December 31, 2005
Out, Out, Damned Spot
That's rich!! The National Spy Agency violates the privacy of millions of Americans, listening to their most intimate conversations, tracing commercial transactions, and intercepting their mail and, when somebody finally blows the whistle to call the cops, they call out the dogs to find who "ratted" the spymasters out.
If you think this kind of language isn't appropriate to describe our government's actions, you're absolutely right. But that's because the government's behavior is totally out of bounds. Our government is acting like a bunch of common criminals--merchants of terror and their henchmen, relying on pay-offs and secret deals to keep them one step ahead of the law.
This close association between the lawman and the lawbreakers is what makes it easy to pervert; makes it hard not to cross the line. Easy to argue that the law has to be broken to catch the crooks. Not to mention that skirting the line generates a sense of excitement.
But I don't think that's what this is about--a bunch of lawmen gone bad. No, the multiple layers of secrecy, piled up in the last five years, are giving off the stench of a giant cover-up. Moreover, as each layer wears thin and cracks and the stench just gets worse, both the obsession and the frustration level increase. It's the 21st Century version of Lady MacBeth and her damned spot.
So, what is it that's being hidden? What's worth perverting the whole legal system and subjecting the whole nation to a meaningless search and seizure regimen? Because, you know, the whole thing makes no sense. Sifting through millions of random communications might make sense if you knew what you were looking for or collecting data for a marketing scheme (which is a possibility, but you wouldn't need a governmental prompt for that), but this wholesale approach seems particularly ill-conceived. Which may well be why the participants are blowing the whistle. When a project is almost certain to fail, the temptation to tamper with the results and generate the appearance of success increases exponentially, along with the risk that innocent people will be injured.
Perhaps that's the key. More innocent people are being put at risk because some innocent people died needlessly. Maybe it's not a case of the barn being locked obsessively after the horse was stolen, but of locking the barn obsessively after the horse was sold to be rendered.
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http://www.perrspectives.com/resources/documents.htm
Posted by Hannah at December 31, 2005 06:26 AM