Cato's Letter #33 (1721) by "Cato" (John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon )

http://classicliberal.tripod.com/cato/letter033.html

People are ruined by their ignorance of human nature; which ignorance leads them to credulity, and too great a confidence in particular men. They fondly imagine that he, who, possessing a great deal by their favour, owes them great gratitude, and all good offices, will therefore return their kindness: But, alas! how often are they mistaken in their favourites and trustees; who, the more they have given them, are often the more incited to take all, and to return destruction for generous usage. The common people generally think that great men have great minds, and scorn base actions; which judgment is so false, that the basest and worst of all actions have been done by great men ...

Political jealousy, therefore, in the people, is a necessary and laudable passion....

To conclude: Power, without control, appertains to God alone; and no man ought to be trusted with what no man is equal to. In truth there are so many passions, and inconsistencies, and so much selfishness, belonging to human nature, that we can scarce be too much upon our guard against each other. The only security which we can have that men will be honest, is to make it their interest to be honest; and the best defence which we can have against their being knaves, is to make it terrible to them to be knaves. As there are many men wicked in some stations, who would be innocent in others; the best way is to make wickedness unsafe in any station.

Impossible to guess what exactly is motivating the Obama administration, but Dahlia Lithwick raised a possibility that I found interesting. In her article at Slate about this case she speculated that the Obama administration is using the bogus state secrets argument because it is afraid that if the details of this case and other such cases is disclosed the Obama DoJ will be obligated to investigate and prosecute the Bush administration for crimes. This would be politically inconvenient for Obama, since Limbaugh style partisans and the Beltway elite would attack him for being partisan and what not (despite the obvious reality that the true partisans are those who want to excuse Executive lawbreaking consisting of torture, imprisonment without trial, and massive illegal surveillance.)

This way Obama gets to publically say he's for prosecutions of crimes if evidence of crimes surfaces while keeping that evidence from surfacing in the first place.

Nope, given that I don't read the comments here (more than a few here and there) and the article itself is more than a week old.