Tag Archives: 911

The Problem With Our Government and Classified Information

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For those of you who already know me or about me, you know I used to be a counterintelligence agent. I worked with and about classified information. It was basically my job. What I’m about to say now is probably going to be taken as a bit of hypocrisy or at least with a sense of strangeness. You see, I don’t think most of what is classified these days really should be classified at all. I’m being nice by saying “most”, but in actuality, I mean none of it.

The first part of the problem is that we classify way too much. If some decision-maker thinks there’s a fear of our “enemies” finding out something about what we’re doing, he or she immediately feels that information needs to be classified. In my time, I’ve seen people feel the need to classify newspaper articles. Yeah, I’m serious. Mass-printed and mass-distributed newspaper articles. Someone in our government (and by someone, I mean a LOT of people) reads an article in a newspaper and then decides that information needs to be classified, so it gets made “Confidential”. Then someone up that chain reads the release, feels it’s even more dangerous if our enemies find ou about it and upgrades it to “Secret” or even “Top Secret.” Meanwhile, some farmer in Utah is reading that exact document with his morning coffee because it came from a newspaper, not from the CIA. Yeah, that happens a lot.

Which brings me to the philosophical part of the argument. If we were an autocratic government, or a dictatorship, or some country that basically lives its existence by doing evil deeds in the shadows, well, then, I would think we need to classify a lot of things. But that’s not supposed to be our government. We’re supposed to be a nation that exists as one where the people make the decisions. The people decide who goes into office. The people decide who creates new laws. And at a lot of times, we vote for a lot of the laws that run our very lives. At no time did we elect a dictator-in-chief, nor did we ever sign up for a Master-of-Secrets. We have a free press because our news people are supposed to be able to tell us what’s really going on so we can properly decide on the right people to keep representing us for the laws we would like to see enacted.

A perfect society should have no secrets. At all.

I know the immediate response to this is “but what about our enemies???” The thought is that we need to keep certain information from our enemies to make sure they don’t know what actions we are taking against them.

Okay, why are we taking actions against anyone to begin with? Cause they don’t like us? Cause they hate us? Cause they do dastardly things targeted at us?

What would change if we were more upfront about the information we collect? We have entire police agencies that operate mostly in the sunlight, yet they are still quite capable of stopping a lot of really bad people. Sometimes, they don’t tell the whole story of what they’re doing, and most of the time when that information has been revealed, it turns into a bit of a scandal, and the Monday Morning Quarterbacks indicate that they probably should have been a lot more honest about what they were doing. And even if that wasn’t the case, our police agencies collect information until they make the arrest. And then the courts are privy to the information. We generally don’t try people with “secret” information. The few times we have tried to do that, it has backfired horribly. And yeah, I know there are a couple of instances going on where we’re doing exactly that. Mark my words: Those will backfire horribly, too.

An important question to ask is why do we have enemies in the first place that we have to keep information from? I think if we dug deep enough, we could probably find some circumstances we did in the past that made things as they are. Some, maybe not. But that still doesn’t indicate a reason for having to keep information confidential from people we generally don’t trust. If the Iranians know that we have lots of cruise missiles on ships parked off their coast, knowing about it is probably not going to do them a whole lot of good. But even so, I’m not advocating telling our “enemies” about our troop movements, but about changing our mindset from one of secrecy to one of sunshine diplomacy. We are a very powerful country. If a potential enemy sees us on their doorstep, classifying stupid memos doesn’t change the fact that they’re going to realize that they’re being watched, and they’re being watched by a pretty powerful potential foe.

You see, the problem I perceive is that our secrecy is being used as a type of cloaked power that it was never designed to be. The press, our check on government, is told that it can’t find certain things out because of “national security” when most people know there’s absolutely no national security at stake in most cases that phrase is used. What’s generally at stake is embarrassing information that certain actors don’t want to reveal to the press because it might cause them to lose their leverage in the cloaked power of secrecy they currently maintain. A fresh slate means that people can make honest decisions based on honest observations. Way too often in the past, someone in power has stated that something cannot be revealed because “government knows better”, which is slang for “some moron in government thinks he knows better than you do.” Sorry, but I call them as I see them.

