Secret Secret Secret Secrets
56A reading of Ted Gup's Nation of Secrets will leave your forehead smarting (if it isn't already) from self-inflicted slaps and wondering how it's humanly possible to love your country and not despise the fucking government. Presented as a sober accounting of maniacal secrecy it nevertheless sent me at times into spasms of teary-eyed hysteria reminiscent of forays into Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Major Major Major Major. It lends, with no satire intended, a satirical view of governmental mental illness, revealing how rampant secrecy has resulted in a volitionally induced implosion into a super-massive black hole.
In steadfast opposition to oversight and logic, secrets are made so at the whim of thousands of entities, ranging from the dubious to the criminally insane, extending to agencies headed by their own worst enemies such as the EPA, the Forest Service, Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, FCC, ad infinitum, joined by a bevy of war profiteering private sector weapons contractors, mercenary hired killers and adventurers in the land of telecomplicity.
Thanks to interagency squabbles and conflicting criteria secrecy sustains a spy vs. spy vs. spy scenario and creeps via ‘derivation' into issues of public concern. Estranged from real world legal protection heroic whistleblowers are sentenced to professional exile and condemnation at the hands of our traitorous mainstream media. One example cites a postponement by two years of an upgrading in body armor that would have assured the survival of eighty percent of Marines killed between March 2003 and June of 2005. Secrecy has mitigated against challenges to dirty deals in congressional ‘sessions', Enronesque burlesques and sundry episodes of oligarchic skullduggery.
Every classifier of secrets delights in the invention of Orwellian titles for its various overlapping levels of security. In addition to the old familiar layers such as Secret, Top Secret, etc. we are treated to such masterpieces of convolution as For Official Use Only, Sensitive Internal Use, In Confidence, Limited Distribution Information, Critical Infrastructure Information, Non-Public Information, Safeguards Information and Predecisional Drafts. Gag me with a national security letter.
I could list many more but they're classified as Deep Background, Deep Deep Background, Deeply Deep Deep Background and Deeper Than The Deepest Depths of The Deepest Imaginable Background. So, concerning those, I have nothing to say.
Nation Of Secrets: The Threat To Democracy And The American Way Of Life by Ted Gup. http://www.buzzflash.com/store/items/855
For more by Tim Hollis go
To Iniquity, and Beyond: News from a lunatic-infested dirt clod
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Ron Spainhour says:
2 years ago
The secret of all secrets is that the authors of the Constitution of the US created a democratic form of government. The 55 participants of the effort to prevent "an excess of democracy" were the among the wealthiest in the land. Today's equivalent would be for Robert Mellon Scaife, David Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Sam Walton, the Hunt brothers, etc. to get together and write a new constitution. Their concern was to prevent the majority from passing laws that might alter the wealth and power of the the wealthy minority. To get this undemocratic constitution accepted, they had to sell it as being democratic. It has worked as designed. The minority can prevent the majority from ruling. Don't believe that? Take a look at the operation of Congress as the so called Democratic majority as they have tried to remove the US from the war in Iraq. Do the high school history, government, or civics textbooks ever discuss the reality of the operation of the US government? NO. Does the mainstream media ever examine the operation of the government in the light of democratic requirements? NO. Do politicians ever discuss why it is that for the last 60 years the overwhelming majority of the American public has indicated a desire for a national health care system and yet this has not been established? Why? Because the minority can prevent the majority from ruling as was designed by the wealthy minority back in 1787. If the majority cannot pass the laws they desire--it is not a democracy. A secret that exists and has existed throughout our history and it is never identified as being in existence. What other secret has existed for this length of time? I think it qualifies as "the secret of secrets".