Secret Secret Secret Secrets

A reading of Ted Gup's Nation of Secrets will leave your forehead smarting (if it isn't already) from self-inflicted slaps and wondering how it's humanly possible to love your country and not despise the fucking government. Presented as a sober accounting of maniacal secrecy it nevertheless sent me at times into spasms of teary-eyed hysteria reminiscent of forays into Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Major Major Major Major. It lends, with no satire intended, a satirical view of governmental mental illness, revealing how rampant secrecy has resulted in a volitionally induced implosion into a super-massive black hole.

In steadfast opposition to oversight and logic, secrets are made so at the whim of thousands of entities, ranging from the dubious to the criminally insane, extending to agencies headed by their own worst enemies such as the EPA, the Forest Service, Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, FCC, ad infinitum, joined by a bevy of war profiteering private sector weapons contractors, mercenary hired killers and adventurers in the land of telecomplicity.

Thanks to interagency squabbles and conflicting criteria secrecy sustains a spy vs. spy vs. spy scenario and creeps via 'derivation' into issues of public concern. Estranged from real world legal protection heroic whistleblowers are sentenced to professional exile and condemnation at the hands of our traitorous mainstream media. One example cites a postponement by two years of an upgrading in body armor that would have assured the survival of eighty percent of Marines killed between March 2003 and June of 2005. Secrecy has mitigated against challenges to dirty deals in congressional 'sessions', Enronesque burlesques and sundry episodes of oligarchic skullduggery.

Every classifier of secrets delights in the invention of Orwellian titles for its various overlapping levels of security. In addition to the old familiar layers such as Secret, Top Secret, etc. we are treated to such masterpieces of convolution as For Official Use Only, Sensitive Internal Use, In Confidence, Limited Distribution Information, Critical Infrastructure Information, Non-Public Information, Safeguards Information and Predecisional Drafts. Gag me with a national security letter.

I could list many more but they're classified as Deep Background, Deep Deep Background, Deeply Deep Deep Background and Deeper Than The Deepest Depths of The Deepest Imaginable Background. So, concerning those, I have nothing to say.

Nation Of Secrets: The Threat To Democracy And The American Way Of Life by Ted Gup. http://www.buzzflash.com/store/items/855