Secrecy

Oh my god this film is extraordinary. It's a documentary about the tension between state secrecy (in the interest of national security) and governmental accountability. There's an ugly paradox at work in the US government's invocation of state secrecy privilege, and the journalist, attorneys, and former CIA officers that star in this film unintentionally make it hard for any thoughtful patriot to be completely "pro-transparency". What if terrorist attacks can be prevented by covert operations? How can these operations be monitored without jeopardizing their efficacy?

In the end, no one wants to compromise our free society by endorsing the government's reckless abuse of "secrecy", but what good is the government if it doesn't have the freedom to do its job?

Before this film I was complacently anti-secrecy and very hostile to the Bush administration's expansion of presidential powers. Now I'm terrified that the Rubicon is so far behind us that we need much more than utopian political theory to salvage the American experiment.

Secrecy