Ted is often elitist, interventionist, and outright socialist, but this was a good talk:
Daily Archives: 29 July 2010
US says Wikileaks could ‘threaten national security’
The US has condemned as “irresponsible” the leak of 90,000 classified military records, saying their publication could threaten national security.
The documents released by the Wikileaks website include details of killings of Afghan civilians unreported until now.
The records also show Nato concerns that Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency is helping the Taliban in Afghanistan, an accusation Islamabad has denied.
The Pentagon said it might take weeks to ascertain what damage had been done.
(Read more from www.bbc.co.uk)
The Real U.S. Government
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest demonstrates once again why she’s easily one of the best investigative journalists in the nation — if not the best — with the publication of Part I of her series, co-written with William Arkin, detailing the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret U.S. Government: what the article calls “Top Secret America.” To the extent the series receives much substantive attention (and I doubt it will), the focus will likely be on the bureaucratic problems it documents: the massive redundancies, overlap, waste, and inefficiencies which plague this “hidden world, growing beyond control” — as though everything would better if Top Secret America just functioned a bit more effectively. But the far more significant fact so compellingly illustrated by this first installment is the one I described last week when writing about the Obama administration’s escalating war on whistle blowers:
Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance — literally — occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. . . . Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That’s why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They’re one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.