It’s funny, if I start with the premise that Bush and his cronies are not idiots, I’m forced to suffer mental contortions, bruxism, and skull-pounding as I try to understand what motivates them. But if I assume they are idiots, everything effortlessly falls into place.
My mother was always careful to specify, while chastising me: “I’m not saying you’re stupid. I’m saying you’re acting stupid.” It’s remarkable how the older I get, the less relevance I find in that distinction.
Here is my best ‘not stupid’ conspiracy theory.
Basically, Bush has made a career out of bankrupting corporations to provide tax shelters for his rich friends. Everyone likes to say this is because he is a poor executive. That is because they are assuming that when you run a company you want it to be successful, that the shareholders want it to be successful. This is certainly not the case. It helps when you can sell a stake to Saudi princes for a high premium because of who your Daddy is. It’s how they launder their money essentially. George Soros has used Bush for this purpose in the past as well. I’ve heard a rumor that there is a whole class at Yale about how to get the government to bailout your failing company. Remember that people paid for audiences with Bush and Baker and people of that ilk. They get paid high premiums from companies like the Carlyle Group to go into a room chat with Saudi Princes and then leave so that the company men can come in and do business with the Princes’ company men. It’s a tale as old as Aristocracy.
Of course, people in America don’t like to believe in fairy tales such as Aristocracy, so that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it.
So yes, Bush is an idiot.
But you and I can’t make these decisions. We elect people to know much more than we can and act in the nation’s interest accordingly. We have to trust that the people we elect will make the right call. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. And the right call may have little to do with what either of us think is the right call. So, I see no way around a policy that embraces—however reluctantly—that national security is in the hands of precious few, and that sometimes secrecy will be in our best interest. And the only people who can decide when that is the case are the very few people we’ve elected to do so.
Is that in the constitution or something? I don’t recall reading anything about us having to trust the bastards just because they manage to get elected.
Maybe you can’t, but nobody deserves a blank check. Government secrecy is antithetical to accountability, and accountability is central to a democracy. Like I was saying, governments can ask for all the secrecy they want, but that doesn’t mean they need it - and without leaks, there is no way to know how it is being used. They shouldn’t be granted it unquestioningly. The more secrecy a government has, the more it’s likely to abuse it.
A few pages ago, Sunrazor said it’s okay for CIA professionals to leak a plan they think is wrong, but it’s not so good for a “some junior-league analyst with an axe to grind.” It’s important to assess sources for biases, but I don’t agree - if Mark Felt wasn’t ticked off about being passed over for a CIA leadership post, he wouldn’t have worked with Woodward and Bernstein.
You have to trust them if you want them to be able to do their jobs. Fact is, whoever is elected is in a position of immense power and is privvy to information that the rest of us can only guess at. Whoever is elected enjoys the power and trust that comes with the office. They are who decides what the military response will be if we are attacked or provoked. That is true whether you like the President or not. I do not like Bush. I never voted for Bush and was beside myself when he merely got the nomination, but he is The Decider. If he or any other President is considering action that would be more effective if kept secret and they deem it so, I have no option but to hope for the best.
But what do you do in the case of the hypothetical when clandestine operations are planned and secrecy is instrumental to those operations being successful? There is no opportunity to hold anyone accountable until after the operation, becuase assessing the operation prior would do away with the secrecy aspect. Right now, if we were attacked by Country X, the person who would have the final say in our response would be the President. Some of those response options may, in truth, depend on secrecy. We cannot allow someone to undermine the President’s—read, the Country’s—efforts because they don’t agree with them. If they feel that strongly about it, that the proposed actions would be so detrimental to the country, let them leak the info and feel the full brunt of the laws. If their acting so magnaminously, they should consider it a small price to pay.
You keep trying to compare the current situation to times of war. There’s a difference.
I appreciate your taking the trouble to double-check your cite. Seriously.
Yeah, we’ve all heard this song and dance before. It’s true. Of course, we also know that system gets abused – and that abuse is enabled by the fact that it’s done in secret – and I don’t think we’re obliged to sit there and take it. All the best information somehow lead us to this screwup in Iraq, for example.
They benefit from that trust, but that trust is not unlimited. Not in a democratic society.
I’m glad that not everybody just hopes for the best.
