Tuesday, February 21, 2006
this post will soon be classified
Okay, evidently the federal government is re-classifying documents that are mundane, too old to be relevant, or embarrassing. Why? We’re not sure. Since the reclassification program is… classified. Now, of course I understand that secrets are sometimes necessary for the national security, but just seems a little contradictory that the same government that won’t tell us much about what they’re doing, or even what they did decades ago, thinks we should be perfectly fine with the patriot act and wiretapping etc etc. I thought democracy was built on transparency and accountability to the citizens…
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7 comments:
"Transparency and accountability"? You crazy, nutty idealistic grad student, you.
Yeah, if only.
But then where is the balance of having certain things classified and having others declassifed?
Wouldnt we all like to know what exact intellegence got Bush believing there were WMD in Iraq. But then at the same time should we know all the information that Clinton had on what was going on in Serbia in the middle 90's or Iraq at the same time? Should the American public have all the information about what we knew of terrorist movements and communications before 9/11 or the USS Cole attack?
If you want a trasparent and accountable government, where do we draw the line between need to know iformation and stuff that clearly should be classified at all times?
But is there anything that shoud really be classified at ALL TIMES? I mean, maybe we don't want to know how tenuous the whole thing is, and how little information government decisions are made based on, but we should be allowed to. And some of this stuff is 50 years old - it's only useful for historians and political theorists to learn from. it's just an impulse for secrecy that is keeping them from being public, and that's just silly, not to mention hypocritical. I understand the need to keep some information classified, but the secretive government that is suspicious of citizen secrets (and increasingly controlling of our educational system) stinks of facism.
I saw a link to this article on languagelog today, too. They had some satirical things to say about it.
It seems like it's quite appropriate to classify some things, like some of the events surrounding the Cuban missile crisis.
Or should I say, "Cuban" ...
Sweet...classifying old irrelevant documents. Perhaps some of them can be about my love life. Then when I tell my students that it's classified information, I won't be lying.
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