Guardian UK: The US national security smokescreen

[marmar]

The US national security smokescreen
The State Department response to the ACLU's FOIA requests for WikiLeaks' cables reveals the absurd abuses of state secrecy

Nancy Goldstein
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 December 2011


Ben Wizner, the litigation director for the ACLU's national security project, cheerfully admits that its April 2011 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for 23 of the very same US State Department diplomatic cables we all read this time last year, when WikiLeaks released them to five newspapers including the Guardian, was "cheeky" – a way to foreground the "absurdity of the US secrecy regime".

And so it has. Nearly eight months after the original FOIA request, the State Department has finally released … 11 cables. Federal censors have helpfully redacted them, making it easy to see, by a simple act of comparison (which the ACLU performs for us, here), precisely which sections the State Department wants hidden. Missing are a dirty dozen cables the government refused to release – despite those cables having already been leaked, published and analysed in virtually every major national and international media venue – again, because they were classified as secret or deemed to contain sensitive information.

Administration officials unleashed plenty of hyperbole and hysteria when the cables were first published. But it turned out that none of the information in them actually endangered American citizens, allies or informants. They did, however, prove embarrassing for the US and many foreign leaders. Because it turned out that claims about national security were often an excuse to prevent us from seeing our government engaged in unethical, unconstitutional and, sometimes, illegal practices. These ran the gamut from extraordinary renditions, detentions and torture to shaking down other governments in an attempt to influence their political processes and tamper with their criminal justice systems.

We learned that the same Obama administration that had refused to pursue the perpetrators of the Bush torture regime at home had also tried to put its thumbs on the scales of justice in Spain – aggressively attempting to prevent a counter-terrorism judge from trying the senior legal minds of the Bush administration for their part in the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/08/us-national-security-smokescreen

[Laelth]

1. k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be. n/t

-Laelth