Yes, there are no guarantees that wisest course of action will be taken, or if it is, if it will be handled well. But how do you decide what secret plans are leaked, thereby frustrating them? How is such a dtermination made? And by whom? I’m sure we all think we’d make the right decision, but only one of us can be President and put plans into action. Do you make room for decisions being made on your behalf—that you would judge SHOULD be kept secret—even if you don’t agree with them? If you do, we’re back to the first question in this paragraph: how does one decide which plans should be leaked, thereby frustrating them? And who should make such a deterimination?
I’m not so sure. In matters of national security, lives will be at stake, eityher directly or indirectly. If you grant that battle plans might qualify for secrecy being sacrosanct, why wouldn’t actions, some black ops move oputside of war, niot qualify, as well? If prior to goiong into Iraq there was a clandestine plan that required secrecy, but if successful would have meant we didn’t go into Iraq, would you have been in favor of doing everything we could to keep the plans secret. And if the info was leaked, that the leaker feel the full brunt of the law. For this hypothetical, let’s assume that you thought it a good plan and one with a high probability of suceeding.
I felt it incumbent upon me. I too quickly offered up an example, more concerned with the point I was trying to make than the specifics. When I was called on it I saw Norway and—DOH! Truth be told, I was as interesterd in figuring out how the two thoughts were so tightly associated in my brain as I was with offering clarification for the debate.
And prior to that, thanks for taking the high road and gertly suggesting that one of us had his facts straight and not immediately going into attack mode.
I see I’ve taught you well. 
You sound like you’re looking for some cut-and-dried rubric, but I don’t think any exists. Those decisions are made in the press the same way they’re made in the government: people take the information they have and do what they think is best.
The bottom line, to me, is that our society works better when the government does what it thinks is best and the press does what it thinks is best, even (especially?) when those views conflict. That’s far better than when the government does what it thinks is best and the press does what the government thinks is best.
It could not have been a covert operation if the mainstream press got the story. The press does no investigative journalism ,so it was handed to them.
There’s logic if ever I heard it. :rolleyes:
Actually, if you assume, for the sake of hypothesis, that Bush et al. are deliberately trying to break the government, to weaken the military, to bankrupt the state, and to poison public confidence in mechanisms of governance, because it is in the interest of the multinational conglomerates to whom they are inarguably loyal above all else that there should be no superpower to interfere with their activities, a very different but no less elegant consistency in their behavior emerges. I am not an adherent of this belief, because I do not trust interpretations of history that rely on unseen but well-organized conspiratorial machinations, but it offers the same kind of explanatory clarity as does the assumption that they’re a bunch of swaggering ignoramuses.
Assuming this was directed at gonzomax’s (as usual) informative and substantial post, all I can say is…
-XT
I see the sense in what you’re saying, but I just don’t see how we cannot have a clear rule in place. I think you’d agree that the less leaking the better. Am I right? If so, we should take the leaking of classified information seriously and hold people accountable in a very sobering manner. One through which leaking is very discouraged and has a high cost associated with it in order to discourage it.
Maybe it’s better if I just ask: should leaking be discouraged? What should happen to those who leak classified national security information? How about battle plans? Do you treat them differetnly? If so, why?
No. I will agree that the less necessity for leaking the better. However, officials have a strong tendency to hide their mistakes so as to avoid embarassment. And the present administration has a liking for secrecy in all things such as we have seldom seen before.
Well, there is classified information that should be so and that which shouldn’t. Having worked in the Department of the Navy for nearly forth years I am firmly convinced that overclassification is the rule.
Espionage and intelligence organizations are paranoid by design because they have to be. It seems so obvious to me that the Iranian president operates on the assumption that we are always working to weaken his hold on the nation that I don’t see how the general statement that we are doing so harms us.
In addition, all covert organizations know how covert operations are conducted and so can make a pretty good guess as to how the other side is going about their business.
Yes, the details of exactly how our CIA is conducting this particular operation should be witheld, but it seems to me that its existence would be an open secret to Iran anyway.
So under this theory (somewhat similar to the one Cervaise described but does not subscribe to), the United States is Bush’s Springtime for Hitler.
Sadly, it does not appear to have become an accidental success with hilarious unforeseen consequences, resulting in its creators going to prison.
So far. There’s still time for Bush and Cheney to put on Nazi costumes and do some soft-shoe.