Secrecy: Authoritarianism's Dead Giveaway

This is so fucking cute. Bevin snatches a quarter-million dollars from Medicaid patients losing their health coverage in a secret repug Senate bill to pay for a secret hotline run by political hacks to keep state government corruption - wait for it - secret.

Your ass is showing, motherfucker.

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration is spending nearly $250,000 this year for a new hotline and website that state employees and Kentucky residents can use to report wrongdoing in government.

Attorney General Andy Beshear said he has “serious concerns” about the new hotline, calling it redundant and lacking independent, trained investigators.

“I, like all Kentuckians, want to ensure that reports of unethical or illegal actions are reported to and investigated by a trained, independent and nonpartisan government agency,” Beshear said in an email.

Beshear, a Democrat, noted that state employees may anonymously report any questionable activity to his office through its Department of Criminal Investigation at 866-524-3672. That number is answered by sworn law enforcement officers, who are career merit employees, not at-will employees, he said.

Under Bevin’s hotline, reports “will not go to an independent law enforcement agency, but to his political employees who will then decide which allegations are investigated and which are not,” said the state’s chief law-enforcement official.

“That is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” Beshear said.

Report on Ky Lege So Bad It's Kept Secret

Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, reports like this recommend the firing of a couple of low-level scapegoats. At worst, it might wrist-slap legislative leaders for letting things get out of control.

But what in this report could be so terrible that the lege has buried it where no one will ever find it?

John Cheves at the Herald

In October 2013, the Kentucky legislature faced a growing scandal: a lawmaker who resigned over accusations that he sexually harassed women at the Legislative Research Commission; allegations that sexual misconduct and favoritism made the LRC a hostile workplace; and the abrupt departure of longtime LRC director Bobby Sherman, whom police investigated for shredding documents at the Capitol days after he quit.

Hoping to restore public confidence, Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker Greg Stumbo gave a $42,410 contract to an outside group — the National Conference of State Legislatures — to perform a top-to-bottom performance audit of the $19-million-a-year LRC, the bureaucracy that runs the legislative branch of state government. The leaders pledged to publicly air and fix any problems identified.

"There's a lot of interest in what has occurred," Stivers, R-Manchester, said at the time.

That was the last the public ever learned about it.

The National Conference of State Legislatures, or NCSL, flew a team to Frankfort to interview scores of legislative staffers and lawmakers, and pore over data and documents. The group submitted a draft report of its findings in April to Stivers and Stumbo, co-chairmen of the LRC. But the leaders never responded.

As of last week, the LRC considered the report a "preliminary draft" and so refused to release it to the Herald-Leader under the Kentucky Open Records Act.

Call girls in the hearing rooms?  Meth cooking in the leadership offices?  Butt sechs in the stairwells?

Nah, probably just the usual boring Big Coal buying up everybody's ass and nobody giving a shit about some dusky-skinned secretaries whining about a little harmless attempted rape.

QOTD: Charlie Pierce

On the justifications for President Obama's toothless and insulting NSA "reforms":

Wait a minute. "Advocates of civil liberties" -- which, damn it, ought to be all of us, including the president -- have to be "placated" but not at the expense of risking a "backlash" against the president from "national security agencies" which, ostensibly, work for him on our dime. The whole debate is backwards.

AynRandy Attacks Surveillance Abomination with Popgun

If only there were some group of people, maybe chosen by their fellow citizens, who had the authority to vote on proposals that would have the force of law ....

But teabagger morons like the Tribble-Toupeed One think the U.S. Senate is for grandstanding, not lawmaking.

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul said Friday night he is planning to file a class-action lawsuit against the Obama administration over the National Security Agency’s (NSA) collection of data through domestic surveillance programs.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared Smirky/Darth's "terrorist" roundup and detention program unconstitutional, and not only did Shrub ignore the ruling, Obama still ignores it to this day.

You want the NSA stopped, Senator Paul? Then propose legislation to that effect and persuade your fellow members of Congress to pass it with veto-proof majorities.  That's what the taxpayers are paying you to do.

But that won't rev up the mouth-breathers in Iowa like yelling "I sued their asses!"

