What do we know? We know that things are kept secret from the American people supposedly because the government wants to keep it secret from our enemies, but too frequently the so called enemies have knowledge of the supposed secrets and only American Citizens, who should be the ones who know are kept away from the secrets that aren’t really secret at all.

Looking at this strange dance with truth, would make a person wonder if the whole idea is not to keep information secret from our enemies, but to create such a vast amount of official secrets that politicians and business can hide the crimes they commit against the people.

I think that no secret should last more than 6 months before becoming a matter of public record. I think Americans are unlikely to be able to understand the importance of government actions if we don’t know what it is they are doing. How can we supervise our elected and appointed officials if they keep hiding their crimes from the American People by the fiction of “Top Secret”?

“A good start?” BS. This was leaked on the day that Judge Vaughn Walker is scheduled to hear arguments on the Al Haramain case in Northern California. Here’s how blogger BMAZ described the government’s problems:

“The al-Haramain case is a perfect storm of problems for the government, there is warrantless wiretapping, the surveillance invaded an attorney-client relationship, there is known proof in the form of the sealed surveillance log under the protective custody of the court, and at least some of the surveillance is known to have occurred during the period after the infamous “John Ashcroft hospital scene” when Jim Comey and other DOJ officials revolted and the Bush Administration was unquestionably illegally operating their program under the insufficient signature of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.

But the monster problem that may be lurking beneath even this surface is that when Bush’s DOJ submitted declarations to the court describing their program and why state secrets were being invoked in 2006, they did not describe the underlying process by which they picked targets, to wit data mining. And the existence of data mining is a huge problem, because all activities in that regard had been rendered illegal and were specifically defunded by Congress in the Appropriations bill for that year.”

The DOJ is hoping to sway Judge Walker with this dog-and-pony show about “policy reform”. Fortunately, so far the judge has shown nothing but scorn for the government’s tactics and will probably do so again.

WOW this is about fifty years over due. Misuse of
security classifications should be a felony with long
jail terms and no statute of limitations. Add to that a
special inquest process that automatically has full
clearance to access all security files on demand with
no redactions from all agencies.