Who Cares? - Part 2

The most consequential news item of the week will obviously be -- or at least should be -- the massive new leak by WikiLeaks of 90,000 pages of classified material chronicling the truth about the war in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009. Those documents provide what The New York Times calls "an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal."

  Salon

Surprise!

The Guardian describes the documents as "a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency."

And I expect this to have about the same effect that last week's Post expose regarding the US Police Security State had. Pretty much none.

It's not difficult to foresee, as Atrios predicted, that media "coverage of [the] latest [leak] will be about whether or not it should have been published," rather than about what these documents reveal about the war effort and the government and military leaders prosecuting it.

[...]

Anyone who believes that the Government abuses its secrecy powers and then uses that lack of transparency to keep the citizenry in the dark and manipulate public opinion -- and who, at this point, doesn't believe that? -- should be squarely on the side of the greater transparency which Wikileaks and its sources, sometimes single-handedly, are providing.

[...]

Just as was true for the video of the Appache helicopter attack in Baghdad, there is no valid justification for having kept most of these documents a secret. But that's what our National Security State does reflexively: it hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing.

Which leads us nicely into this: you already know that the government can shut you out and effectively shut you up by claiming state secrets to withhold documentation or even deny you the right to file a lawsuit. But maybe you didn't know that the precedent for the government's privilege is based on a lie and a coverup.

[The landmark case, U.S. v. Reynolds, that established the state-secret doctrine in the Supreme Court] never did involve anything even remotely resembling "state secrets." When the [report of the plane accident that was the subject of the lawsuit] was declassified in the 1990s, all it contained was a dry summary of glaring negligence: engine maintenance orders (designed to prevent the fire) that had been ignored, negligent aircraft operation by the pilots, and a failure even to train the civilians on escape procedures or parachute operation.

  Seattle Times

The Supreme Court ruled in the early fifties that the government could refuse to allow any lawsuit it wanted based only on its claim of state secrets. The Court did so without even having read the documents that the government in Reynolds claimed contained state secrets. They did not – a fact that was learned when the documents were declassified. And from that day in 1952 continuing even now, based on government lies and Supreme Court complicity, our government is permitted to deny to anyone the basic right of bringing a lawsuit to address an injustice, merely by claiming state secrets privilege.

We haven't had our democracy in a very long time. Our rights have expired, as Mr. Thomas Jefferson might have said.