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[Rafe Colburn <rafeco AT rc3.org>]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 02:27:15PM -0400, Andrew Phillips wrote:

> I know I will probably receive much flack for saying this, but I feel
> there are some things it is better that the government didn't tell
> us or show us.  I think the biggest problem with the United States
> right now is we have this feeling that the government has to tell
> us everything that they are doing...  I feel that if its for the
> betterment of our nation that we don't know then so be it. The news
> media needs to learn they can't have it the same way they did during
> the Clinton Administration. although I'm a huge Clinton supporter, I
> feel they were too lax with the Media...

 Nobody has given you any flack for this, so, hey, I'll volunteer.

 The problem we run into immediately with this is the same one we
run into when we talk about lifting the ban on assassinations.  

 The simple fact is that without disclosure, there is no accoutability.

 Sometimes things need to be kept secret, there's no argument about 
that, but the question is how long we should keep things secret and
why they're kept secret.

 It's easy to look at things like assassination or keeping secrets
through the lens of stopping terrorism and say, hey, we need to do 
this in order to save lives or protect the country.  But as soon as
we start going down that road we find ourselves trading arms for 
hostages and using the money to support drug-smuggling rebels trying
to overthrow democratically-elected governments in Central America.

 Or we find ourselves assassinating "Marxists" or "terrorists" or 
other people who don't agree with us in some way.  

 Every year it seems more and more of our Cold War behavior comes 
to light.  And, in the case of these terrorist attacks, some of that
behavior comes back to haunt us.  I'm not saying we deserved those
attacks, but there is no question that some of our past acts in
the Middle East motivated them.

 The most important thing is to take a stand against terrorism and
to attempt to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.  Part
of that is looking at our own history and our own policies and seeing
where we could clean out our own closet as well.  We're demanding that
the Afghanis dismantle and allow us access to any terrorist training
camps in their country.  What would we say if the government of
Honduras demanded that we shut down the School of the Americas[1] in
Fort Benning, Georgia and allow us to inspect it and make sure
that it's gone?

 --Rafe

[1]http://www.soaw.org/