{"id":10756,"date":"2021-01-20T08:57:42","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T08:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=152226"},"modified":"2021-01-20T08:57:42","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T08:57:42","slug":"enough-with-the-goddamned-secrets-open-up-the-government-joe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/20\/enough-with-the-goddamned-secrets-open-up-the-government-joe\/","title":{"rendered":"Enough with the Goddamned Secrets! Open Up the Government Joe!"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The incoming Biden administration is considering breaking with a long-standing tradition of new presidents sharing national secrets with prior presidents. Instead, in the case of his future predecessor Trump, Biden says he wants to hear the advice of key national security figures in the new government regarding whether or not to brief the impeached ex-chief executive once he\u2019s out the White House door.<\/p>\n

That is not the question Biden should be considering. Rather, he should be opening up about government secrets with the American public, who for far too long have been kept increasingly in the dark.<\/p>\n

The truth is that over the years, especially since the end of World War II, with President Harry Truman\u2019s establishment of a \u201cnational security state\u201d and the launching of the Cold War, the United states, though commonly referred to in our national mythology, in speeches by politicians and in the media as \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest democracy\u201d is actually a bureaucratic state with secrets so deep, dark and wide-spread that, as Daniel Ellsberg reveals in his latest book The Doomsday Machine, even the president and the secretary of defense for generations haven\u2019t been told the actual war plans that the nation would follow in the event of a nuclear conflict with China or Russia.<\/p>\n

The only way we citizens can really know what our government is doing \u2014 at least the significant stuff and virtually anything related to foreign policy or military policy and action \u2014 is when some whistleblower like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden has the guts to leak it out and if our toady corporate-owned media dare to publish or broadcast it. That\u2019s how we learn our government is committing war crimes all the time, how the government is secretly monitoring all our communications, all of us, how it is actively subverting democratic governments around the world, and that our country actually has a policy not of responding to nuclear attack but of being the instigator of any nuclear war.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re supposed to have Freedom of Information, but whenever I file a FOIA request, if I get any response at all, it\u2019s usually composed of completely blank pages, or pages displaying only prepositions and articles, but no nouns or verbs or the positions of people who are doing things that area also whited out. (I once received, in response to a FOIA request for an audit report from the Pentagon\u2019s Inspector General\u2019s office regarding the Navy budget, a document in which the term Navy was redacted in the document title and in every subsequent reference!).<\/p>\n

There is, in practice, no freedom of information in the federal government any longer. There was back in the late \u201970s, briefly, after the Watergate scandal and the exposure of Cointelpro (that was the result of a break-in of a local FBI office and the theft of FBI spying documents by anti-war activists) were investigated in the Senate Church Committee hearings. But that brief era of openness has all been ended.<\/p>\n

Under President Obama, the Espionage Act, a hoary freedom-assaulting relic of World War I, was revivified and \u201cweaponized\u201d against whistleblowers and journalists, who were jailed on the flimsiest of excuses, charged with luring whistleblowers to \u201csteal\u201d government secrets, or charged with \u201ccontempt\u201d of contemptible courts and judges for refusing to name their sources, and jailed, or threatened with jail. That stinking precedent established by the alleged former \u201cconstitutional scholar\u201d president was carried on by President Trump, who has continued the persecution and sought the extradition of journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, still stuck in solitary confinement in a British prison hell-hole as the US pursues an appeal of a magistrate\u2019s denial of her rejection of that requested action.<\/p>\n

All freedom-loving Americans should demand that incoming President Biden reverse this travesty and reverse the onward march of ever more secrecy, with a first immediate step being a restoration of the Freedom of Information Act. Every department and agency of the federal government from the wholly closed-down CIA to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Commerce should be instructed that any request by a citizen for information regarding that unit of the government should be responded to on the basis of openly supplying all information requested unless there is a justifiable reason for not releasing it (the current standard is not to release any information unless the requester can justify its release).<\/p>\n

Openness must be the government\u2019s default response.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s only the start.<\/p>\n

A full review needs to be made of all government secrecy labeling. Almost nothing this government does should be stamped \u201crestricted,\u201d \u201csecret,\u201d \u201ceyes only,\u201d \u201ctop secret,\u201d or higher. Democracy demands openness. A closed government is a tyrannical government.<\/p>\n

If he US sends or posts troops to some country, or bombs some country, whether this is done under orders from the Pentagon or the CIA or some other agency like the Drug Enforcement Agency or NSA, the American people have a right to know about it. If the NSA is spying on us in anything but a spy catching effort, we need to be told and the reason for and scale of the operation should be publicly stated.<\/p>\n

If the Pentagon\u2019s Cyber Command or some other agency or department is spreading false information, hacking or monitoring American media outlets, spying on Americans, or using contacts in American news organizations to spread propaganda, we need to know.<\/p>\n

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (a misnamed body that is not a true court and is not limited in its jurisdiction to just \u201cforeign\u201d surveillance, should be scrapped. If any government agency wants to spy and surveil Americans, that agency should have to first obtain a warrant from a legitimate court or the action should be disallowed.<\/p>\n

Biden has taken one baby step, announcing that the appointment log of visitors to the White House, closed during the Trump and the Bush administration before it, will be reportedly be made public in the new administration. That\u2019s great, but it\u2019s a tiny beginning.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s demand fully open government, period. Unless it\u2019s a legitimate national security issue, let\u2019s demand that meetings of the cabinet with the president be open to the press, and not just as a photo op. Why should such important policy sessions be any different from Congressional committee hearings \u2014 which, incidentally, should all also be open?<\/p>\n

We need real democracy, not the Potemkin democracy that the US has become.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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