In “Criminal Inquiry Opens Into Spying Leak,” Trent Duffy, spokesman for President Bush in Crawford, Texas, read the following from a prepared statement:
The leaking of classified information is a serious issue. The fact is that Al Qaeda’s playbook is not printed on Page 1, and when America’s is, it has serious ramifications. You don’t need to be Sun Tzu to understand that (Shane, 2005).
Unlike Bush and Duffy, Sun Tzu did understand the ramifications of the President’s stance, and why it is ineffective as well as wrong.
First of all, Al Qaeda’s playbook is printed on Page 1. The US intelligence community, military and nonmilitary, has long been considered poor on basic library research skills. Whether they don’t value them, emphasizing fieldwork over homework, or don’t make use of the results when they don’t like what they find is moot. The intelligence community and the Bush administration have made numerous mistakes that most reasonably informed citizens knew were mistakes. Many folks here and abroad told this administration why in time to prevent the errors. The administration ignored them.
It’s not that Bush and the US intelligence community don’t know that a good researcher can find out just about anything they want to know about every organization and entity in the world at the public library. They do know that. That’s why they are very concerned about who’s reading what at the library.
You don’t need a library to find out how to make a bomb, dirty or otherwise, or any of the lethal, terrorist things that Bush claims justifies spying on American citizens including what they look at when in the library. You can find out all that stuff on the Internet. Even Al Qaeda’s playbook. It’s not like it or any other terrorist group has been innovative. The same as their US intelligence counterparts (and they are mirror images of each other), they have little imagination and a lot of arrogance. They follow each other like sheep doing what the other does. See what the US does and you know what the terrorist groups will do. Watch the terrorist groups and learn the next move of the US.
You need the library to delve into the kinds of records where effective means of changing institutions can be found. You need a library to research the root causes of current problems using primary sources so that you can resolve the underlying issues. You need the library to check the written record, which can be and is sometimes altered on a web site, whether personal or government. Good decision-making as well as innovation come from informed thought–something noticeably lacking in the current White House occupants.
But, secondly and most importantly, any branch of government unilaterally keeping secrets from the other branches only benefits the evil-doers. The bad guys, whether in government or elsewhere, all get to make unsubstantiated claims of questionable accuracy. Concealed under the cloak of those claims, they all get to follow personal agendas which may or may not have anything to do with their avowed purposes.
As most US citizens know, the reason our founders created three major branches of government–executive, legislative, and judicial–was to provide checks and balances through review of each other’s actions. They knew that no single branch of government could be counted on to do its job properly without being checked and balanced by others of equal stature and force. History showed that only too clearly.
Indeed, there are no modern examples of secret, autocratic governments, such as we see now with the Bush administration, with a flourishing middle class except in the short term. This kind of government only benefits a very limited group of wealthy elite and their cronies. These governments have all ended or are ending badly–usually not just for the government itself but also for the people in the country as well.
Even Machiavelli warned against government that trampled the rights of the governed and decreased their benefits. Instead, the Bush administration has been following the “playbook” set out by the Spanish Inquisition and calling those methods of governance and interrogation innovative and legal. Water boarding is new? Oh please.
But you don’t have to be particularly well-read to see the effects of autocratic rule, just be a parent. You may get your children to submit to your will, but they then become sneaky to get their way while building up resentment at your lack of fairness. Think back to when you were a child. “Do what I say not what I do” doesn’t work as a parenting rule of thumb. Children do what they see done. It doesn’t work for governance either.
It doesn’t matter if all prisoners say they aren’t guilty. The fact is that prisoners tend to know who is and isn’t guilty, and treating the innocent the same as the guilty emphasizes to both innocent and guilty that actual innocence and guilt don’t matter. Who you are matters and who your friends are–and, most importantly, not getting caught matters. Muzzling the whistle-blowers (if you are the government) and snitches (if you are the guilty–and who says the government and the guilty can’t be one and the same) matters. Maintaining a smokescreen matters.
Being innocent is no shield against mistreatment and torture, so the obvious conclusion is there’s little benefit to abiding by the law. The guilty hide since getting caught is the only meaningful problem in such a situation and elude the authorities. The innocent are gathered up indiscriminately, or turned in by the bigoted or people with a grudge against them, and tortured until they confess to whatever it is their torturers want to hear.
We don’t need citizens to feel they won’t be protected from abuse by the government and malicious neighbors. We don’t need citizens to feel the government acts to benefit only itself and its cronies at citizens’ expense. We don’t need scofflaws in government. Those things encourage general lawlessness and swell the ranks of terrorists.
And, that means we need what our Constitution sets forth, open government. Disperse the smoke. People must see what’s happening and decide what is right and what is wrong. In this country, oversight is done by our elected representatives. The innocent need to know they will have due process so that they can demonstrate their innocence, and continue to feel there is value in being law-abiding.
The three branches of government must be equal and responsible partners–even in wartime.
And, when judged wrong, the offending branch of government must stop its wrongdoing, not persecute the people who point out its mistakes. The other two branches of government have a responsibility to make the offending branch stop if it refuses to do so voluntarily. Everyone hopes that no one will step over the line on his or her watch, but when it happens, dealing with it is the responsibility that goes with the perks of office.
We shouldn’t be maintaining concentration camps to hold people on the basis of their religion or gulags for political prisoners. Not here, not anywhere. Unfortunately, we only have the word of an administration which has repeatedly been caught in blatant and gross falsehoods that there has been any benefit at all in its harassing and imprisoning people in these places, and only its word that religion and politics don’t form the bases for the harassment and imprisonment. It sure looks like religion and politics are the bases. People, including American soldiers, are dying or being grievously and permanently injured because of Bush administration falsehoods.
History says not only is there no benefit to religious and political persecution, but such actions harm the country that allows those things to continue.
Bush and Duffy need to take time out from vacationing and frat-house partying to actually read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Machiavelli’s The Prince (not the CliffsNotes version, but the unabridged version). Those two books may be the most misunderstood yet most (mis)quoted ever written to justify the unjustifiable by ignorant autocrats. How this administration behaves both at home and abroad and excuses its behavior have been shown for centuries to be the action mainstays of losers.
Oh, and the US Constitution also frowns on it.
Reference:
Scott Shane, Criminal Inquiry Opens Into Spying Leak, New York Times, December 31, 2005.
Diana Kirk, a researcher and analyst with several think tanks, including the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute), and Rand Corporation before founding her company, The Writer’s Place, has taught social science research methodologies at Stanford University and Mills College. See also The Write Stop (writestop.com), WordStar & GNU/Linux (wordstar2.com), and the WordStar Users Group Community (wordstar2.com/WordStar_Users) for her various interests.
