Secrets

by James Glaser
September 28, 2006

The Bush administration has always been into secrets. George made it so that no one will see his dad's presidential papers till long after his dad dies. He and Dick Cheney have also made tens of thousands of pages of government documents classified, so you and I will not have any idea of what the two of them have been doing these last six years.

One thing that keeps America free, is that some government officials have the guts to turn over secret government papers to our still free press. Sunday the New York Times printed a few pages of a report by the sixteen intelligence agencies that the United States has. Those three pages put George Bush and his foreign policy in a bad light. It explained that George's war in Iraq is a failure, and it is hurting America by making us less safe.

Now George Bush was fit to be tied over this release of his secrets, so he came out and said so that voters wouldn't be confused about what he was doing, he would release a few more pages of this secret report. His people combed that report, and George released another small portion, sections that put him in a better light. Congress asked for the whole report to be made public, but George just couldn't let the whole secret out about his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His people didn't do a very good job covering George's butt, because what we know now from these new pages is that Iraq has become "the cause cèlébre for jihadists, breeding deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement."

As long as we are on George Bush's secrets, here is another surprising one. The Boston Globe reports that, "As lawmakers prepare to debate the CIA's special program for terrorism suspects, fewer than 10 percent of the members of Congress have been told which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under the proposed changes in the War Crimes Act."

So Congress is about to vote on a bill that they have no idea of what it contains. This isn't something new. When the Patriot Act was first passed, the law hadn't been printed yet. No one in Congress had a chance to read the law before the voted on it.

Keeping the government's business secret from the people and Congress is now a hallmark of the Bush administration. I would guess that George knows that keeping secrets has worked very well for the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and even Saddam Hussein.

Except for the fact that we still have some very brave individuals in our government who think it is important enough to risk their jobs, maybe their freedom, so that the American the people know what is going on, George Bush could rule America like a despot.




Free JavaScripts provided
by The JavaScript Source


BACK to the 2006 Politics Columns.