The Age of Incompetence: Part X

The issue of torture won't go away. It sits like a bone in the throat of Americans. Various journalists have attempted to perform a Heimlich maneuver to remove the bone by repeating the bromide, "Let's move on." That bromide was coined by President Obama months ago but it couldn't remove the bone in the throat of too many Americans.

It seems about every half century the United States goes through a crisis of soul and now we have arrived at another one of those defining moments to salvage our national soul - and identity. This is, I believe, a healthy thing because there are always two forces in nature at work: entropy and progress. Evolution embraces both as we see some species decline and some advance.

American-style democracy has come under great stress since the end of World War II. Because of the war there was a need for large defense organizations to come into existence. The Pentagon was born. The Manhattan Project was born. The C.I.A. evolved out of World War II. All these were entropy to democracy because they required secrecy to prosper, just the opposite of what democracy requires to prosper and be healthy.

So a deadly game of cat and mouse began: big government and secrecy versus democracy and openness. Decade by decade democracy and openness lost ground. Prosperity through the 1950s and 1960s masked the deadly consequences from the average American. He hardly noticed what the C.I.A. was doing in Central America or that they manipulated the removal of a democratically elected head of Iran in 1953. The average man was far more worried about the threat from communists in Russia.

It wasn't until the murder of President Kennedy that the average man awoke from his slumber. The more the average man examined the facts of the case, the hard forensics, then the less sense it made, no matter how much the establishment press and the Judith Millers of the era attempted to defend the government's "plausible denial."

But the secrecy cult won the day: they got the evidence locked away under a national security code for the next 75 years until 2039. No one went to jail, there were no trials and most of America went back to their slumber and chasing dreams of bigger houses and cars. But the dagger was plunged in the back of democracy.

The Pentagon Papers and Watergate were more or less damage control kind of inconveniences. Some small fry went to jail, but the big fish, Nixon, was pardoned by Gerald Ford, one of the key figures in the Kennedy murder. Ford was on the Warren Commission and was secretly informing FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover everything that was going on inside the commission, giving Hoover time to cover up anything he didn't want the commission to investigate. So Ford helped put the dagger in the back of democracy and by pardoning Nixon before a trial would reveal the full extent of his crimes, Ford shoved the dagger deeper into the back of democracy.

Gerald Ford is the perfect example of how when the political class is faced with having to face the music for their crimes, they always cover up for one another. Then there is no distinction between Democrats or Republicans: they stand united to block the law and champion secrecy under the concept of "national security."

Iran-Contra was another damage control operation. George H. W. Bush pardoned the offenders so there was no trial, no jail time. It should be noted Bush was once the head of the C.I.A. Another victory for secrecy and another knifing of democracy.

Enter the George W. Bush gang in 2001. Many of them were graduates and interns from the old Ford administration such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and what they had learned was there was no penalty for crimes because secrecy and "national security" always won the day over democracy. It is worth noting here that George W. Bush once ensconced in the White House signed an Executive Order that essentially shut down the examination of all the presidential papers of recent past presidents. Namely Reagan and Bush Sr. It was but the first act of secrecy in what turned out to be eight long years of secrecy: no other administration in American history hid so much behind the veil of secrecy from the public.

It is also worth noting that when Ronald Reagan was a lame duck after the 1988 elections, his last two acts as president were to try to water down the Freedom of Information Act and then to gut the Whistle Blower Act. Evidently Mr. Reagan couldn't resist two last stiletto stabs in the back of democracy. After all what do peasants need with information or as one of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremburg Trials remarked, "Every educated person is a future enemy." - Alfred Rosenberg.

Nothing seems to unnerve and unleash the bile of the authoritarian mind as the freedom of information.

Two generations past the end of World War II we have morphed into a strange figure. What is considered to be normal today to those born after about 1980 is actually a kind of Frankenstein creation, only the surgery has been done in piecemeal so the grotesque figure in the mirror is thought to be normal by millions. During this period democracy has been steadily knifed in the back and lost much of its blood so that although it still has a pulse and is standing it has a deathly pallor.

Candidate Obama said he recognized this malignant cult of secrecy and was going to remove it and heal the victim. But contrary to his promise the Obama administration has gone to court three times and claimed actions of the Bush gang must remain out of the courts and secret under, of course, the State Secret's doctrine. Two of those cases involve illegal wiretaps within the United States.

As USA Today put it, "If the Bush administration's overzealous passion for secrecy was a tragedy, the Obama administration's decision to embrace the Bush legacy has all the elements of hypocrisy...The public apparently doesn't have the right to know why it doesn't have the right to know."

That's the kind of Frankenstein creature we have become: Frankenstein's don't need either minds or souls. All they need to do is obey their masters.

Recently a panel of federal judges slapped the Obama operatives in the face by rejecting their claim of State Secrets in one case. We shall see if the Obama team appeals. Almost certainly they will.

If we cannot make a stand now against the cult of secrecy and restore real democracy then what is left of it won't be worth saving. After the ravages of Stalin the poet Yevtushenko said, "It was a nightmare in which all the thoroughbred horses were eliminated. Horses as a bred survived, but many of them turned out to be horses with the psychology of mice."

So after 50 years of the cult of secrecy we find democracy alive but its survivors with the psychology of mice.