Please forgive my long, tedious rant. I had to get it out before I exploded. I hope I have made it informative for the few that make it to the end…
My mind boggles at the horror.
It is not just the torture. I am aghast at all the people who seem to concur that THIS is the direction they want our nation to go. They look at the torture, the lies and the soul destroying justifications and say that this is the world they want for themselves and their children. They are willing to discard the rule of law. They don’t care about ethics. They take no thought for the long term consequences. Where do they think they are going to live?
Our nation has gotten through equally difficult problems in the past. Hopefully, today enough of us will remember that our noble goals are:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
It is not about whether torture is hard to justify. It is not about whether torture is effective. Arguing about these points is substituting false judgement for true judgement. The reason we don’t torture our fellow man is because we believe that we are created equal. And we believe that we all have certain inalienable rights.
When a part of our government systematically violates our inalienable rights. Then engages in a prolonged battle to conceal the truth about their actions, it severs itself from any claim to have ‘Just Powers.’
It is now our Right, and our Duty to alter or abolish the destructive part of Government.
At least we know the root of the problem and have some idea of what works and what doesn’t.
The problem is, our nation does not currently have a good way to handle secret knowledge. When secret knowledge drives government action, it isolates government and corrupts it from it’s intended purposes.
We have proved that the following approaches do not limit government corruption:
- Allowing our government representatives to act on secret knowledge corrupts them from their intended purpose. They substitute their agendas for our agenda. The corruption occurs faster if their actions are hidden from the public.
- Adding an isolated layer of oversight that can partake of the secrets (but can't expose the secrets) slightly slows, but does not stop, the corrupting process. The FISA court was [captured][4] and corrupted by the Intelligence community. The [House Intelligence Committee][5] appears to be captured and corrupted. The Senate Intelligence Committee appears be complicit in the NSA corruption, even while acting against the CIA corruption.
- Leaving corruption alone makes it worse.
- Secret processes don't reduce corruption. They are are much more likely to be co-opted and increase the corruption.
- Allowing the same government entity to create secrets, protect secrets, and act on those secrets speeds the corrupting process.
- The [Espionage Act][6] appears to be severely broken. It denied the whistle-blowers [Kiriakou][7] and [Manning][8] the ability to present a Public Interest defense. The Act has eliminated and suppressed many opportunities to evaluate and prevent the corruption of government.
- Allowing Government to avoid trial and suppress evidence by claiming National Security appears to be an extremely bad idea. Our government has repeatedly used this claim to avoid evaluation by independent, judges. This has also eliminated many opportunities to prevent the corruption of government.
The following solutions have worked to limit or reduce government corruption:
- Exposing the secrets exposes the corruption. Once the corruption has grown sufficiently ripe, it is always better to expose the secrets than endure the corruption. Oddly enough, history seems to indicate that it takes our Intelligence community about 40 years to go from full exposure to ripe secret corruption.
- Even if the secrets are kept, corruption can be greatly reduced if it is publicly exposed, uprooted, punished and replaced. Skipping one of these steps leaves the corruption intact.
- Whistle-blowing and public disclosure by informed, ethical insiders works to expose and limit corruption.
- Allowing Oversight groups to freely disclose secrets if they feel it is in the Public Interest greatly slows the corruption.
- Distributing the processes of creation of secrets, protecting secrets, and acting on secrets to different parts of government appears to greatly slow the corrupting process.
All branches of our Government have proven susceptible to the corrupting power of secrets:
- The Legislative branch almost never keeps secrets. When it does, it grows corrupt.
- The Judicial branch keeps secrets. They are usually resistant to corruption when keeping others secrets. The Judicial branch will rapidly corrupt when their own knowledge, laws and actions are kept secret.
- The Executive branch creates, preserves and acts on secrets all the time. Sometimes, parts of it exhibit non-corrupt behavior. However, we have two exceptional cases: The Military has historically been a little more resistant to the corrupting power of secrets. The Intelligence community has historically been highly susceptible to the corrupting power of secrets.
God help us if we don’t act to stem the current tide of government corruption. We will lose ourselves and probably take the rest of the world with us.