The biggest problem I perceive in my suggestion is that people will constantly cling to the old adages of Cold War philosophy, thinking that diplomacy is a weapon rather than a tool. We still think in terms of how another country can benefit us rather than how we can use this mega machine of democracy to develop more democracies and, in turn, fix our own. Because in case you don’t realize it, since 911, we’ve moved further away from democracy than we have in decades, and we’re still cascading down that path towards oppression. And most of us don’t even see it because we’ve been blinded by nearly a century of having gone the other way.

Government should never be used as a vehicle to drive over its citizens, but as an implement to take those citizens to somewhere better. Right now, we’re going through a pre-election period where absolutely NONE of the candidates are talking about that better road. Well, one of them maybe, but he’s being cast aside as inconvenient rather than as an actual player. Which means we’re going to have nearly an entire decade of continuing to travel down the wrong path without ever realizing we’re not even traveling to the place we set out to go when we first started.

How Do You Steer a Rudderless Movement?

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When the Tea Party first emerged, one of the notable features of the gatherings was the simple fact that there appeared to be no leadership whatsoever. However, as time passed, a few people became the spokespeople for the movement, and now whenever the “organization” is discussed, people can point at a few politicians and say “that’s their leader”. However, at one point, there were no leaders, and when the news media was trying to get comments from the protesters, it was very interesting to see how they tried to manage the fact that there was no one to actually interview.

Fast-forward to today, and we have yet another movement taking place that has virtually no leadership whatsoever. Unlike the Tea Party movement, this “organization” tends to hail from the liberal side of the political spectrum, but like the Tea Party, it shares the one attribute of having more in common with anarchy than actual political representation. The movement I’m talking about, of course, is the Take Back Wall Street movement that is currently occupying a lot of the current news.

It is yet another fascinating moment in people politics because it has absolutely no organization and has more in common with flash mobs than it does in any previous type of organizing behavior. Most events tend to be sporadic, immediate and out of nowhere, but unlike a flash mob, these movements tend to be stationary once they actually occur, meaning they don’t appear and then go away a few minutes, or hours, later.

But there are no leaders. And because of that, it is very difficult to determine exactly what they want, or what it would take to make them satisfied. The consensus, if there is one, is that people are outraged, upset and not going to take it any more, but when it comes to defining what they’re outraged about, why they’re upset, or what exactly they’re not going to take any more, that’s a little less apparent. Taking it one step further, what they actually want to fulfill their movement’s charter, if there was one, is even less tangible.

Analyzing it, they appear to be upset that Wall Street, or the people who work on Wall Street, have their own interests in mind at the expense of the rest of the country, or world. The claim is often made that the 1% (those who profit off of Wall Street antics) are profiting at the expense of the rest of the 99% of the country (and world). So, the desire is to somehow convince the 1% that the 99% are not going to take it any longer, and if things don’t change, that 99% is going to do something. What exactly, I’m not sure. No one else appears to know either. But they’re pissed, and they’re going to do “something” if “something” isn’t done to change things.

With a charter like that, it appears very difficult to figure out what they’re going to want or need to appease their members. Even worse, there’s no way to figure out who their members are, or even if they would be satisfied if “something” was done to appease them in the first place. I’m reminded of Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action, in which he pointed out that people have a tendency to free ride their way through collective action, expecting to achieve results but aren’t willing to do much to achieve those results. There appears to be a lot of free rider activity going on here, as was noticed during a recent Chicago flash mob of the Take Back Wall Street variation, reported by the Wall Street Journal, in which an independent trader named Roger Brownworth points out that he was disappointed at the turnout (he had seen only about 20 protesters), but at the same time didn’t seem all that interested in joining it himself.

