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Humor Times blog - by James Israel

I publish a monthly paper called the Humor Times, available via subscription anywhere in the world. This blog allows me to comment in a more timely manner on current events, etc., since, after all, I have plenty to say!

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Informed electorate sorely needed

"A popular government, with out popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy. A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives them." – James Madison

Indeed, an informed electorate is the life blood of democracy. And yet, here in this "information age," we are seeing the most secretive administration ever, so paranoid of an informed citizenry that they even classify information that has long been public!

On August 21st, the Washington Post ran a story based on a report from the National Security archive, a research library at George Washington University. According to the report, the Bush administration has been deleting previously public information on the nation’s strategic military capabilities capabilities. All, it says, in the name of national security.

Well, sure, we wouldn’t want to give away any top secret information that could help enemies harm us. However, the information they are "protecting" dates back to the Cold War! These include memos, charts and papers that over the past fifty years or more have been cited in open congressional hearings, used in history books and reported in newspapers. It even includes information the government long ago deemed innocuous enough to provide even to its former mortal enemy, the Soviet Union!

As Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald said, "This is a classic case of locking the barn after the horse has escaped – and died of old age." In Pitts’ report, he continued, "From its 18-hour black out of news that the vice president had shot a man, to its paying a newspaper columnist to write favorable pieces, to its habit of putting out video press releases disguised as TV news, to its penchant for stamping top secret on any thing that doesn’t move fast enough, this administration has repeatedly shown contempt for the right of the people to know what’s going on."

Indeed, one might wonder what fuels such paranoia. But we already know. It’s the same paranoia that causes them to have their lawyers do back flips trying to explain how the Geneva Conventions aren’t applicable any more, how it’s ok for America, land of the free, to hold people with out charge indefinitely, use torture, and invade countries at will. These people are guilty of voluminous crimes, as documented extensively in Congressman John Conyers’ recent report, "The Constitution in Crisis." The staggering report gives hard evidence of a multitude of crimes and abuses committed by President Bush and his administration. No wonder they’re paranoid!

This is no way to run a free country. And the constant efforts to diminish our civil liberties to "defeat the terrorists" is also quite counter-productive. After all, what are we defending, if not our freedoms?