Governments need to be able to keep some kinds of information secret. You can't, for example, be putting the capabilities of our high-tech military equipment and how those capabilities came to be in the public domain. Many kinds of negotiations can't be conducted in a TV studio. That said, there are literally no restraints on what the government classifies as secret. And there needs to be. There also needs to be strict limits on what the government can do if it wishes to use the so-called "state secrets" doctrine. Such a doctrine doesn't mean that the government can force the abrogation of a lawsuit because they don't want to reveal information; it means they automatically lose because they are unwilling to defend themselves.

As the Pentagon Papers caper revealed 30 odd years ago, the government can, has, and will classify information that has nothing to do with protecting our military capabilities or sensitive negotiations with other countries, or any other legitimate cause and has everything to do with concealing governmental behavior which is foolish, embarrassing, stupid, and/or illegal. A classic example is the CIA "black sites". Does the revelation of the existence of such sites compromise some unique American capability? Well, no, it doesn't. Many other repressive regimes maintain such sites although usually in their own countries. Even the locations of these "black sites" isn't particularly secret. A real investigative reporter could find them because while I may not know where they are, the people who live in the area would know that the Americans have some suspiciously secret facility in their area (even if they couldn't hear any screams).

One of the things that we need to push through the government is reform of how and what the government is allowed to classify.

Oh, and Dr. Ivins? Rumpole described the golden thread that runs through English Common Law as Innocent Until Proven Guilty. No amount of innuendo constitutes proof.

That we had such a great justice system that we didn't need to be a part of the ICC for the persecution of war crimes. Not that I'm a great fan of the ICC as it frequently will look like the victors using a "legal system" to punish the losers. On the other hand, there seems to be this collective blind spot in the American psyche that seems to think that the torture and/or murder of detainees by the American military and an unprovoked invasion of Iraq and deaths of hundreds of thousands innocent Iraqi's, the use of Argentinian/Chilean style "disappearances", and turning millions of innocent Iraqi's into refugees are an internal American issue. Most of the rest of the world thinks these things are war crimes, not a question of weather or not somebody committed perjury by being less than candid about his sexual peccidillos. Most of the world thinks that war crimes are a world issue, not an internal issue for the perpetrators.

The Non Sequitur cartoon of 7/4/08. Wiley Miller has it pegged.

It was, after all, on the paternalistic liberals (Democrats) watch that the federal government was inserted so deeply into American society. The authoritarian liberals (Republicans) merely used the levers of control created by the Democrats in a perverted way. And this should come as no surprise. Anytime that an organization can cost your company millions or billions of dollars with the stroke of a pen, the logical response is to try to control that organization. Corporations can do this - they have lots of money. Das Populi are helpless in the face of the federal government. We have neither the money nor the organization to influence far away Washington, DC. Lacking any initiative process or other means to directly influence the federal government outside of our elected representatives, we simply get pummeled by what comes out of Washington. So the dime that goes to the automakers will now vanish because the tire inflation system mandated by Washington will cost a whole lot more than a dime. Washington mandated this system because a sufficient number of soccer moms weren't paying enough attention to the maintenance of their monstrous SUVs that their overstressed and underinflated tires blew out and their truck rolled over. The fact that they were driving these outsized, unnecessarily large vehicles can be attributed to yet another Washington mandate - CAFE. See, Washington really didn't care what you wanted to drive; they were going to tell you what you could drive. Since the SUV was a truck and, therefore, exempt from CAFE under the arcane rules written by Washington, American drivers turned to the SUV to escape the underpowered, poorly designed vehicles Detroit created in response to CAFE. When the government starts telling people what they can and can't do irrespective of what the people want, we cease to be government of, by, and for the people and we start, baby step at a time, to become an authoritarian state.

That is but one small example. The greed and corruption of the recent (and not so recent) past can be attributed, not to "conservatives" or liberals, but to the accretion of power in Washington beyond the wildest dreams of the founding fathers. Things will get worse, and probably a lot worse, until we wrest control from a largely unaccountable federal government. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen since once a government gets power, it's not likely to give it up quietly. Power, it seems, is a drug far more addictive than crack cocaine.

a dark stain on America's honor. I warned this would happen as far back as 2002 (see my letters to Salon). So now the circle is complete. We have become Chile and Argentina - with our "disappeared ones" to our torture and murder to, finally, our Kangaroo courts and star chamber proceedings.