The Problem with Creeping Totalitarianism at the Core of American Government — Is Not that Its Minions Are Necessarily Evil People — It Is that the Minion-Keepers’ Paranoid Tunnel Vision Prevents Them from Understanding How Democracy Is Constitutionally Supposed to Work

© 2015 Peter Free

 

11 May 2015

 

 

The vacuous logic of Big Brother-Ism

 

Sam Sacks noticed that:

 

 

At a hearing today on a lawsuit seeking to make videotapes of force-feedings at Guantánamo public, Justice Department attorneys argued that the courts cannot order evidence used in trial to be unsealed if it has been classified by the government.

 

“We don’t think there is a First Amendment right to classified documents,” stated Justice Department lawyer Catherine Dorsey.

 

Chief Judge Merrick Garland characterized the government’s position as tantamount to claiming the court “has absolutely no authority” to unseal evidence even if it’s clear the government’s bid to keep it secret is based on “irrationality” or that it’s “hiding something.”

 

“That is our position,” Dorsey agreed.

 

She added that a more appropriate tool to compel the release of the videos was through a Freedom of Information Act request.

 

© 2015 Sam Sacks, U.S. Government: We Can Classify Anything and Judges Can’t Stop Us, The Intercept (08 May 2015) (extracts)

 

 

FOIA is a more appropriate tool?

 

The hypocrisy of Catherine Dorsey’s reference to the superiority of a FOIA request is laughable. Government refuses to comply with those with even less justification than it uses to thumb federal judges in the eye.

 

One wonders where the Feds parked their apparently tiny brains, when they goose-stepped into court.

 

 

In sum — the government’s core argument is (apparently) that it can do whatever it wishes

 

Obviously, if government can make secret whatever it wishes, the process and implementation of governance becomes unknowable.

 

This is equivalent to saying that the Feds can do whatever they want, whenever they want, and the Courts (and the rest of us) just have to lie back and take the totalitarian phallus up our behinds.

 

Not even a high school student of average intelligence would accept the government’s argument as a constitutionally legitimate summary of the American system.

 

 

The moral? — Power corrupts, and it evidently makes us even stupider than we were

 

The majority of prominent American leaders no longer understand the democratic principles that they are ostensibly trying to protect. Killing the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.