Any government or office within the government (intelligence and other appropriately sensitive agencies aside) who are proud of their work should be encouraged and willing to discuss openly with the people who give them the authority and resources to do their jobs.
This whole issue of lack of transparency is becoming a larger and larger problem with the government and again…. if we are not careful will result into a slide into fascism. Transparency of government is one of the bedrocks of a democracy, hell, even a republic. The current Whitehouse administration has dramatically accelerated this move towards fascism and again, I have to quote Milton Mayer’s book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1939-1945 where an anonymous professor said “What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.”
I was talking to Heather just yesterday about some of the stories from Cobra II, that reading it you really get a sense that the people running this country(Democrats and Republicans) have completely lost sight of(or less generously, have purposely abandoned) the principles of a free, democratic society. As early as 2001, these people had come to an understanding that we would attack Iraq, regardless of the fact that our own intelligence agencies considered it – WMDs or not – to be a low-priority threat; so low-priority that we only had four “humint” sources within the country. And then for over a year this ad-hoc cabal carried out a completely shameless effort to plan the invasion, divert money from other sources into the covert war effort, carry out low-level attacks(‘below the CNN radar’) against Iraq to “soften it up”, etc.
And the whole time this secret operation was ongoing, the same people maintained a wholly separate public track where they slowly set the stage and readied the public for war. So at any given time in 2002 these people are knee-deep in planning the invasion and securing alliances, but then are going on Sunday talk shows and trying to act as an honest participant in a debate about how to deal with Iraq. It’s the way you’d govern children, not the citizens of a democracy. And as the author from /. says, it’s part of a continued slide towards fascism.
I’ll call it “bumper sticker fascism,” since politicians seem to have realized that it’s much easier to not bother asking the populace to personally sacrifice anything towards the effort(much easier to use richly-rewarded mercenaries instead). As long as the people don’t stand in the way as the leaders plan the wars of national greatness, create secret courts and prisons, ‘disappear’ people, conduct illegal domestic wiretapping, trump up ‘terror victories’ against poorly organized radical elements, move ever-closer to full-fledged corporatism, replace rational dialog with nationalist platitudes, and so on
You can’t put rational dialog on a ribbon and glue it to your SUV though, so who gives a fuck?
Update:Atrios dug up a great example of how our fine news media did its part. “Suck on this”:
Update #2: I somehow missed Andrew Sullivan, again raising the specter of fascism in regards to the current administration, in a post titled The Weimar President:
His speech yesterday actually managed to shock. You might think that, in wartime, a president would acknowledge what no one denies is a terribly grim decision in front of us… But no. There is no gray here….
To place all the troops into the position of favoring one strategy ahead of us rather than another, and to accuse political opponents of trying to “pull the rug out from under them,” is a, yes, fascistic tactic designed to corral political debate into only one possible patriotic course. It’s beneath a president to adopt this role, beneath him to coopt the armed services for partisan purposes. It should be possible for a president to make an impassioned case for continuing his own policy in Iraq, without accusing his critics of wanting to attack and betray the troops. But that would require class and confidence. The president has neither.
This from a conservative who was assailing liberals as a possible “fifth column” after 9/11.
