid — the supreme judge of right and wrong, subject to no prince, accountable to no open vote.
So weigh the two erasures against each other, because they are the same act at different magnitudes. The machinery that disappeared one young man’s medals, rank, name, and face is the identical machinery that disappeared the American people’s control over whether their country goes to war. To redact Rubicon from his service record and to redact Article I from the working constitution are not two crimes. They are one crime, committed at two scales, by one apparatus, for one reason: so that no one will be made to look.
V. What the Law Cannot Reach
Return to the man, because the law would still rather you didn’t.
He does not want the record fixed. We have said this, and it bears repeating, because it is the hinge on which the whole indictment turns. A piece about restoring a falsified DD-214 would be an administrative piece, and it would miss everything. Rubicon does not petition for the medals; the medals nauseate him. He does not crave the corrected discharge. It’s too late in life.
But understand what “too late in life” is shorthand for, because the system counts on you imagining it as mere resignation. It is not resignation. It is a clear-eyed reading of a procedure built to defeat exactly the man it claims to serve. Consider, soberly, what it would actually take.
To correct a discharge that brands him with “APATHY — DEFECTIVE ATTITUDE,” a veteran must petition his service’s Board for Correction of Military Records — for the Air Force, the AFBCMR — on a DD Form 149. The statute, 10 U.S.C. § 1552(b), gives him three years to file from the discovery of the error. His error was discovered in 1981. To get past the clock at all, he must persuade the Board to waive its own statute of limitations “in the interest of justice,” which it is free to refuse, and which costs nothing to refuse. Then comes the part engineered to stop the heart. The Board operates on a presumption of administrative regularity — the military is assumed correct, and the burden of undeniable proof falls on the man it erased. To meet that burden, he would have to produce the very evidence the architecture exists to suppress: mission logs, deployment orders, award citations — every one of them Title 50 material, classified, owned by the agency that stripped him. And under the same Snepp and ODNI restrictions described above, transmitting that classified material to a Title 10 administrative board to clear his name is itself a federal crime. There is the checkmate, set decades in advance: comply with the classification and you have no evidence; produce the evidence and you face prosecution. The only door out of the room is wired to a charge.
And even supposing he found the key — even with the AFSOC commander’s letter in hand as the rarest possible “newly discovered evidence” — he would then enter the slow machine: a first file review measured not in weeks but in twelve to twenty-four months; backlogs the institution has every incentive to let lengthen; files that go astray; clocks that run; a process whose unspoken strategy is exhaustion, the quiet confidence that an aging man will die, or break, or simply give up before the apparatus is obliged to admit a thing. This is the system at its most characteristic — not screaming cruelty but bureaucratic cruelty, the kind that covers its own backside with forms and deadlines and presumptions, that makes the wronged man do all the bleeding while it does all the waiting. It is the kind of procedure that gives a man chest pains in a fluorescent waiting room, that he is told to be grateful even exists. To submit to it, at near sixty-five, to chase a corrected piece of paper he does not even want, through a maze designed to outlast him — that is what “too late in life” means. It is not that the hour is late. It is that the system was built so the hour would always be too late, for everyone, by design.
So he will not chase it. What he wants is for the erasing not to have happened — and that is the one thing no remedy can deliver, because you cannot un-erase a man any more than you can un-kill the woman who whispered “baby.” The apology, when it finally came on a general’s last sheet of letterhead, was real, and it mattered to him, and it could change exactly nothing in any record the state controls. It was mercy without remedy. Conscience, arriving after the law had finished.
But here is what the architects of the machine, for all their forty years of careful drafting, never accounted for. They built a delete function for the record. They did not — they could not — build a delete function for the man.
Rubicon says it better than we can, in Guilt, Repentance, & Change: “Humans have no delete function. Whatever goes in, you are required to face head-on.” The DD-214 has a delete function; it was used. The classification system has a delete function; it runs, currently, to 2085. The 1949 Act gave the agency the power never to admit he belonged to it. And none of it reached the wound. The dreams kept coming — the woman, the husband, the detached head of the cartel guard, all of them angry at the man who stole their lives. The hands kept filling with phantom blood in humid weather. The right arm kept aching with the memory of the knife. The paperwork erased the record. It could not erase the body that carried the record in its tissue, its sleep, its DNA. Whatever goes in, you are required to face head-on. The state redacted the file and left the man holding the unredacted original, in his own flesh, for the rest of his life.