But Olson isn’t the only source that should be of interest here. I’m also reminded of Poor People’s Movements by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (a great book, I HIGHLY recommend), who remind us that when people get together and form major movements to benefit their own interests, they’re often appeased by very minor reforms or benefits and then don’t show up for future gatherings, convinced that because there was such great outpouring the first time, they won’t be expected to show up for the next one, kind of backing up Olson’s projection. The Chicago gathering is a direct example of Piven and Cloward’s argument.

But that’s the movement itself, which in Piven and Cloward’s book usually points at an organization that has some type of leadership. With the Take Back Wall Street movement, we have no apparent leader where everything seems to be organized a lot like a flock of birds all turning together at the same time as a part of a social being rather than a collaboration of like-minded individuals. During the Gulf War protests during the Bush Administration, many gatherings of protesters were similar to this flash mob mentality, but quite often they were derailed by one or two individuals doing something uniquely ridiculous, like Woody Harrelson trying to climb up the gratings of the Bay Bridge during a San Francisco protest. Other major demonstrations were often turned by one or two individuals who acted as spontaneous agitators, yelling out something like “let’s take City Hall” which would cause throngs of people to start running off in one direction, causing a riot where a peaceful gathering was taking place only moments before.

That’s probably the biggest fear we have right now as when you have a mob (the obvious physical make-up of a flash “mob”), there’s a very real possibility that an agitator or two, either spontaneously or surreptitiously placed, may cause a group of people to react in a way that they were not intending to do when they first gathered to protest over concerns they may have had about injustices and unfairness. How many major sport events have turned violent because one or two individuals started doing or saying something stupid that somehow riled up a group of people who were already excited by the happenings of the particular event they were attending? Quite a few actually. Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book Blink that one of the biggest problems with excitable events, like a police car chase, is the excitement of the chase itself, which often can lead to adrenalin requiring some kind of release, which would explain why so many car chases end up with a physical altercation that might not have happened if people hadn’t been overly excited by the chase in the first place. The same thing occurs at these major social gatherings, like sports events, or for the sake of this essay, a flash mob. People are excited, they are yelling, and quite often it only takes a nudge in one direction for a group of people to start doing things they might not normally have done if they weren’t already overly excited.

Which means, there’s a good chance that one of these Take Back Wall Street events is going to turn violent if they continue to remain without leadership. However, if someone, or some people, arrives to take charge of this venue, there’s no promise that the presence of leadership is guaranteed to be in any way more positive. History is replete with examples of mob leaders who did some pretty horrific things once empowered with that ability to lead a group of people. And then there’s the equal fear that the emergence of leadership might doom the movement in the first place. Since the creation of “leaders” for the Tea Party movement, the spontaneous nature of that process has diminished greatly because a lot of the people who originally affiliated themselves with an unaffiliated organization never really fell in line with self-proclaimed wannabe leaders like Palin, Bachman, and the 70 or so Republican legislators who have claimed ties to the Tea Party foundations. Many of its members have actually gone underground, realizing that what they had to complain about was never solved by having people claim their throne in their name while never actually espousing their true beliefs.

The same problems may be seen for a Take Back Wall Street movement. The current crop of wannabe leaders already showing up are the likes of Michael Moore and other already entrenched in Washington political Democrats who see the movement as a way to shore up more support for their positions they already hold. There is also the tendency of the media to try to control the movement so it can be easier to report. CNN is already reporting How Occupy Wall Street Has Evolved, when CNN is still as clueless as the movement itself as to how it is changing, what it actually stands for, and what it actually intends to do.

What’s probably most significant is that a movement is underway, but no one knows where it is heading. It can become distruptive, like the Bolsheviks in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, it can be innovative like the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, it can transform like the recent Arab Spring, or it may write its own chapter of unforseen future circumstances. Either way, it probably shouldn’t be ignored.

Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism, Being an American and Rejoicing in Death

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For some reason, this has been gnawing at me all day. Fortunately, I’ve had one of those days where I’ve sat behind a computer and had to work on meticulous details about a health care module I’m building, so I’ve had little time to really reflect on anything. But when you’re doing that sort of drudgery work, your mind gets to thinking, and no matter what you do, you can’t stop it from thinking the things it does.

