Daniel Ellsberg on secrecy, and Sibel Edmonds interview

[moodforaday]

On p 43 of Ellsberg's "Secrets", there's a passage worthy of a highlight:

It is a common place that "you can't keep secrets in Washington" or "on a democracy," that "no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in the New York Times." These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget shares, lead to leaks. Moreover, to a certain extent the ability to keep a secret for a given amount of time diminishes with the number of people who know it. As secret keepers like to say, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead." But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets to not leak to the American public. This is true even if the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.

Whistleblowers. Please.

(Here, for example, is an interview with Sibel Edmonds, recorded in January: http://weekendinterviewshow.com/audio/edmonds.mp3 - haven't seen it linked to before, and it's one where she really tries to say as much as she can.)

[ElsewheresDaughter]

1. here's the VIDEO .........

http://mistakesweremade.com/vid/Sibel_Edmonds_vs._DanielEllsberg.wmv

[wli]

2. the black budget is 1.7-2.3 trillion/yr and no one knows where it goes

My guess is toward sinister purposes, though which I have no idea.