Secrecy is its own justification
I think the post-title paraphrases something said by Max Weber, noting, of course, that when a government does anything good, it desperately wants you to know about it, so that when it wants to do something in complete secrecy… draw your own conclusions. And so the Grey Lady’s editorial page, never quite apologetic for that institution’s role in our current state of affairs through its own shameless flogging of the reporting of Miller, Gordon, et al., nevertheless offers us this nice summing up of the current “controversy” over the intelligence bills (specifically, on whether Congress will legislate the blocking of the kind of accountability that discovery in law suits against complicit telecoms will uncover).
That’s an interesting thing to note btw– the government will indemnify the telecoms– this is not about some financial risk to them, so much as the risk of what illegalities by the Bush Administration might actually come to light should the litigations now in place go forward absent Congressional fiat (which Harry Reid is a.o.k. with, btw… f*** you, Harry– your own party should replace you with Dodd, or perhaps Obama should he not be elected President).
Anyway, this is just another part of “the ballgame”: will we even know the damage Team Bush II has down to our republic, if the Harry Reids of this country continue to serve as enablers of the cover-up?
Technology now allows the government to ostensibly capture every single electronic communication in this country, whether it be local phone calls, e-mails, or of course, this blog post (or any comments on it). The follow-up question becomes the ability to index it, as the government does not have the man-power to make much use of that information unless it can tie it to the specific individuals that it is targeting, say, when it wants to engage in some political hit at a particular moment.
The FISA court is at best symbolic– out of tens of thousands of warrant request, it has refused perhaps half a dozen over the years… but that symbol is too much for a Bush Administration that wants no holes in its cover-up plans. Courage has been in short supply. Here’s hoping Nancy Pelosi’s is not fleeting… lest yet another piece of our Constitutional framework break off in the tornado of our times…