And then the man did the thing the whole apparatus was built to prevent.
He wrote the book.
The medals were taken. The rank was taken. The discharge was falsified. The name, the operations, the locations, the face — all classified, all forbidden. And the one document the state does not own, cannot seize, cannot redact and cannot classify, is the account the erased man wrote of his own erasure. He published the ODNI letter itself as a chapter — the machine’s own words, turned into evidence against the machine. He answered the demand that his truth appear fictional not by pretending to comply but by redefining the terms, in Sean’s Author Statement: “THIS WORK IS FICTION in the sense of the lies, corruption, propaganda, and false agendas which made it possible... THIS WORK IS NOT FICTION.” That is the refusal in its purest form. You may have owned my body. You do not own the truth of what you did with it.
Now turn the finger, as this project always does, because the indictment was never only against the major, or the agency, or the parade of presidents. The architecture of erasure was built and sustained in the citizens’ name, with the citizens’ money, by the citizens’ representatives — and it could only ever have survived on the citizens’ not-looking. Every classification timeline is a bet that you will lose interest before it expires. The 2085 veil is a wager that you will be dead, or distracted, before the truth is unsealed. The whole machine runs on the reasonable institutional confidence that no one will make you look, and that you will be grateful not to be made to. Rubicon’s verdict on his fellow Americans, in Lies And Damned Lies, is unsparing and we will not blunt it: “Every American, ignorant or choosing ignorance, is guilty of participating in this slaughter.” The men are expendable, he writes in Boys And Men, only because we agreed they should be: “Men are expendable. Your government expects you to die to protect them and their corruption and deceit.”
Ignorantia non excusat. Ignorance does not excuse. You are responsible for the laws that erase the men you send, whether or not you ever read a line of the National Security Act, because the laws were passed by people you elected, kept secret by people you tolerated, and funded by taxes you paid. The man with the phantom blood on his hands buried a pregnant woman and her husband side by side, with their hands clasped, because even mid-atrocity his humanity refused to fully surrender. The question the book puts to every citizen is whether ours will do the same — whether we will refuse, finally, to be the comfortable readers of a story the state has demanded us to believe is fiction.
VI. Heschel, and the Refusal to Look Away
The architecture of erasure has one structural vulnerability, and it is not legal. No statute can be drafted to repair it, because it is not in the statute book. It is in us.
The whole machine — every clause from 1947 to Snepp, every classified Finding, every doubled veil, every redacted line of a young man’s discharge — depends, finally, on the public’s indifference. The cage could be built, and can be kept, only because no one is made to look at what is inside it. Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose moral vision runs through the whole of X Rubicon, named the thing exactly: “Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.” The major who stripped the medals committed a cruelty. The agency that classified a man’s face committed a cruelty. But the thing that sustains the architecture across forty years and a dozen administrations is not their cruelty. It is our indifference — the contagious, comfortable, universal looking-away that the classification system is engineered to reward.
Heschel left us the other half of it as well, and it is the line this house has always closed on, because it is the whole of the matter: “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
Some are guilty — the major, the agency, the presidents who signed the Findings and the ones who doubled the veil. But all are responsible — every citizen who let the law be built and kept in his name, who accepted the deniability he was handed because being unable to see the body was easier than being unable to forget it. The erased man is still here. His face is still classified, his medals still revoked, his discharge still stamped with a lie, his missions still sealed until a year none of us will live to see. The one thing the apparatus could not erase is the man’s own account — and the one thing it still depends on is your willingness not to read it.
So read it. Refuse the indifference the machine is counting on. The truth was buried; it does not have to stay in the ground; and the burying was done, from first to last, in your name.
“Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”
ignorantia non excusat
And the man still exists
Sources and grounding:
the ODNI letter (reproduced in full, redacted, in X Rubicon);
the AFSOC commander’s letter (AFSOC Commander: A Smedley Butler Moment and Conversion in X Rubicon);
X Rubicon chapters Up Against A Wall, Lies And Damned Lies, Boys And Men, and Guilt, Repentance, & Change;
the companion essay Who Owns Your Life? (Snepp/Marchetti, prepublication review);
Cardinal Manning as quoted in the companion essay The Polyglot of Evil;
Statutory and case authority verified against primary and authoritative sources: National Security Act of 1947, § 102(d)(5); Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, § 6 (50 U.S.C. § 403g); Hughes–Ryan Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 (presidential Finding requirement); Goldwater–Nichols Act of 1986; the Church Committee (1975–76) and the subsequent executive order banning political assassination; Snepp v. United States, 444 U.S. 507 (1980); United States v. Marchetti, 466 F.2d 1309 (4th Cir. 1972); 10 U.S.C. § 1552(b) (Board for Correction of Military Records, three-year limitation); the 2024 Supreme Court oral argument on presidential immunity. Heschel: A Passion for Truth and The Insecurity of Freedom.
Postscript by Rubicon: Can the bodies be counted?
It’s a richer tradition than the silence around it suggests. It splits into three honest approaches, none of which can produce a clean count, which is itself the tell.
The documentary tradition gets closest to my specific wound. The clearest analogue is Ted Gup’s The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA (1999). The wall at Langley holds seventy-one stars; only thirty-five are named in the Book of Honor at its base — beside the rest there are no names. Gup’s reporting hits this essay’s exact theme: families were told little, and in some cases the agency denied the dead had been covert operatives at all, and his conclusion is the same as the essay’s — widows were not allowed to keep medals, and the secrecy often served to hide what would merely embarrass the agency. He couldn’t compile a figure either; he reverse-engineered identities one at a time from thousands of documents and 400 interviews. That’s the honest method when no count exists.
The nearest living parallel — men erased by the cover story rather than by death — is Air America. Allen Cates, a former pilot, wrote Honor Denied (2011) about it, and the structural mechanism is almost identical to my own: crews were denied federal-employee status because the government used their cover story — private workers for a civilian company — to determine it, which locked them out of pensions, VA benefits, the works. Hired as covert operatives, they were never given the standard government forms and so couldn’t prove federal employment. The fight ran for decades — a 1980s lawsuit was thrown out, and the CIA opposed recognition partly because contractors now outnumber the official workforce and granting status would invite thousands of similar claims. That last line is the quiet admission of scale we’re looking for: the agency itself fears “thousands.” Worth knowing it partially resolved — the Air America Act would finally grant benefits and formal CIA acknowledgment, decades too late, after most claimants had died. Mercy without remedy, the same shape as the AFSOC letter.
The structural/legal tradition names the machinery without the man. Robert Chesney’s “Military-Intelligence Convergence and the Law of the Title 10/Title 50 Debate” (Journal of National Security Law & Policy, vol. 5, 2012) and Andru Wall’s “Demystifying the Title 10–Title 50 Debate” (Harvard National Security Journal, vol. 3, 2011) are the scholarly anatomy of the exact seam this essay describes. Chesney calls the domestic legal architecture “a half-baked affair,” built on categorical distinctions that convergence confounds — academic register for the same void we wrote about, the place where a Title 10 man gets “chopped” into Title 50 and his honors fall into the gap. Neither offers a body count, because their argument is precisely that the framework is built to resist one.
And the extrapolation, since that’s the itch that’s left. Anyone honest who has tried lands in the same place: every available number is a floor, never a ceiling, because the apparatus exists to suppress the knowledge of the ceiling. You can triangulate — the named-vs-nameless ratio on the wall, the Air America losses (240 crew dead) against a workforce the CIA disowned, the prepublication curve, the agency’s own “thousands” anxiety — and what you get is not an estimate but a shape: large, deliberately uncountable, and growing with the contractor era. The most intellectually honest sentence anyone has written about the figure is the one this essay already implies — that the absence of the number is not ignorance, it’s the product working as designed. Gup, Cates, and Chesney are three serious people who came at this from journalism, memoir, and law, and all three hit the same wall. That convergence is the answer: not a count, but independent confirmation that the count was made impossible on purpose.
