Contact
Subscribe


Well, See, Our New Secret Weapon Will Turn Terrorists Into PILLARS OF SALT

Dec 9, 2010
By .
Politics & Current Events

I haven't written about Wikileaks because I am not finished reading about it. I do think that even in a free society a government has a legitimate interest in keeping at least some things secret. But I also think that only a fool would accept, uncritically, the government's own assessment of which secrets it needs to keep. In American law, the state secret privilege — the notion that the government can ask a court to dismiss any lawsuit seeking to vindicate any right, no matter how important, by saying that it will reveal state secrets — is a sham founded on perjury and fraud. People who work for the government will always try to keep as many things secret as they can, because it hides their misconduct, makes them feel important, supports their feeling that citizens are unwashed hoi-palloi who don't know what's good for them, and seems "safer" — in an cover-my-ass sense — than being open.

So it should be no surprise that governments — national, state, and local — continue to make facially ridiculous claims that some things must be secret. Like, for instance, the New Jersey Department of Public Affairs, which believes that national security justifies concealing information about the building of a government barn used to house road salt, under a public order that justifies ignoring the state's open records act when necessary to “protect and defend the state and its citizens against acts of sabotage or terrorism.”

A robust discussion about what government documents ought to be secret is good. A servile and gullible concession that the government can be trusted to draw, and toe, that line is bad.

Via KipEsquire.

Last 5 posts by Ken

5 Comments
Tags

5 Comments

  1. shg  •  Dec 9, 2010 @10:16 am

    Some people just don't appreciate the strategic importance of salt barns. Sure, blame the government for that.

  2. SPQR  •  Dec 9, 2010 @7:11 pm

    The Snail Terrorist Front Unified is planning a preemptive assault on the salt storage facility.

  3. Base of the Pillar  •  Dec 10, 2010 @9:54 am

    Imagine what they could do to people's blood pressure if terrorists got a hold of all that salt!

    On wikileaks, I don't find dumping thousands of raw documents that tell no coherent story or open our eyes to something truly insightful (for good or bad) journalism. At least, no more so than opening a can of cranberry sauce to make a cylindrical sidedish makes my mother a cook. Just dumping diplomatic cables unthoughtfully into the marketplace is more Lorem Ipsum than Carl Bernstein (and the sources of said cables no Mark Felt).

  4. TomH  •  Dec 10, 2010 @6:18 pm

    IMHO, Wikileaks is more an opportunity for journalism, not journalism itself.

  5. Rick C  •  Dec 13, 2010 @4:01 pm

    You know, if you read the article, one of the commenters suggests that this woman's filing for the plans is just the latest in what appear to be a series of maneuvers to kill this barn. "This thing started a few years ago as a wetlands complaint, then a highlands complaint, now it’s a uniform construction code complaint."

    Given that the article says the barn is 38 feet from the woman's property, I wonder how much of this fuss is just her trying to quash it because it interferes with her view, or she doesn't like the noise, or something like that.

    I don't have anything to say about the "homeland security" argument the state is making. I'm just pointing out that the article is very one-sided.