As The Washington Post points out, it is not their policy to publish anonymous editorials… but they have made a stunning exception to the policy today. Here are some of the more important passages from anonymous’ account of being involved in the National Security Letter lawsuits.
I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.
and:
recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I’ve now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point — a point we passed long ago — the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government’s use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.
This underscores why political secrecy is not simply “partisan politics by other means.” We all, as members of the public, need to realize that a state that can order us to spy on our fellows and then order us into perpetual silence about it is a state that is not worth living in.
In 1774, Great Britain passed a series of laws that we came to know as “Intolerable Acts,” they included the closing down of our harbors, the removal of trials from the eyes of ones peers, and the motions by the state to increase hostilities between citizens and other hostiles so that the citizens outrage could be redirected away from their own government.
Today, our government is taking people embroiled in legal disputes out of the public eye, encouraging hostilities towards external enemies to justify domestic abuse, and are closing down harbors of our most basic liberties: those of pursuing happiness in our own life through our right to engage in free enterprise and being able to have one’s share in public happiness through public participation in politics.
Despite our state becoming more and more a secrecy state, we are still privy to hearing what is going on. We hear about Guantanamo Bay. We hear about “Black Sites.” We hear about Abu Gharib, and water boarding and renditions. We hear about NSA wiretapping programs without any oversight, and we hear key leaders in the Executive give false testimony to Congress. Now we hear that there people in the United States, who have been subject to forced enlistment in a life that best resembles working in Ceausescu’s Securitate. How much more do we have to hear? When will we be heard, roaring back, demanding our birthright as descendants of those who rose up against intolerable acts and held the truths of liberty to be self evident?
We cannot allow any branch of government, whether it is run by someone like Mussolini, Mr. Rogers, you, me, your best friend, whoever, to have the type of authority to do the things our state is allowed to do. We cannot, and we must not by into the fiction that replacing leaders will make this go away. To those who are still drunk from celebrating the mid-term elections in Congress, this editorial should be a sober reminder that our enemy, our challenge, is not any particular leader or particular administration. It is, to borrow from Jeffrey Isaac (who in turn is borrowing from Arendt), the “dark times” of our democracy. Until we demand that the state remember that the model of governance we strive for is “power in the PEOPLE, authority in the Senate,” they will not do so… and the more we allow the changes in this age erode this relationship, the further and further we slip away from what is supposed to be, as Americans, the gifts that are truly ours.