New "National Security" Tools to Shut Down Dissent

Of course it's always been done, which is exactly why the Constitution specifically declares protections against it.


Digby:

The point is that governments, to a greater or lesser extent, always try to shut down dissent, whether it's through social pressure, legal means or something else. Even the good ones do it. Allowing them to have even more tools and even more power to do this is a recipe for abuse. You can already see it happening with the ridiculously long sentences for hacking. It is highly likely that at some point a US government is going to believe its justified in using the massive spying capacity it's building to quell what it quite logically believes is a threat. It's so fully baked into the cake of human nature and government power that our founders wrote a whole list of individual rights out on paper telling them they weren't allowed to do it.

We Are Not Children To Be Shielded From the Truth

I have nothing to add to the mountain of anniversary remembrances and analyses, except that you must read this.

More American Progress Only A Despised Dissident Can Accomplish

The question isn't patriot or traitor.  The question is progress or regress.  And as President Obama has made crystal clear, on both Bradley Manning's and Edward Snowden's whistle-blowing revelations, the answer is, resoundingly: progress.

Digby:

The president held a press conference (Friday) and spoke of many things.  But he opened his remarks with an announcement of coming investigations and a release of information about the NSA's secret spying apparatus. And while the President insisted that he had already been reforming the NSA so Snowden's revelations are irrelevant in the long run, the mainstream press, at least, doesn't seem convinced of that anymore.

SNIP

It's nonsense and everyone knows it. This great debate, which today resulted in a very public set of executive branch reforms and investigations would not have happened were it not for Edward Snowden. You do not have to call him a patriot --- perhaps you think these programs are great and you hope the government keeps up the good work. But he is most definitely a whistleblower in the most classic sense of the word.

And that whistleblower was undoubtedly very well aware of the fact that the Obama administration has been uniquely hostile the very idea of a free press informing the American public of what the government is doing in its name:



SNIP

There is no evidence that President Obama was seriously engaged in systematic reforms of the NSA surveillance programs prior to now. He could have put a stop to much of it long before Edward Snowden came on the scene. And he sure as hell could have called a truce in the war on whistleblowers and the press. Instead, the DOJ has been pressing forward with everything it has against reporters like the NY Times' James Risen who has been harassed by the federal government since 2005.

The administration's actions speak louder than words, especially these words:

[T]here's no doubt that Mr. Snowden's leaks triggered a much more rapid and passionate response than would have been the case if I had simply appointed this review board to go through -- and I'd sat down with Congress and we had worked this thing through -- it would have been less exciting and it would not have generated as much press -- I actually think we would have gotten to the same place, and we would have done so without putting at risk our national security and some very vital ways that we are able to get intelligence that we need to secure the country.

Basically:

It's time for that trope to be retired. It's frankly reminiscent of the paternalistic bullhorn nonsense we had to put up with in the Bush administration. This is a democracy. We don't outsource our constitutional responsibilities.

This administration, like all the administrations before it since WWII, has fiercely guarded the prerogatives of the secret surveillance state and the Military Industrial Complex.  It is the source of real presidential power and they are loathe to give up any of it until they are forced to do so by the people. This has been obvious for many decades and President Obama is no exception.

Making Hay While the Needles Disappear

Steve M is on a roll lately. Regarding the uselessness of the highly anti-democratic NSA spying, he writes:

If the phone surveillance is pretty much useless, I'm not surprised -- it seems to me that the theory behind the program, and behind a lot of what we now know the NSA is doing, is that the best way to find a needle in a haystack is to pile as much hay on the stack as humanly possible. The vast majority of the money, effort, human labor, and computing power is dedicated to amassing more and more hay. The priority is hay collection and management, not needle identification.

We understandably see these programs as ripe for abuse. And yes, I think I think a Nixonian administration could easily use this data-collecting power to spy on enemies. Spying on political activists who are operating completely within the law is also made easier.

Obviously we should know whether any of that has gone on under Bush or Obama. But I think what's more likely, under both presidents, is that a worship of the method led everyone involved to think it must be worthwhile because it's so damn big and expensive and all-encompassing.

SNIP

It seems like a good idea because it's awesome. Not because it works. And so the hay continued to be collected and piled and sorted, at great expense, because the hay-management technology is so damn cool.

