The War In The Shadows

[n2doc]

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

Do yourself a painful favor and watch the Frontline special currently kicking around on PBS about the CIA's program of systematic torture and the agency's fight to keep its crimes hidden and its criminals beyond the reach of justice. The cold fish of the CIA are truly startling when you realize that these people were formed in what was still a democracy, which has proven to be a marvelous environment in which to create monsters.

After you watch it, and when you're finished being crippled with nausea, you should read the latest from the invaluable Charlie Savage, who asks the only question worth asking.

But the open debate and vote was also striking because national security programs have so often been created in secret over the past 14 years — from the C.I.A.'s now-defunct torture program to sweeping surveillance activities to the use of drones to kill terrorism suspects away from combat zones. Secrecy has always been traditional and accepted in wartime, but traditional wars have an end. Under two administrations now, as the United States has remained on a permanent war footing against Al Qaeda and its splintering, morphing progeny, tensions over fighting battles in the shadows have steadily escalated. If this is a forever war, can a democracy wage it in secret?

Secrecy is addictive. It deforms and mutates political institutions the way that alcohol and heroin deforms and mutates individual lives. It forces those institutions to take secrecy itself as their primary constituency. It forces the imperatives of secrets onto institutions designed to be free and open and democratically accountable. This is really what you're being asked to debate when Chris Christie bellows about your not having civil liberties when you're dead, or when Marco Rubio talks tough about what has to be done to maintain our values. The answer to Savage's question is a definitive "no," but that doesn't really mean much any more.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35175/democracy-dies-in-the-dark/?click=welcome-ad