Much has been written about the Wikileaks being released today. I understand both sides of the argument; but tend to favor disclosure over non-disclosure, because disclosure is what makes government accountable to the people.
The most sensible solution to the problem is for Congress to take the bull by the horns and define a strict and very limited policy for the classification of documents. In my view, the only reasons to classify a document are:
- To prevent the disclosure of military strategy and tactics to an enemy while a war is in progress;
- To protect an intelligence asset working abroad; and
- To prevent premature disclosure of diplomatic negotiating strategy to the other parties.
I suspect that the Wikileaks disclosures will prove to be embarrassing to the federal government; which (1) is not sufficient reason to classify a document, and (2) suggests that, given the cloak of secrecy, officials will say and do careless things that would not happen if they knew that their actions were part of the public record. The threat of disclosure is also a potent weapon to ensure that the Constitution is being enforced.
3 comments:
That transparency thing doesn't look so inviting now.
I get a little tired of the over-simplified mantra that government is always the problem. It distracts everyone from the real problem which is the corruption of government by corporate interests, Wall Street interests, and an ownership class that doesn't give a damn about the middle class.
Wealth has been re-distributed upward out of the hands of ordinary Americans over the last 40 years, but people, even the middle class people who have been beaten down economically, think that's perfectly ok and cry socialism if any politician tries to do anything to change that distribution. No country with the wide and growing wealth gap that we have can stay wealthy or stable for long.
It's the corruption of government by those who don't care about the interests of ordinary, working, middle-class Americans that is the problem.
I haven't been here in a while, but the Ohio Republic seems to move farther right than it was when it first began. As someone who is politically centrist, I find this disappointing.
Anonymous:
In a republic, when we say that government is the problem, we are calling on the people and their elected representatives to fix it.
Corruption is made possible by bad policy, which in turn was created because we the people (and our media) were either asleeep at the switch or complicit.
This blog may be more blatantly decentralist than it was in 2007, and I have soft-pedaled secessionism a bit lately in the hope that other approaches might prove successful. However, I stand by the principles I wrote in my first post (and for that matter, all the posts under the Basics label.
In short, I favor very limited federal government, very limited state government, and all the local government tbe people want. If that makes me a right-wing extremist, I will wear the label proudly.
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