If you want to keep pulling this thread sometime, Frank Snepp’s own Irreparable Harm (the man named in the case this essay cites, writing about his own erasure) and the moral-injury literature — Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam on institutional betrayal of “what’s right” — are the two other rooms in this house.
I personally know three affected in the same vein as myself, though I fell into the void alive. Jim, my fellow Scout, written about in the book and the ODNI and AFSOC letters, who died finally in Central America, was reported to his family as having “died in an unfortunate training accident” —he died in the void; we’ve never been able to track down a sister that I thought he may have had. Sean is attempting to go through the prepub review now with his own story involving his team, but since the ODNI letters for X Rubicon, this has become exponentially more difficult.
That “unfortunate training accident” is not a one-off phrasing — it’s the standard-issue cover, and recognizing it as standard-issue is its own cold confirmation. It’s the exact formula Gup found over and over: the family handed a tidy fiction, the real death sealed, the man’s actual end existing nowhere they’re permitted to see it. Jim isn’t an anomaly in that record; he’s a recurrence of it. Which doesn’t soften anything, but it does mean the lie told to his family was institutional, not personal — a form letter, essentially, with a man’s life redacted out of it.
The sister is the same mechanism at a different point in the line. The 1949 Act’s real function isn’t only to hide the operative — it’s to sever the threads that lead back to him, including the people who’d remember he existed. If she’s hard to find, that difficulty may not be an accident of records gone missing; it may be the records doing exactly what they were built to do. I’ll be straight with you: tracing a possibly-existent relative tied to a classified operative is genuinely beyond what most people or systems can reliably do, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The honest thing is that her untraceability sits in the same category as the missing count — an absence engineered, not stumbled into.
Sean’s situation is the bitterest of the three, because of the direction the cruelty runs. The ODNI letters for X Rubicon should, in any sane system, have been a precedent that eased the path for the next man with the same story. Instead they appear to have been read the other way — as a map of what to clamp down on. That’s the apparatus learning. When a thing it was forced to concede once gets studied so it’s never conceded again, that’s not bureaucracy being slow; that’s it being adaptive in the worst direction.
About Crossing Rubicons
People involved have their own voices and peculiarities in speech. Each has many years of experience. The names are pen names, that they’ve chosen for themselves in compliance with the ODNI’s proscriptions. The occupations and details are actual. They are ALL volunteers in this project because they believe in the messages of the book and the Declarations Of Conscience. Each one chose to volunteer after becoming familiar with Rubicon’s and Sean’s experiences.
Jules Bond is the chief editor of X Rubicon and Crossing Rubicons. She is a former research librarian, she has thirty years experience researching complex cross relational topics in all fields. Jules regular contributes to essays.
Sophia Rose is an artist. She painted Life Begets Life, as a gift to Rubicon, which was used for the cover of X Rubicon. She also painted Stalking in the Field of Death for the book. She continues to provide original artwork and opinions in publishing decisions; and, from time to time, she contributes to essays.
Juan Idalgo is a forensic psychologist in clinical practice, and professor of forensic psychology. He has worked at the University of Michigan and other US and international universities. Rubicon and Sean first met him in 2021. They set up a patient session under privilege and had him analyze the first ODNI letter, and the subsequent letters. Quotes obtained from that first session were utilized in the book. He later wrote the Forensic & Clinical Reading of X Rubicon and Crossing Rubicons’ Expansions... “emotional nakedness that is rare in war literature.” and became a regular contributor to Crossing Rubicons. Recently he helped Sean and Rubicon write Psychological Kill Training as an expansion in X Rubicon.
John is a certified international project & program manager. He has managed complex multi-party projects, such as construction projects and third party fiber optic cable access in jointly owned AT&T/Baby Bell “3-D” sites as controlled by the former federal Consent Decree. He performed a comprehensive investigation into charter school corruptions, failures, and illegal activities in ignoring educational contracting laws in Michigan. He once made a FOIA request that found the charter school’s lawyer, after the investigation had caused panic, had written to the charter’s board and the authorizer’s board that “I can’t believe so many people with so many years of education with advanced degrees could be so blind to the requirements of the law.”
