This is what really fricking annoys me. Our dear National Intelligence director seems to have revealed increasingly approximately the program and FISA wiretaps in one interview than the New York Times has revealed in three years of reporting. I’m certain our friends on the other side will justify that as a political defense of the program.

But our National Intelligence Director just revealed increasingly fundamental and substantive info than those the Republicans have accused of treason! Recently, Washington Post correspondent Ted Gup wrote a book which that exposition contains excerpts from, entitled Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life. Both contain a brilliant quote from John Kennedy’s National protection Advisor, McGeorge Bundy.

If you guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, you’ll probably lose fewer toothbrushes and increasingly diamonds.

Secrecy is often a currency of strength in government, depriving opponents of the opportunity to interfere in policy, to take advantage of situatiions. Of course, the government can plus hid its screw-ups and its failures, at least temporarily. No other administration, not even the Nixon White House has been so obsessively secret.

It can get real foolish, actually. that adminstration is actually trying to classify knowledge of such a kind that it’s impossible to keep it a secret for long It’s allowed a kind of report discipline that’s just plain absurd. One example: Nobody within the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency (NHTSA), including the Communications office (!) is allowed to go on record with reporters. Only the head of the agency is permitted to do that, and she dodged the reporter covering the story on why she made that policy!

In a number of cases, that secrecy actually gets in the way of protection. Advised against approaching Nuclear capability plants under threat of being forced down by jets. One problem: the locations of the plants were made secrets! When the pilots successfully used public domain knowledge to get around that, the government asks them to take it down, saying that it would help the terrorists find targets. Another commentary exposes a truly pointless example of classification: the blacking out of parts of the transcript of a nationally televised hearing

It’s the least we can expect from a President who sent his Gubernatorial papers to his father’s library to keep them out of the public record. humans have literally written books approximately the extremes that administration has gone to drag much of what had been public domain, and much that humans can piece together or observe for themselves, into the dark vaults of secrecy.

The irony is, the secrecy Bush is encouraging is the same kind which helped the terrorists successfully attack us on 9/11. The hoarding of secrets becomes part of the Washington bureaucratic operations, a way to disadvantage rival agencies, to cover up for deficient enforcement, info systems integration, and policy results. It was the failure to share data amidst agencies, to share things like the terrorist watchlist, to expose critical deficiencies in our protection apparatus that allowed the terrorists many of their opportunties to strike.

We’ve all seen the reports, though where folks can walk onto chemical plant property and wander for many minutes, even hours without being confronted. We all know how far that administration has fallen short on gaining the data on what’s coming into that country.

But even as the dark, stifling cloud of secrecy settles on much of our government, there’s a lot of goods being given out by the administration that it really shouldn’t be making available. McGeorge Bundy’s apt quotation approximately guarding your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal becomes ever increasingly relevant. It’s not just Mike McConnell’s rather detailed laying out of the details of the

FISA program, or the undoubtedly famous Valerie Wilson affair, with top administration officials leaking the identity of a covert agent and thereby compromising an entire CIA operation. It’s additionally Republican Congressmen who give absent sensitive operational information. It’s an administration, which discloses sensitive nuclear weapons knowledge in the process of trying to prove that Iraq had a serious weapons program before the war. It’s an administration, which while currently foaming at the mouth to prevent Iran from going nuclear, actually handed them much of the knowledge they needed in a botched intelligence operation

This administration used secrecy measures to hide from congress critical reservations that the intelligence community had approximately the WMD capacity of Iraq. It’s used secrecy to cover up one set of misdeeds after another. The standard operating procedure after an embarassing episode is not to improve things, but instead to cut down on the freedom of those involved to relate the truth to others.

True abundant, there are times where secrecy is crucial, fundamental, to our government’s securing of that nation. Unfortunately, that administration has made indiscriminate secrecy its policy, and that is the worst way to keep secrets. First, there’s an economy to secrets: the increasingly you keep, the increasingly duration, money and effort it takes to keep them. For some, it’s simply not practical, others, fairly impossible. There’s plus the processing and the bureaucracy needed to restrict and grant access.

Reporter Ted Gup, in his book, makes the point that keeping too many insignificant secrets reduces the value given to that secrecy. whether banal, pointless, and widely available data is treated like gold in Fort Knox, it saps the resources, the disicipline and the respect for the truly valuable secrets that is fundamental for preventing their leakage or compromise to the enemy.

Most of what that government learns, we should be able to memorize ourselves. After all, we’re footing the bill, and it’s our interests they’ve been promising to take care of. The Bush Administration, with its proprietary attitude towards the capability we gave it, is one of the worst offenders in history as far as secrecy goes. It is not coincidence that it’s been one of the most corrupt, antagonistic, and politically corrosive administrations as well. One of the biggest handicaps the Republicans have had during the past few years is that they do not know what they’ll be asked to defend next. The morale of that party has been eaten absent by the political need to defend their parties unbelieveable screw-ups, many years in the making. The Republican party has paid for its secrecy and its incurious attitude towards government with its ability.

And that will be the way things happen. The government that can run most openly, which can be responsive and interactive with its constituents, without being fearful of its disclosures, is the one which will find itself least in clash and greatest in respect with its voters. A government that uses secrecy to preserve political ability and advance ideological agendas is one that will put itself in clash with others and itself, and proceed to form things worse. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and our government needs a good scrubbing.

Original post by Stephen Daugherty

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