{"id":119,"date":"2006-02-02T07:29:46","date_gmt":"2006-02-02T12:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=119"},"modified":"2006-02-02T07:48:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-02T12:48:00","slug":"the-information-curtain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2006\/02\/02\/the-information-curtain\/","title":{"rendered":"the information curtain…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I wrote, then discarded, a post analogizing the Bush Administration to a stage play in which what we see is carefully orchestrated, and the truth is "backstage." I discarded it because it didn’t quite say what I was feeling. This morning, a better analogy occurred to me – "the iron curtain." Wikipedia discusses the iron curtain<\/strong><\/a> as a physical barrier, fences and walls, that surrounded the Soviet Union from the inception of Communism until it’s fall, though the term was popularized in a 1945 speech by Winston Churchill. But the "iron curtain" was more that a physical barrier, it was an information barrier as well – a bidirectional information barrier. The rest of the world knew almost nothing about what happened inside the Soviet Bloc, and the Russian people received little information from the "outside." It has been said that what brought down the Soviet Union was the Information Age, the Internet and Fax machines. Once the flow of information could no longer be controlled and the Russian people knew what was going on in the world and within their country, the government lost control and "the rest is history." It’s a good metaphor for what I’ve been thinking about the Bush Administration. <\/p>\n

National Security is the only justification that I can think of for government secrecy in a free society. Privacy is a right of citizens, not government. <\/strong>Government is "of the people, by the people, for the people." Government in this country is not a separate, self-contained entity. It’s a part of us. But right now, I think of our government as being behind a wall. That’s why I was thinking about the theatrical metaphor, because what we see feels "staged." But it’s bigger than that. If you go to a play, you accept that it’s staged – you know it. It’s a contract of illusion. We call it a "play," a "pretend." What’s happening in our government right now may be a "pretend," but there’s no contract between the government and the people that legitimizes it, and it’s anything but "playful."<\/p>\n

There is a monumental mistake on the table right now. We went to war preemptively with Iraq based on the pressured assurances from our government that they were a real threat to our safety. We now know that they weren’t, and we’re still at it. The government says "whoops" and blames it on bad intelligence. We know that’s not true, that the intelligence was jury rigged, yet getting access to the information about that is exhausting because it is resisted at every turn. We know that the Administration outed Valerie Plame to discredit her husband, and that it was an attempt to cover-up the manipulation of prewar intelligence. Getting at the truth has been exhausting, and met with resistance at every turn. We now find out that there are missing emails in the evidence turned over to the Prosecutor from the President’s and Vice President’s offices. This deceit and disinformation has nothing to do with National Security.<\/p>\n

Recently, we’ve found out that the N.S.A., one of those agencies that deals with National Security issues abroad has been listening in on domestic communication with no judicial review, in spite of the fact that Congress said "No." We know that the President claims to have the authority to do this as a National Security issue. Many of us, probably most of us, disagree that he has that authority. Congress is about to look into it and has asked for the government documents addressing the legality of unwarranted domestic eavesdropping. We learn this morning<\/a><\/strong> in the New York Times<\/strong><\/font> that the government is saying we only need to look at the 42 page hastily prepared statement by the more than partisan Attorney General, that we don’t need the documents from the justice department from before the existence of this program was revealed. We know that we do, indeed, need to see those documents from a well investigated article in Newsweek<\/strong><\/font>, Palace Revolt<\/strong><\/a>. Again, the Adminstation is arguing that we should only see what they want us to see.<\/p>\n

I guess it’s not an "iron curtain." There are no fences or walls. It’s an information curtain<\/strong><\/font> that appears at almost every juncture. President Clinton was impeached for lying. I, for one, don’t agree with the argument that his lie was okay because it was about his private life, or that it had nothing to do with government. He chose public life and he did lie. Shame on him. But what’s happening here is so much more ominous. In the N.S.A. case, the Administration is saying we don’t need to see the Justice Department’s deliberations about the N.S.A. Domestic Spying program. Who are they to say what we need? There’s no threat to National Security for our government’s legal department to tell us what it’s been doing. The Justice Department apparently rationalized something that seems both irrational and illegal. It’s our Justice Department, not the Administration’s! We not only have a right to know what they did – they have an obligation to tell us.<\/p>\n

Somebody please, tear down this wall!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote, then discarded, a post analogizing the Bush Administration to a stage play in which what we see is carefully orchestrated, and the truth is "backstage." I discarded it because it didn’t quite say what I was feeling. This morning, a better analogy occurred to me – "the iron curtain." Wikipedia discusses the iron […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}