The “enigma machine” (WWII)
A few years ago I met a guy over a cup of coffee at the café I frequent. The usual café protocols we exchanged: first names and what we do for a living. Having given mine he gave his name and then said that he worked for a part of the government he couldn’t specify that undertook unspecifiable, clandestine operations for the country.
“You mean you can’t even tell me the name of the part of my government that you work for?” I asked, not really that curious.
“I could,” he said, almost seeming to relish the chance to give his reply, “but then I would have to kill you.” He smirk-smiled.
My BDM* needle hit the peg in the red zone. He also sported a “Semper Fi” tattoo on one forearm (but why didn’t he roll up the other sleeve?) the military haircut, and the requisite thin mustache. “I can tell you that I was trained as a Navy SEAL,” he offered as a consolation, or maybe as proof that he could kill me if he had to, or maybe because he was another of a number of poseurs who happened to frequent the café until they were “found out.” He’s been long gone for years.
I don’t remember his name, but I remember the encounter every time it pops up in some espionage thriller Tom Clancy type film. These days I remember it when I hear George Bush, or one of his minions get up and plays “The Secrecy Card.” The SC has been a part of our government since well-before 9-11. “National Security” has long been an appropriate and abused excused from keeping information from the general public. Traitors, terrorists, and other bad people are out there in the general public and could use such information against us. The corollary is . . . ahem . . . that the bad who can do harm to us are never in the government and never those who have the authority and the prerogative of the SC.
But the Bush administration has taken secrecy to new depths. From its uninformative and taciturn press secretaries from whose pronouncements we come away knowing even less, to its “renditions” of prisoners, military tribunals, torture programs, and now spying on the communications of its own citizens, secrecy in government begins to rival those of infamous authoritarian regimes. Member of congressional committees that are supposed to be brought into decisions are ignored, and the judicial oversight of various surveillance and information gathering techniques of the FBI, CIA and NSA have been ignored. The resulting outcry and outrage have been dismissed with either assertions that thye administration is doing nothing illegal (certainly in terms of their legal lackeys like Alberto Gonzales and John Woo), or playing to the cheap seats with assertions that it would be preferable for Americans to have their phones tapped than to be blown up by Al Qaeda.
Actually, all of this probably gives Al Qaeda a good chuckle, especially when, at the same time we are spying on ourselves, it is an open secret that it has been rather easy for millions of illegal aliens to penetrate our porous borders and our scarcely protected ports.
This is another expression of the philosophy of the present regime that has often been denounced in these pages—that for them, the ends justify the means. If it must abridge freedom to protect freedom, to burn the village to save it, there is no contradiction in such reasoning.
The secrecy thing is, of course, a Catrch-22. (“I’ve got a secret. Oh, what is it? If I told you it wouldn’t be a secret.”) In government things are kept secret for purposes of ”national security.” But there is no way for an outsider to judge whether it is worthy of being kept secret because it’s a secret. There is, then, not way of determining if “national security” might be being used as a smoke screen for other motives an administration might have for keeping secrets.
Such an atmosphere feeds all sorts of suspicions and even cottage industries like the UFO enthusiasts. The UFO types have been maintaining for years that the government is keeping secret information they have about visitations of extraterrestrials. That the government might be keeping secret experiments with highly-classified vehicles and weapons will never be accepted by people who now refer to themselves as “Ufologists,” a “discipline” that deals with the “knowledge” about what is either unidentified, or secret. This is where it all becomes rather insane: the ufologists need for whatever might be secret to remain secret because their entire raison d’etre is built on the very notion of secrecy. If there was anything being kept secret its exposure would put them out of a job.
But it doesn’t quite work the other way. If you have a secret, or are suspected of having a secret that might be regarded as a matter of national security you are fair game for espionage.
Eventually, policies such as the Bush administration is pursuing break down the essential element in any relationship—trust. They treat us like they don’t trust us—even though there are some people who can’t be trusted—and we eventually don’t trust them to be the guardians of our rights. So, is this what the terrorists might be really trying to do, break down the essential element in our relationship with our government? If so, they have found a compliant administration that is playing right into their hands. “The terrorists win,” to use the phrase that employed for quite different purposes, but by making us terrorize ourselves.
Is this to say that we don’t need some secrecy and surveillance. Of course not. But they way this is being conducted in this administration is analogous to the way in which the so-called ‘war on terror” is being conducted—with a blunt instrument that causes a lot of collateral damage.
Ironically, by committing an act of terror the terrorists have succeeded in getting America to wage a “war on terror,” a fallacious metaphor that seems to result in America terrorizing itself. The Bush administration has never explained how one makes a war on a concept, a strategy that exists in no particular place.
How will we know when the war on terror is over, completed, won?
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.12.2006)
*Bullshit Detection Meter