It's the same boys-and-their-toys attitude that leads to every ridiculous overbuilt boondoggle in the history of technology.  But in this case, there's far more at stake.

Ten Ways Bradley Manning Changed the World

The verdict of history is usually derogatory.  From the distance of decades, deeds and people that seemed honorable or even heroic at the time are usually revealed to have been corrupt, craven and contemptible.

Far more rare is the reverse case: people condemned and vilified in their day revealed by history as heroic.

My only hope for long life is to see Ronald Reagan acknowledged as the former and Bradley Manning as the latter.

Juan Cole at Nation of Change:

Bradley Manning will be sentenced today, having been found guilty of 20 counts on Tuesday, including espionage (despite the lack of evidence for intent to spy and the lack of evidence that his leaking ever did any real harm). Whatever one thinks of Manning’s actions, that we deserved to know some of what he revealed and that his revelations changed the world are undeniable.

1. Manning revealed the Collateral Murder video of a helicopter attack in Iraq on mostly unarmed non-combatants (though some of those struck may have been armed), including two Reuters journalists, whose cameras were taken for weapons, and children. The army maintains that the video does not show wrongdoing, but the killing of unarmed journalists is a war crime, and the callousness of video gives an idea of what was going on in Iraq during the years of the US occupation. When the Bush administration asked the Iraqi parliament for permission to keep a base in the country, the parliamentarians said, absolutely not. The US military was forced to withdraw from Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011.

2. Manning revealed the full extent of the corruption of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidin Ben Ali, adding fuel to the youth protest movement of late 2010, which translated the relevant US cables into Arabic. Manning contributed to the outbreak of powerful youth movements demanding more democratic governance in the Arab world.


3. Manning revealed to the US and Yemeni publics the secret drone war that Washington was waging in that country. That the cables show then dictator Ali Abdallah Saleh acquiescing in the US strikes on his country probably played into the movement to remove him as president, which succeeded in early 2012.

4. He revealed that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to spy on their United Nations counterparts. The UN spy requests included cables that “demanded detailed intelligence on the UN leadership including forensic detail about their communications systems, including passwords and personal encryption keys,” foreshadowing later revelations of extensive US spying on even allies like Germany via the NSA.

SNIP

6. Revealed that Afghanistan government corruption is “overwhelming”. This degree of corruption, which has shaken the whole banking system and caused US funds to be massively misused, is still a factor in our decision of whether to stay in Afghanistan in some capacity after December 2014. The US public is in a better position to judge the issue with these documents available.

7. Manning revealed the degree of authoritarianism and corruption of the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak, which was subsequently swept away.
 
Read the whole thing.

The Crime of What We Did to PFC Manniing

First, Gary Younge nailed it

Gary YoungeVerified account @garyyounge

 

Exposing war crimes gets you 130 years. http://bit.ly/13w4610 
Committing them gets you a library. http://bit.ly/Mp2ljA  #Manning
6:41 PM - 30 Jul 13

Chase Madar at The Nation explains it:

Many intellectuals have labored to draw casuistic distinctions between what they see as Manning’s irresponsible leaking and Daniel Ellsberg’s virtuous leaking of the Pentagon Papers some forty years ago. These exercises zealously avoid the main legal difference: the thousands of documents leaked by Ellsberg were uniformly classified as “top secret,” whereas nothing released by Manning is of that high status. Meanwhile, Ellsberg himself has been a tireless defender of the young soldier, and on a weekly basis has had to reprise Marshall McLuhan’s famous scene in Annie Hall against Manning’s smug detractors. 

SNIP

After all, the transgression of this soldier is far greater than being a freethinking queer in the military. Private Manning actually believed that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be about Iraqi freedom. He thought he should be a well-informed citizen soldier, and he thought civilians should know the truth about the war that was being fought in their name.