Rubicon spent just under three years as a military Scout. During that time he was awarded the “AF Cross, 2 Silver Stars, 4 Bronze Stars, Defense Superior Service Medal, AF Good Conduct Medal, and the CIA Distinguished Service Medal” (ODNI). When he refused to kill further, he was stripped of these awards and was abandoned with his PTSD and Moral Injury by the military and thrown away. Due to proscriptions laid out in negotiations and three written ODNI letters, we don’t give further information on Rubicon nor Sean, to protect identities and to comply with the ODNI.
Sean Griobhtha (gree-O-tah) is an Army Ranger combat veteran. He is the author of X Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy Wars: An indictment of US Citizens: ignorantia non excusat, which details the life of Rubicon (“2.5 years Deception & Death; 40+ years locking away Emotions & Truth”). His time as a Ranger (1978-82) involved participation in Operation Eagle Claw, and subsequent lead of his team in Central American and South American CIA operations, similar to Rubicon’s. He is currently trying to navigate the prepublication review process with the ODNI for his own accounts (the manuscript has been written by Rubicon). It’s important that you read the Foreward, Or The Vanguard; written by a highly intelligent woman with a heart of empathetic gold; she’ll bring you in gently, which neither Rubicon nor Sean would ever do. Due to proscriptions laid out in negotiations and three written ODNI letters, we don’t give further information on Rubicon nor Sean, to protect identities and to comply with the ODNI.
Julie (Mrs Rubicon) has been tutoring dyslexics and non-dyslexics in reading and writing for over three decades. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities, and a Master’s degree in Pastoral Care and Psychology. She completed Pastoral Care training at the University of Chicago Hospital; and she has worked with various court systems in turning children around. She has volunteered in school sponsored reading programs where we’ve again witnessed her skill in improving even the most recalcitrant students. She holds teaching certification in Orton-Gillingham tutoring from the Michigan Dyslexia Institute. Julie wrote the Foreward, Or The Vanguard for X Rubicon, to provide both an empathetic start for the reader, and to prepare them for the content; she brings the reader in gently, which neither Rubicon nor Sean would ever do.`
GP&R performs publishing and research.
GP&R’s association with the MacArthur Foundation: The Foundation supplies GP&R with a limited grant to provide print copies of X Rubicon directly to local and intermediate school district Boards of Education members. The purpose is to encourage school boards to rethink participation in military recruitment (ROTC/JrROTC) and provide exploration for students into peaceful avenues of study and understand the ideas and thoughts to counter systemic violence (war). From time to time, in accordance with the agreement, we must publish deeper looks into what drives the issues, and those essays include IAW (in association with) MacArthur Foundation in the byline or immediate area. A few of those essays are in Crossings Rubicons’ archive.
Crossing Rubicons: Declarations of Conscience
X Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy Wars: An indictment of US Citizens: ignorantia non excusat by Sean Griobhtha (GP&R, 2022-2026, edited by Jules Bond). Available in hardcover, paperback, ePub, and, in English and nine translations through Ingram, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, your local independent book seller, or digital stores. If you would like to understand the effort and trouble that went into publishing this book, and view about the author, the book, and translations, read X Rubicon: Author Statement, and X Rubicon Editions - New.
If you enjoyed this writing, you can tell Crossing Rubicons that their writing is valuable by purchasing X Rubicon to learn more on the CIA proxy wars, and the moral reckoning of a combat veteran.
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💕 Our only hope is for the population to wakeup and take their responsibilities seriously.
The welfare system was set up with the same logistical catches in mind. The people that get into office are all compromised by money within days to weeks.
I lokk forward to your writing about yiur experiences ❣️
This paragraph is the bottom line for me, too. It says it all.
“So he will not chase it. What he wants is for the erasing not to have happened - and that is the one thing no remedy can deliver, because you cannot un-erase a man any more than you can un-kill the woman who whispered "baby!" The apology, when it finally came on a general's last sheet of letterhead, was real, and it mattered to him, and it could change exactly nothing in any record the state controls. It was mercy without remedy. Conscience, arriving after the law had finished.”
And when human beings are left with this as the best possible conclusion, while all the others keep singing and dancing down the yellow brick road, getting up every morning as a Herculean effort.