They've Got A Secret

When government officials say something is secret because it's a matter of national security, they must know what they're talking about, right? They're protecting us, right?

Sometimes, not so much. And with the current bunch in Washington, probably not very often.

Case in point: a woman in the FBI employed as a translator complained about something she thought was pretty shoddy, and would definitely harm national security. She wasn't listened to, let alone rewarded. In fact, she was fired.

She sued. In court, the FBI didn't defend itself for firing her, it didn't explain that her complaint was wrong or crazy, it didn't explain itself at all. The FBI just said they couldn't talk about it because it was a secret, so the judge had to throw the suit out.

What was the secret she would have exposed? That among other things, the person the FBI was sending to Guantanamo to talk to prisoners who spoke Farsi, did not himself speak Farsi.

In this case and in others like it, it wasn't national security that was at stake: it was job security. The officials involved weren't protecting anybody but themselves and their incompetence.

This is what happens when the judiary rolls over for every claim of the militarized executive, as it did in this case. This is what happens when you give people this kind of power without institutional conscience being applied. Without oversight, without checks and balances.
Nobody has yet come up with an example of an enemy getting a secret that damaged national security from a judge or a Congressional body monitoring for abuse of power, nor for that matter of a press report.

That the people running things in Washington are on the whole hopelessly incompetent if not venal opportunists, and the fact that they are the most secrecy minded bunch in American history, kind of matches up well. When you're a screwup, you'd naturally like to keep that a secret. When what you're really doing, and the reasons for doing it, are not what you tell the public, that's another swell reason for slapping Top Secret on everything, and telling judges that they can't judge, and investigators they can't investigate, because it's all a big Secret.

Well, their Secret is out. They can't handle the truth. They can't operate in a constitutional democracy. They can only flourish in their petty darkness.

UPDATE: A Supreme Court decision today seems to limit protection of whistleblowers by denying free speech protection to speech as a government employee with their employers. The case was brought by a lawyer in a DA's office who complained that a warrant was issued on falsd pretenses. While this 5-4 decision isn't likely to encourage better or more honest governance, it ironically encourages whistleblowers to go directly to the public, where their speech is protected.