SNIP

But Private Manning broke the law—and the law is the law! This folk tautology ought to be airtight, but it carries a whiff of desperation, of depleted authority on the verge of meltdown. It turns out that selective enforcement of military law is pervasive. Sexual assault is rarely punished. Laws against killing foreign civilians are worth even less: just ask the Marine unit that killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians in Haditha, some of them execution style, without any of the soldiers serving time in prison (the leader of the unit suffered only a reduction in rank and a pay cut). The law in these instances may be many things, but it is not a prescriptive rule enforced evenly and impartially. And yet the request for clemency in the case of Bradley Manning is treated as an outrageous and whiny exception, which if granted would bring about the collapse of all military discipline. 
The laws against releasing classified material are just as elastic. Barely a week goes by without The New York Times or The Washington Post spilling government secrets. This complaisant nonenforcement of leaks is nothing to complain about: after all, it’s how we learned the truth about—to name just a few salient examples from recent history—Vietnam, Watergate, warrantless wiretapping and the cyberwar against Iran.

SNIP

But it is Bradley Manning we have put on trial, not the impresarios of war, not the CIA torturers or their lawyers. The Iraq War, which began with a lurid overture of secrecy and lies, is now getting its dissonant coda: a private court-martialed for telling the truth, a trial unfolding behind a thick wall of official secrecy, in which the court’s media center was, on the day of the prosecution’s closing statement, patrolled by armed soldiers peering over the shoulders of typing reporters. “Pfc. Manning was not a humanist. He was a hacker,” said prosecutor Maj. Ashden Fein. “He was not a whistleblower. He was a traitor.” The past decade has witnessed the carnage unleashed by militarized cluelessness. In the story of Bradley Manning, who has been the ethical citizen and who the rampaging criminals?

Charlie Pierce's Simple Question

It's the only question that matters: What is being done in my name?

Just read it.

Sign the Petition to Pardon Edward Snowden

From Firedoglake:

White House website petition for a pardon for Edward Snowden.

Well of course they won't pardon him.  But their justification for not doing it (after the petition gets 100,000 signature - go sign!) will be fucking hilarious.

How to Drive a Political Activist to Suicide

Used to be they just pulled this shit on low-level drug users - the impoverished, dusky-skinned ones, that is. Now they're coming after the kids who dare to cross Big Computer.

DSWright at Firedoglake:

Aaron Swartz was an American success story. A talented kid he worked on developing the RSS feed when he was 14. Swartz latter became – what every sanctimonious politician of both parties proclaim is the ultimate achievement – an entrepreneur, founding Infogami which would later merge with reddit in 2006. In 2007 Swartz left reddit and became a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics while also founding Demand Progress a progressive activist group focused primarily on online organizing. Perhaps Swartz’s most famous activism was his role in helping to stop the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

In 2011 Swartz was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. The crime? Downloading academic journals from not-for profit JSTOR on a guest account without permission. JSTOR would later provide free access claiming it already had a program in the works when Swartz committed his crime. In other words, Aaron Swartz did to JSTOR what Mark Zuckerberg did to Harvard’s Facebook – gained unauthorized access to data which lead to offering a service the university said it was already working on. And in the state of Massachusetts no less!

Like Harvard with Zuckerberg, JSTOR was able to settle the issue with Swartz outside of a court room. Unlike with Zuckerberg, the US Attorney for Massachusetts pursued criminal charges which meant Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and a million dollar fine. Maybe if Zuckerberg had been a political activist…

On Friday January 11th Swartz was found dead in his apartment. The cause of death is believed to be suicide, with a family member confirming death by hanging.

This is a straight-up murder by federal law enforcement and prosecutors persecutors. The feds don't have to take your guns. They don't even have to send a drone to blow you to smithereens. All they have to do is prosecute you to death.

Bradley Manning and American Injustice

No wonder if you haven't been keeping up with the latest in the Bradley Manning case. Manning has been thoroughly ignored by the legacy media and even by most of the left blogosphere, with the conspicuous exceptions of Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald.

It's dismaying and depressing to read supposedly liberal bloggers condemning Manning in spittle-flecked hysteria because he dared to expose wrongdoing by the American military.

For the U.S. Army is committing a grave injustice against one of its own - an injustice with far-reaching implications for democracy in this country.

Last week, The Nation published a remarkable statement from three Nobel Peace Prize recipients on Bradley Manning and American Injustice.

