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In the Shrouded Empire - Secrecy, Surveillance, and Subterfuge

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For Mr Abbott and most Western leaders then it seems there is no end to the benefits to be gained by politicians in stoking terrorist fears, lending ample credence to HL Mencken's adage that "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, (and hence clamorous to be led to safety), by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

Meanwhile, back in the "Homeland", James Bovard recently commented on Obama's "sordid" record on transparency and accountability, and is happy to let the math tell the story. After observing that there was an almost thirty-five percent increase in the amount of documents classified "secret" or "top-secret" between 2010 and 2012, he notes somewhat drolly that the amount of information so designated under the Obama administration "is multiplying even faster than congressional ethics scandals."

Moreover he says, the U.S. Justice Department has launched "more than twice as many federal prosecutions" for alleged violations of the Espionage Act as all previous administrations combined.

What makes Obama's security 'initiatives' even harder to swallow than those of the Bush administration is his past history as a constitutional lawyer and much-touted civil liberties enthusiast, the latter attributes something that Bovard in fact underscores with no small measure of irony and dismay. Obama leveraged both of these purported USPs to great effect in his first campaign.

But as any objective observer might be expected to do, Bovard is careful to 'spread the love'. Along with citing the present administration's spurious justifications for bombing Libya and ousting Muammar Gaddafi, and then arming the so-called Syrian "moderates" purportedly to relieve Bashar al-Assad of the burdens of power in that country, he recalls Bill Clinton's depiction in 1999 of the "murderous" Kosovo Liberation (sic) Army as "freedom fighters" (itself reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's impressively euphemistic descriptor of the comparably "murderous" Nicaraguan Contras), and the Bush/Cheney administration's own notoriously bogus rationalizations for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein.

In doing so Bovard is scathing of all three administrations. The secretive and totally deceptive manner in which each administration justified their respective counterfeit claims he says,

".....paved the way to foreign debacles. If Americans had had contemporaneous access to the information in government files, there would have been far more opposition to launching new military assaults. Naturally, politicians do not want that constraint on their power.....The more information the government withholds, the easier it becomes to manipulate public opinion with whatever 'facts' are released. By selectively disclosing only details that support the administration's policies, government prevents citizens from fairly assessing the latest power grabs or interventions."

Tom Englehardt also weighed in with some recent musings on the themes herein; he notes amongst other things that "this vast world of information overload has been plunged into a world of secrecy in which, if it weren't for leakers and whistleblowers, we would never have any intelligence that they didn't want us to have". For Englehardt, the crypto-state system has become intrusive in ways even totalitarian states of the past couldn't have dreamed of, as well as abusive in ways [that are] degrading "almost beyond imagination".

The crypto-statists have he says, "collected more information about all of us than can even be grasped". Along with being "eternally a step behind" in delivering actionable and useful information to the government on "just about any subject we can mention", he goes on to say that irrespective of whether it "works or not, is legal or not, [or] is useful or not", [it] doesn't make any difference to the disparate power players in Washington because,

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Greg Maybury is a Perth (Australia) based freelance writer. His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military and geopolitical affairs, and both US domestic and (more...)
 

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