State Secrets

Obama’s Department of Justice is continuing to support a policy of Bush’s Department of Justice – one that Obama explicitly campaigned against.

It’s all about state secrets.

There is such a thing as a State Secret. I’m all about transparency in government, but I acknowledge that there is information gathered by our intelligence agencies that cannot be immediately shared with the general populace, and that there is information about our government’s capabilities and activities that needs to be kept from our enemies and therefore may need to be kept from the general populace also. The fact is that some stuff is just Need To Know.

But we do need to balance this somehow, which brings us back to transparency in government. It would be very easy for our government, in its quest to protect us or to protect the interests of our country, to undertake a program of truly evil actions in our name. Some level of vigilance has to be exercised in order to prevent this.

Civil courts are often part of this process of vigilance and transparency.

The state secrets privilege was first recognized by the US Supreme Court in 1953. Family of civilians killed as a result of a crashed B-29 bomber sued the government for information as to the cause of the crash. In recognizing the state secrets privilege, the court allowed the government to withhold evidence from the proceedings.

But the proceedings did continue with whatever evidence was admitted.

Evidently in the following 24 years – between 1953 and 1976, inclusive – the government invoked the state secrets privilege 4 times, including the original case.

After 9/11 the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege 23 times.

But wait! There’s more! President Bush’s Department of Justice used the state secrets privilege to have cases entirely thrown out of court. They didn’t just withhold sensitive information.

This is what Obama promised to end. State secrets will continue to exist, and the state secrets privilege may need to be invoked from time to time in the interests of national security, but it should not prevent court cases from proceeding, albeit lacking whatever secret information is withheld.

And yet this policy is what Obama's Department of Justice is inexplicably continuing.

The court case in which this policy is being upheld is one that concerns Extraordinary Rendition – the tendency of our intelligence agencies to transport suspects to fun places like Syria in order to have Syrian intelligence have a go at them, since they use interrogation techniques that we ... do not.

This has evidently been done to innocent people.

And information about the particular case that is slowly making its way through the court system has been reported in the press.

So what remains to be withheld?

There’s only a few possible conclusions I can draw from all this.

• One possibility is that President Obama has gone mad with power.
• Another possibility is that he reserves the right to go mad with power at some point in the next 4 to 8 years.
• And the last possible explanation is that whatever information has not yet come to light about the practice of extraordinary rendition – or related intelligence gathering practices - is amazingly, amazingly horrible.

Between this and Obama’s flip-flop on the FISA legislation, I find that I’m concerned about whatever he knows that I don’t.

I remain an Obama supporter. Fundamentally I believe that Obama is trying to change things for the better. But it appears that he must have become informed of something that our government has done or is doing (in the course of its intelligence gathering) that he has decided must remain unknown, for our safety, and for the safety of our country.

I leave it to the more seasoned conspiracy-theorists out there to go on about Black Sites and Total Information Awareness and whatnot. I personally am hesitant to speculate further about what exactly it is we have done – what it is we are doing – that must remain a state secret. All I can say is that something is being done in the name of our safety, and its something that - in the name of our safety - we evidently can't be allowed to know about.

Important news

I try to stay informed. Really I do. In my quest to be aware of current events I read news when I ought to be doing other things. As a consequence I know about the drought in China that is causing a "National Emergency" there, about the simultaneous floods in Australia and in Fiji and in the Solomon Islands, about the slow disappearance of the Maldives and of Kiribati and their populations' hope to relocate, about Iceland's new Prime Minister who happens to be the first openly gay leader of a nation, about the fact that China bought more cars and trucks in January than the US did and that this is the first time this has ever happened for any month, ever...

But sometimes important news slips through the cracks. News that, evidently, is of great importance to many people. And I missed this one until today:

Jessica Simpson has gained weight.

My reaction to this news is different than most, though. My reaction is Thank God. That woman was just too skinny.

Evidently I am out of step, though. According to the Daily Beast (my preferred news site these days) other media outlets are referring to Simpson as a “fat cow”.

The Daily Beast goes on to talk about the weight-loss industry and what an incredible opportunity this is for Jessica to cash in – provided she can lose the weight. Evidently she could easily get a 7-figure sponsorship from Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem or others if she simply hawks their products in the course of losing the weight. If she stops losing the weight – and definitely if she gains weight – then she’s out. All-gone-money.

Let me take this opportunity to state for the record that if someone wants to pay me upwards of a million dollars to get in shape then I will make that my full-time job.

That stated, I don’t think Jessica should lose the weight. I mean, if there’s millions of dollars involved then sure, go for it Jessica, but if there’s not and it’s all about image then I just gotta say I much prefer the new image.

I haven’t done a full web search for photos, so maybe I’m not seeing what others are seeing. All I’ve seen are these two photos:



And I gotta say, I much prefer the one on the right.

That is all. Thank you for your attention.

UPDATE: In other terribly important news, it turns out that Miley Cyrus is a teenager.

We have to spend on infrastructure

News is trickling out that the stimulus is not going to pass as written, and that a plan to add infrastructure spending to the stimulus did not garner sufficient support.

I'm sorry, didn't a bridge collapse in Minnesota recently because we've not been spending sufficiently on infrastructure?

And people need jobs. When people are unemployed they stop spending, and then the companies whose products aren't being bought and whose services aren't being used have to lay people off. The pool of unemployed grows and the problem worsens.

We need to employ people.

During the New Deal the government employed people through the WPA and other programs, and by doing so the government accomplished - among other things - the following:

"The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters."

Well, we need to repair our existing infrastructure. We always need more hospitals, schools, and teachers. We need to make some fundamental changes to our electrical infrastructure - transmission lines to take wind-power from where it's generated to where it's needed, smart grids to make energy use more efficient and less expensive. Simply put, there's work to be done.

Normally the markets take care of this. Something needs to be done and from the market emerges companies competing to do it.

But the market is broken just now. Companies are cutting back on the spending that would be necessary to enable them to do the jobs we need. Also states and municipalities are cutting back on spending on the necessary infrastructure changes, so even if there were companies to do it, who's going to pay them?

The government has to step in and pay to get things done, and we need to let them. In the process, folks will be employed, and those employed folks will spend money on various goods and services.

Employment good. Unemployment bad. It's simple, really.

Does it have to get worse before we'll allow our government to start addressing the situation in a meaningful manner?

Personally, I think we should pass an infrastructure bill. Not an economic stimulus package. An infrastructure bill. We need the infrastructure upgrades, and people need jobs.

Also, we don't know what a stimulus package is going to do, exactly, but we know what an infrastructure upgrade is, or what it can be, anyway. It can be what it was in the New Deal, and in the process it will provide economic stimulus as a convenient side effect.