As people who have worked for decades against the increased militarization of societies and for international cooperation to end war, we are deeply dismayed by the treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning.
 
We have dedicated our lives to working for peace because we have seen the many faces of armed conflict and violence, and we understand that no matter the cause of war, civilians always bear the brunt of the cost. With today’s advanced military technology and the continued ability of business and political elites to filter what information is made public, there exists a great barrier to many citizens being fully aware of the realities and consequences of conflicts in which their country is engaged.

Responsible governance requires fully informed citizens who can question their leadership. For those citizens worldwide who do not have direct, intimate knowledge of war, yet are still affected by rising international tensions and failing economies, the WikiLeaks releases attributed to Manning have provided unparalleled access to important facts.

Revealing covert crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, this window into the realities of modern international relations has changed the world for the better. While some of these documents may demonstrate how much work lies ahead in terms of securing international peace and justice, they also highlight the potential of the Internet as a forum for citizens to participate more directly in civic discussion and creative government accountability projects.

Questioning authority, as a soldier, is not easy.  But it can at times be honorable. The words attributed to Manning reveal that he went through a profound moral struggle between the time he enlisted and when he became a whistleblower. Through his experience in Iraq, he became disturbed by top-level policy that undervalued human life and caused the suffering of innocent civilians and soldiers. Like other courageous whistleblowers, he was driven foremost by a desire to reveal the truth.

Private Manning said in chat logs that he hoped the releases would bring “discussion, debates and reforms” and condemned the ways the “first world exploits the third.” Much of the world regards him as a hero for these efforts toward peace and transparency, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a result. However, much as when high-ranking officials in the United States and Britain misled the public in 2003 by saying there was an imminent need to invade Iraq to stop it from using weapons of mass destruction, the world’s most powerful elites have again insulted international opinion and the intelligence of many citizens by withholding facts regarding Manning and WikiLeaks.

The military prosecution has not presented evidence that Private Manning injured anyone by releasing secret documents, and it has asserted in court that the charge of “aiding the enemy through indirect means” does not require it to do so. Nor has the prosecution denied that his motivations were conscientious; it has simply argued they are irrelevant. In ignoring this context and recommending a much more severe punishment for Bradley Manning than is given to US soldiers guilty of murdering civilians, military leadership is sending a chilling warning to other soldiers who might feel compelled by conscience to reveal misdeeds. It is our belief that leaders who use fear to govern, rather than sharing wisdom born from facts, cannot be just.

We Nobel Peace Prize laureates condemn the persecution Bradley Manning has suffered, including imprisonment in conditions declared “cruel, inhuman and degrading” by the United Nations, and call upon Americans to stand up in support of this whistleblower who defended their democratic rights. In the conflict in Iraq alone, more than 110,000 people have died since 2003, millions have been displaced and nearly 4,500 American soldiers have been killed. If someone needs to be held accountable for endangering Americans and civilians, let’s first take the time to examine the evidence regarding high-level crimes already committed, and what lessons can be learned. If Bradley Manning released the documents, as the prosecution contends, we should express to him our gratitude for his efforts toward accountability in government, informed democracy and peace.

To learn more about Bradley Manning’s case or to get involved, visit the Bradley Manning Support Network website.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

The Big Lie, Now With Corporate Billions

By @KYYellowDog

Via Down with Tyranny, Robert Reich on the real goal behind all the anti-Obama lies.

Big corporations and Wall Street are also secretly funneling big bucks into front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that will use the money to air anti-Obama ads, while keeping secret the identities of these firms.

Looking at the all the anti-Obama super PACs and political fronts like Crossroads GPS, Politico estimates the anti-Obama forces (including the Romney campaign) will outspend Obama and pro-Obama groups by 2 to 1.

How can it be that big corporations and billionaires will be spending unlimited amounts on big lies like this one, without any accountability because no one will know where the money is coming from?

Blame a majority of the Supreme Court in its grotesque 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision — as well as the IRS for lax enforcement that lets political front groups like Crossroads GPS or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pretend they’re not political.

