I Cogitate
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Bush classifies what he has for breakfast
Not really, but can't you hear him saying that printing what he ingests for breakfast would give aid and comfort to the enemy and therefore, is too dangerous to see the light of day.
I offer my mea culpa in criticizing much of and many in the mainstream media. Not that I take back my darts but there certainly are times that individuals and organizations deserve credit and support for certain decisions--those that challenge the government, be it of a Republican or Democrat vein, attempting to gutlessly hide information from we, the people, under the guise of national security.
There has been and continues to be countless episodes of veiled and not-so-veiled 'damage to national security' threats if the press/media print or display something. Then the 'damage' turns out to be solely to the crooks and liars supposedly representing us. That's the bottom line. But not too far from that statement is this question: just what has the Bush Administration done to EARN respect AND agreement in hiding so much information away from the public eye? On the flip side, don't waste bandwidth in detailing what the Bush Administration has done to earn our disrespect and disagreement--such is too voluminous..
Here's the last paragraphs of a recent column by Robert Kaiser, current associate editor of The Washington Post. I think he does a bit too much breast-beating earlier in his column
"...Labeling something "classified" or important to "national security" does not make it so. The government overclassifies with abandon. And the definition of "national security" is elusive. Some politicians act as though revealing any classified information threatens our nation's security, but that seems preposterous.To read Kaiser's complete column, go here.
The Bush administration has been publicly toying with the idea of using the Espionage Act, passed by Congress in 1917 when the country was swept up in an emotional response to our entry into World War I, to prosecute journalists for disclosing classified information. The legislative history of the act convinces me that its authors never intended for it to be used to censor the press, and since World War I it has never been used for that purpose. Numerous legal scholars from right to left say that doing so would violate the First Amendment. But Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said recently that invoking the Espionage Act against the press "is a possibility."
I heard Gonzales's remark as an attempt at intimidation. Intimidation by classification already seems to be a hallmark of this administration, which has created classified secrets at an unprecedented pace -- 14 million in fiscal 2005, compared with 8 million in 2001, according to the National Archives. The Bush administration has encouraged the use of more than 60 new categories ("sensitive but unclassified," for example) to control the distribution of millions more facts and documents.
Steven Aftergood, who works on classification issues for the Federation of American Scientists, calls the administration's approach to secrets "a cultivation of fear as a policy driver." He adds: "We are being told that nothing is more important than the external threat that confronts us, and nothing is more valuable than security in the face of that threat." Aftergood calls this "craven, and an insult to the millions of Americans who have given their lives to defend this country."
For the Founders, the issue was freedom and how best to secure it. Addressing that point in his Pentagon Papers opinion, Justice Hugo Black captured the spirit that animates my profession in just two sentences:
"The government's power to censor the press was abolished [by the First Amendment] so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people..."
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