James Traub Synopsized the Catch-22, Anti-Liberty Logic of the Past Two Presidencies’ National Security Thinking — When You Pee Your Freedoms Away, What’s Left to Defend?

20 May 2013

Big Brother has a way of sneaking up on us, by using logic that isn’t

Unlike:

(a) shrieking Republicans — who apparently think that Idiocy’s Volume makes up for the lack of anything intelligent or factual to say

and

(b) somnolent Democrats — who think that Reality-avoidance is survival’s way,

James Traub took a measured look at the Obama Administration’s warrantless traipsing through Associated Press telephone records:

The real pattern here is the president's insistence that the war on terror has to be classified.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, has been imprisoned for describing -- leaking -- torture tactics to the press, but no one in the agency has been punished for torturing people, and the CIA's investigations of its own alleged abuses remain classified.

Worse still, the defendants in the 9/11 tribunal at Guantánamo, now in its early phases, have been prohibited from describing the abusive practices to which they were subjected, since being tortured exposed them to classified CIA practices.

One military lawyer I spoke to pointed out that even the charts explaining the level of classification assigned to various kinds of documents are themselves classified, exposing him to the danger of inadvertently revealing classified information.

The mania for secrecy has become a defining feature of Obama's war on terror.

I wonder if this is the inevitable consequence of conducting a war through Special Forces and intelligence operatives.

The war on terror has thus become increasingly classified because it is being waged by instruments that are, themselves, classified.

The whole effort has become a giant secret whose details are to be disclosed only when doing so makes the president look good, as in the glorious operation to take out Osama bin Laden. Disclosures of anything else put the American people at risk.

The time has come for Obama to tell the CIA and the Justice Department to back off.

In other words, the President is counting on Catch-22 logic writ large.

The so-called “tension” between national security and the First and Fourth Amendments is nonsense

Pundits (of one political stripe or another) repeatedly excuse this president and the last one by pretending to knowledgeably find an inescapable “tension” between the Constitution’s liberty-protections and our Government’s obligation to keep us safe from ourselves and everybody else.

The word’s intentionally handwringing nuance is supposed to impress us with the Executive Branch’s difficult course in keeping our babies safe from the Running Dogs of Terrorism — to distort the propaganda phrase popularized by China’s Chairman Mao, decades ago.

But that assumed nuance is crap.

Any moron can see that using Absolute Secrecy as a shield against any inquiry (at all) into Government’s too frequently indulged plethora of evils obliterates the American Constitution.

The moral? — James Traub is correct

It is indeed time to tell the Executive Branch and our idiotic Congress to get off our backs.

This is not a question of nuanced balance. It is a simple question of whether we have the moral and physical courage to stay a free people.

PeteFree.com

James Traub Synopsized the Catch-22, Anti-Liberty Logic of the Past Two Presidencies’ National Security Thinking — When You Pee Your Freedoms Away, What’s Left to Defend?