But you might also blame something deeper, more sinister.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist (you can’t have served in Washington and seriously believe more than two people can hold on to a big story without it leaking), but I fear that at least since 2010 we’ve been witnessing a quiet, slow-motion coup d’etat whose purpose is to repeal every bit of progressive legislation since the New Deal and entrench the privileged positions of the wealthy and powerful — who haven’t been as wealthy or as powerful since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

Its techique is to inundate America with a few big lies, told over and over (the debt is Obama’s fault and it’s out of control; corporations and the very rich are the “job creators” that need tax cuts; government is the enemy, and its regulations are strangling the private sector; unions are bad; and so on), and tell them so often they’re taken as fact.

Then having convinced enough Americans that these lies are true, take over the White House, Congress, and remaining states that haven’t yet succumbed to the regressive right (witness Tuesday’s recall election in Wisconsin).

I desperately hope I’m wrong, but all there’s growing evidence I may be right.

Go here to find out how to make it stop.

Kentucky Cracks the Door on Child Abuse Secrecy

Several recent deaths-by-abuse of children under state supervision have finally forced Kentucky to open its secret records on child abuse deaths.

But those records are the tip of the secrecy iceberg. The bigger issue is the secrecy of all child protection cases that allows mishandling by both social workers and judges to go unnoticed.

The Herald:

After multiple lawsuits and key lawmakers' repeated calls for more transparency, Gov. Steve Beshear announced Tuesday that he will release state records of children who have been killed or nearly killed as a result of abuse or neglect.

The Lexington Herald-Leader and the Louisville Courier-Journal had sued the state over the records of children who died while under supervision of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, which oversees child protection.

Franklin Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd has ruled twice that the two newspapers were entitled to the records. State law says that child-protection records are private with one clear exemption: the deaths or near-deaths of children as a result of abuse or neglect.

In addition to releasing the records, Beshear said he would hold legislative hearings and conduct an independent review. An independent panel on child deaths will include social workers and pediatricians. Beshear said he will propose legislation on mandatory release of information on child fatalities in Kentucky.

In Shepherd's Nov. 3 ruling saying that the cabinet had to turn over the records, he blasted the cabinet, saying, "The court must conclude that the cabinet is so immersed in the culture of secrecy regarding these issues that it is institutionally incapable of recognizing and implementing the clear requirements of the law."

Beshear's announcement came a day before a hearing about whether the cabinet would turn over the records as the Nov. 3 ruling ordered. The two newspapers argued in court documents that the cabinet might have misclassified some of the deaths so it would not have to turn over records. The media companies had asked that Shepherd make the cabinet turn over the records by Dec. 2 and requested that the state list all fatality and near-fatality cases in which it conducted an internal review — which would show whether the cabinet made mistakes in handling of an abuse case.

Meanwhile, thousands of Kentucky children move through the protection/family-court/foster-care system hidden from public scrutiny. Several states have opened family court proceedings to the press. The states require only the redaction of identifying information, thus protecting the children while allowing the public to know how courts and social workers handle abuse and neglect cases.

Such transparency protects social workers as well as children - under secrecy, social workers cannot defend or explain their decisions, or criticize the decisions of police and the courts.

Without that kind of transparency, there is no accountability.

"No President should fear public scrutiny of his program."

As we struggle to digest the latest document dump from Wikileaks, Brad Friedman has a great post on the larger issues of government secrecy.

As this information becomes public, and as the U.S. Government continues to scramble to mitigate what the White House is calling today a "reckless and dangerous" leak, condemning it "in the strongest terms" as an alleged threat to national security, it's worth keeping in mind, for valuable perspective, what the 1970s legendary "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote in an op/ed for The BRAD BLOG in early 2008...

Many, if not most, covert operations deserve to be disclosed by a free press. They are often covert not only because they are illegal but because they are wildly ill-conceived and reckless. "Sensitive" and "covert" are often synonyms for "half-assed," "idiotic," and "dangerous to national security," as well as "criminal."

As well, John F. Kennedy's April 1961 speech on what he described as this nation's abhorrence of secrecy, and the necessity of a free press --- as delivered to the American Newspaper Publishers Association at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York a year or so before his death --- is rather astonishing, and more than a bit ironic, in light of today's leaks and, as directly, the actions of the Executive Branch and its enablers in this country --- in Congress, in the mainstream media and in the public --- over the past dark decade. JFK's remarks include these thoughts among others that must be heard or read...

