Secrets

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, according to Wired.com.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he's being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning is alleged to have taken credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians....

"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers, which are cited to justify it."

President John F. Kennedy

Address to newspaper publishers, April 27, 1961

Secrets.

Think about it.

What are the things you keep secret?

Are they the things you are most proud of, the times you did well, helped out, spoke up, fought the good fight?

Or are they other things?

Times when you were selfish, unfair, unfeeling, hurtful.

Which do you shroud in secrecy?

Your best and brightest moments?

Or your darkest thoughts and bloodiest deeds?

The government has secrets, too.

Lots of them.

When they want to hide something they are – or should be – ashamed of, they just stamp it “classified.”

The question isn’t just what are they hiding, but even more importantly who are they hiding it from?

I’ll give you a hint.

It isn’t “the enemy.”

Any “enemy” who could make use of such intelligence has probably already gotten it all on his own.

It isn’t “the enemy” they’re hiding things from.

It’s YOU.

And me.

Because we might not like the things they’ve been doing in our name, with our money, behind our backs.

We might get the impression that these “public servants” aren’t our servants at all, but our masters.

And that’s an uncomfortable notion to folks raised in “the land of the free.”

Uncomfortable enough that we might just do something about it.

So, to their ever-lasting disgrace, they keep it all secret from us.

And to our ever-lasting disgrace, we don’t try very hard to find out.

sj