A Secret Dispatch from the War on Stupidity

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6833

A Secret Dispatch from the War on Stupidity
by Larry Beinhart | Apr 16 2007 - 11:24am


The Senate is about to pass an intelligence bill that calls for spending $45,000,000,000,000 (forty-five billion dollars) a year - not just once, year after year - on intelligence.

Bush is threatening to veto it because it has provisions that might let congress know what they're getting for $45,000,000,000,000 a year. He feels that only he should know.

It's time to seriously rethink this whole 'intelligence' thing. Especially secrecy.

9/11 did not happen because we didn't know enough secrets. We knew quite enough to prevent it. It happened because our culture of secrecy is so excessive that we didn't tell ourselves what we knew.

The War in Iraq would never have taken place except for the culture of secrecy.

Any reasonably literate person knew that Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator, and al Qaeda, a fundamentalist religious group, were mortal enemies.

Yet the Bush Administration was able to claim they were linked, based on 'secret' intelligence. Which could not be challenged , because it was secret.

The public record was clear. Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Or the capability of producing them. The old weapons inspectors said so. The new weapons inspectors said so. Both Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were on record as having said so.

more...

[HowHasItComeToThis]

1. SECRETS WILL KILL OUR DEMOCRACY, MARK MY WORDS

IT IS THE FINAL NAIL IN THE COFFIN

[ThomCat]

2. We need a law

that prohibits anything from being classified beyond the reach of the top people in each of the three branches of government. There should be nothing that can't be reviewed at will.
x(

[MindPilot]

3. Want intelligence?

Spend that money on education.

[valerief]

4. The new cold war budget. nt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. The best shoot-down of the whole notion of "secrecy" is the 1979(?)

book by Victor Marchetti, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.

Marchetti maintained that the real purpose of "secrecy" was to keep the American people in the dark about government actions that they wouldn't approve of, and he gave several examples of CIA actions in which the "enemies" knew what was happening, the innocent bystanders knew what was happening, most of the world knew what was happening, and only the average American was kept in the dark.

Consider Kissinger's involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende's government in Chile. The Chileans knew who was behind the coup, the rest of the world knew, only the American people didn't.