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
...

And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
...

And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.
...

No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary.

Read the whole thing, including a video excerpt and full transcript here.

Before Hiroshima, There Was Alamagordo

The dark side of an authoritarian submissive population that unquestioningly obeys its government is a secretive government that literally kills its citizens. Today is the 65th Anniversary of the Age of Secrets.

Greg Mitchell in The Nation:

While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-fifth anniversary will be marked—or mourned, if you will—this Friday, July 16.

Entire books have been written about the test, so I’ll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there’s much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America). It’s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.

In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren’t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Father of the Bomb,” worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.

Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer’s staff proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, “What are you, Hearst propagandists?”

Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff—who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan—placed the bomb in the same category as “poison gas.” And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.

Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over loosely-populated areas. “We were just damn lucky,” the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.

The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves’ first words were: “We must keep the whole thing quiet.” This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for “downwinders” and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, “atomic soldiers,” those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.

Read the whole thing.

Shining a Light into the Dark Closet of Family Court

The biggest obstacle to improving the child protection system in Kentucky is the secrecy that hides the truth from public scrutiny and shields officials from accountability.

But one courageous and outraged Family Court Judge in Jefferson County has ripped the shutters off the windows, kicked the door open and given us a look at how the system really treats Kentucky's most abused and neglected children.

The teenage girl's relatives had abandoned her at an emergency shelter before leaving the state, announcing they no longer wanted her.

But what has Judge Joan Byer really angry on this day in Jefferson Family Court, as she reviews the file of this quiet, dark-haired girl before her, is a letter from a social worker with the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, saying the state was closing the girl's case because she had been placed successfully with relatives and was attending school regularly.

Neither was true, Byer points out — the placement with relatives lasted barely two months, and Byer's own check of the teen's school records shows she has missed school repeatedly.

“We're going to lose a child,” says Byer, who blames such lapses on an overloaded social service system and intense pressure on workers to close cases.

Family “dependency” court cases involving child abuse and neglect in Kentucky are, by state law, confidential, and such proceedings seldom receive any public notice.

But in recent months Byer, one of 10 Jefferson County Family Court judges, allowed The Courier-Journal to observe cases, with permission of the parties in the courtroom, as long as children and families weren't identified. Byer said she exercised her discretion to do that because she believes, in most cases, the courts should be open and the public needs to understand what's going on with child welfare.

Read the whole thing.

The Poison of Secrecy

The reason secrecy is the most dangerous crime an administration can commit is because it perpetuates and encourages other crimes. Transparency is government is essential not just for its own sake - ensuring the people and the press know what's going on - but for the preventive effect.

In The Nation, John Nichols explains how secrecy can tempt even the most anti-Cheney administration into Cheney-like crimes.

The refusal of the Bush-Cheney administration to permit public review of White House visitor logs detailing who was meeting with the vice president's energy task force during the very first weeks of their tenure was a deliberate decision made to cloak dirty dealing by officials who were determined to serve corporate rather than public interests.

It also provided an early indicator that darker and dirtier deeds would eventually be done by Cheney and his compatriots. And they were.

So what should we make of the news that the Obama administration is now refusing to release White House visitor logs that detail meetings between members of the new administration and health-care industry insiders?

SNIP

When administrations begin to enjoy the benefits of operating in the dark, they become disinclined to end the practice. They also begin to buy into the fantasy that keeping details from Congress and the people is the only way to get things done, as did Obama White House spokesman Reid Cherlin when he tried to explain away a lack of transparency by saying: "Here's what's happening: Groups that have steadfastly opposed reform in the past are coming to the table and making concessions -- because they know we can't wait another year to pass health insurance reform."

Actually, bad players are embracing bad compromises because they have made bad deals with the White House.

And, make no mistake, more bad things will happen.

Only whack jobs who believe that Barack Obama was birthed in Jakarta could imagine that this administration might ever be as corrupt as its predecessor. Bush and Cheney achieved Warren Harding levels of official crookedness.

However, bad-but-not-quite-Cheney-bad is an unacceptable standard.

Read the whole thing.