The inside, untold story of CIA's efforts to mislead Congress -- and the people -- about torture will horrify you
I was horrified already. It gets worse.
The upshot.
The upshot.
One century ago, the brilliant German sociologist Max Weber, looking at the calamity of World War I and the wide-ranging struggle it had spawned between intelligence services and parliament, drew a series of far-reaching conclusions about the effects that secrecy would have on democratic government. Tenacious parliamentary oversight of the operations of intelligence agencies was essential, he concluded, if democracy was to survive. The experiences recounted by Sen. Feinstein provided a rare glimpse into precisely the struggle that Weber predicted.
One commentator quipped, “This is death of the republic stuff.” Hyperbole? Maybe not. More precisely it is what Hannah Arendt labeled a “crisis of the republic.” At the peak of popular discontent over the Vietnam War, as the Pentagon Papers were published and highly classified news about the war effort was regularly splashed across the pages of American newspapers, Arendt focused on the use of secrecy and its close ally, the political lie, to impede public discussion of vital national security issues. However, Arendt had high confidence that the crisis would pass—America’s democratic institutions were sound, its press was resilient, and politicians who made bad mistakes regularly saw accountability at the polls.
Forty years later, America faces another crisis of democracy. But now the dynamics have shifted considerably in favor of national security elites. They have carefully calculated the points likely to alarm the public and stir it to action. More effectively than before, they use secrecy not only to cover up their past mistakes but also to wrest from the public decisions about the future that properly belong to the people. Increasingly, Congress seems no match for them.Barack Obama signs on to the unitary executive doctrine of G. W. Bush and the Nixon doctrine that if the President does it, it is legal. That's dictatorship, not democracy.
Salon
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