Right off the start, I’m left thinking a bunch of random thoughts about the whole situation. A horrible man who hated Americans, just because they were Americans, is now finally dead, reportedly killed by a group of Navy Seals. As I have no reason to doubt the events that took place, I am left with a bit of concern as we went through a lot of work to get rid of the body really, really fast. But I’m going to assume everything went as planned, although it did seem a bit odd to have done the whole “burial at sea” thing without a grandstanding of parading the dead body through Ground Zero first. But I’ll just leave it at that.

What does bother me is the hoo rah’s that are going around by average Americans, including someone who sent out an email to people stating something to the effect of “thank God for protecting America and for blessing us with Navy Seals.” Or something like that. Now, I’m not one to rain on a parade, but I really hope that if there is a god, that god isn’t really going out of his way to make it easy for Americans to kill people for revenge, even if it is the right thing to do. I was as angry as every other American after 911, but something feels really wrong to be celebrating the death of anyone, no matter how bad he is.

You see, part of me wishes for the redemption of man and mankind. When bad people do really bad things, I’m not tied up in a sense of Christian revenge, but if I have to take a page from Christianity, I would like to think that the ultimate redemption of a bad person is probably the best revenge. We seem very tempted by the desire to achieve vengeance in all things, and you can see that in so many things that we do, including our tendency to build more prisons than we build schools. Rehabiliation is rarely our goal; instead, we want to make people pay for their crimes. Sometimes, we’re like the Roman Empire in how it deals with those who trespass against them. Rather than punish the transgressor, we tend to go after the transgressors family, friends, his dog Skippy and anyone who might live on the same block. We use the word collateral damage as an afterthought, and years ago stopped answering for it as an excuse or as an apology. Much like Rome, if this is the tactic we want to take, we need to understand that it has to play to its logical conclusion. We either destroy all of our enemies, including those who are friends of our enemies, or we become destroyed ourselves. The whole idea of “rebuilding Afghanistan” makes little sense if we’re a country that understands only revenge. What we should have done was lay waste to Afghanistan, chase down any of their friends to their eventual deaths and then park an aircraft carrier off their coast to make sure they never join the rest of humanity again. That’s the Roman way, and if we’re going to celebrate like Romans, we need to be a lot more like them.

But I don’t think we want to be the Romans. We have a president in office who is supposedly trying to achieve “peace” in the world, especially in places where we seem to be exacting vengeance upon our enemies. I don’t think we’ve figured out exactly what it is we really want to do. When our enemies, like Al Qaeda, put on Pakistani clothing at night after returning from their day job as a harbinger of terror against all things America, it’s pretty hard to try to achieve a sense of friendship with the same people who have no desire to ever be friends in their lifetimes. But we keep trying to play both sides of the fence, and we’re not very good at doing that.

In all, I’m disappointed that the end to our conflict wasn’t eventual peace and friendship, and maybe a learning moment for some people. The realist in me realizes that maybe such conclusions just aren’t possible. But the little guy inside me that still hold onto hope thinks that we’re doing this all wrong, that perhaps there’s a better way that doesn’t involve either killing someone or being killed by someone. Unfortunately, in our good/bad choice paradigm of American understanding, I don’t think we’re capable of seeing alternative pathways to future avenues of prosperity. For too long, we’ve existed in the “you’re either with us or you’re against us” universe. Honestly, George W. Bush didn’t start that thought process. We’ve been living under that delusion since we first pretended to be Native Americans and threw British tea into the Boston harbor. I don’t thik we’re capable of thinking any other way.

But as an American, I have to feel a sense of “we got our enemy yesterday”, and perhaps leave it at that. As a veteran, I’m proud of what our trained soldiers accomplished. As an American who hated what he observed nearly a decade ago, I can’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment was made here. However, as someone who secretly wished that the world might one day be a better place, I’m afraid we’re continuing to move further and further away from that ever happening.