Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Cone of Silence

(Anybody remember Get Smart ?)

I watch VEEP sometimes and the parody on politics is amusing. What is happening with the scandals in Washington would be equally amusing if it weren’t so serious.

Something happened in the White House situation room the night of Benghazi when the president was “Disengaged” for over 5 hours. The only way it could have been covered up is with the complicity of the National Command Authority. Somewhere between fifty and one hundred DOD workers and a handful of political appointees know what took place and they aren’t talking. The reason the “Cone of Silence” has been imposed is for the right reasons as well as the wrong. The right reasons are that something happened that had far reaching implications and consequences to National Security. The wrong reasons are that what happened was pretty bad and if the cat gets out of the bag it will probably sound the death knell to the current administration.

The problem with the classification system is that it protects both legitimate programs and the mistakes and abuse of those who manage them. As long as the American People have trust in government they are protected on the one hand but on the other are kept in the dark about all the wrongdoing going on. There should be checks and balances but the more we learn from the scandals the clearer it becomes that these are either not in place or dysfunctional. The need for some form of classification in special cases, only insures the tool will be used to also cover a myriad of ineptitude, and selfish interests.

It’s said that during WW2, workers brought into the Ultra project were seated at a table where the briefer prefaced his opening remarks by placing a loaded pistol on the table and threatened with death, anyone who disclosed the program. That might sound a bit melodramatic but the secret stayed well kept for a long time.

If you saw the pictures of the huge NSA facility being built in Utah you must have thought “Oh my goodness gracious!” As public trust and confidence deteriorates, citizens already wary of government become even more distrustful. This distrust leads to the exposure of some real, honest to goodness, secret programs that deserve all the protection they can get.

However when people see the IRS abuses and how public power is being used for political purposes they think, “If it could happen at the IRS it could happen anywhere in government. What makes IRS political appointees and workers any different from those working at NSA? So they want to know more about what big brother is doing and in the process programs that deserved their security classification are revealed instead of being allowed to percolate quietly and do the job they were designed to do.

In watching the head of the NSA give testimony I got the impression that he's SCARED that things are becoming unraveled and something really important is on the verge of being revealed. I’m not talking about telephone records being used to compile suspect lists of Terrorists. For heavens sake, to bill customers it is necessary to know where a call originated, where it terminated, the duration and when it occurred. It happens that this same information can be used to uncover a terrorist network. DUH! Since telephone billing data is in the public domain what is the big deal? In the words of a well know public figure, “Who Cares?”

What started at Benghazi, followed by the IRS scandal, followed by the phone record seizures and finally the NSA ULTRA project being built in Utah has had a chilling cumulative effect on citizens, who are usually half asleep.

“What’s going on here?” they wonder, “Hmmmm are matters afoot I need to pay some attention to?”

“Of course not,” their Government replies. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Can what I don’t know hurt me?”

“Trust us.”

Some say it’s lack of trust and trust is certainly a big part of it. But even more is the decline in morality encouraged by an intellectual elite that assails Christianity and sees God as a fairy tale. What do they know that most of the rest of us don't? My response is before you destroy the single institution responsible for teaching a higher sense of morality you need to have something better to replace it with. If everybody behaved only at the low threshold of the law this country would be even more dismal than it often is. As I read Shaffer’s book it reminds me that many in positions of power are threatened by a higher morality that dares shine the divine light into their dark corner of the universe.