Epicureanism stands for openness. You cannot have a thriving democracy when every stupid little government and military decision is treated as top secret. Millions of documents are classified as secret every year. Why is this? The suspicion is that incompetence, and even corruption, is being hidden up under the mantra of “national security”. Military and government officials hide their mistakes all too easily. No one is accountable, no one loses their job. The hideous massacre of women and children by drones, commanded by a bloodless and indifferent American soldier, as exposed by Snowden, is an egregious example. The women and children had done nothing wrong; their killing was deemed top secret to protect CIA genius who authorised the slaughter. And they call this being “great”?
Manning knew the rules and has to take his punishment, over the top though it – predictably -is. Thankfully, the ridiculous charge of treason was rejected. He and Snowden will have done us all a favour if the number of people in the “classified” system is reduced from 3 million (!) to a maximum of 20,000; if the court that supervises classification is composed of intelligent civilians, not military and CIA ciphers, and if the number of documents classified as “secret” is severely reduced. We want to be protected, but first we must be protected from the very people we are paying to protect us.
Thank you for this superb post, one that I hoped you would write. Your prescriptions meet the case. The core reality, the most crucial statement you make, I think, is this: “No one is accountable.”
What has happened to the men and women who do have the POWER to enforce accountability? the men and women in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches? Who can call them to account?
Over the last few decades, dozens of persons have tried to make policy-makers take responsibility. Invariably the finger-wagging begins with: “Go through channels.” Also almost invariably the men and women of “the channels” hound the dissenters. No need to go over those increasingly familiar stories.
Finally, I’m hoping that the “hero or villain,” “patriot or traitor” dualities will soon give way to more fruitful framing. That’s another story.
The Second World War was fought against a worldwide menace, or, more correctly, two (Germany and Japan for those who learned no history at school). We had six years of life and death struggle, with a military industrial complex a fraction of its present size. Now we must struggle against a raggle-taggle bunch of religious fanatics, living in mud huts, with outdated firearms and some crude explosives. To do so we apparently need 3 million men and women, in deadly secrecy, to overcome them. And yet, guess what? We never seem to win!
The is a “war ” of ideas, and this tiny group of Islamic nutters is successful because of an endless series of crass foreign policy mistakes. The real agenda is not about al queda at all. It is about putting profit for the “security” industry and the armed forces, not to mention career advancement, ahead of nnational interest. It is undermining our democracy, our Constitution and the economy of the nation. The people who should have been in the dock, charged and imprisoned were unaccountable, anonymous, grey little men, never seen by the public – and they never will be.