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The People's Republic of the United States

Joe Lockard explains the fog surrounding the Congressional Joint Inquiry report on September 11th:

As readers, we come to know that the Republic contains answers and we learn that good citizenship lies in not asking for more answers than one receives. To accept state-sponsored mystery quietly becomes an act of faith in the beneficial purposes of a state that denies the capacity of its citizens to debate and make public policy based upon full evidence. Instead, the state reverses this relationship entirely by implicitly informing the citizenry that it is the state that manifests confidence in them by withholding crucial information about the history of a national crisis. The theory of government here is that what outside-reader citizens do not know is good for them, a theory similar to that which led the Chinese government so disastrously to refuse its public information on the SARS epidemic.

While the suggestion that public servants are responsible for providing the public with accurate information seems to be a quaint notion from another era, even one that arguably never happened, what we encounter here is the power of public deletion. The political capacities of this exercise derive from its refusal of transparency, one that is nonetheless transparent for that very reason. The power of modern state security historically has lain in the denial of state information to a public readership, witness the Official Secrets Act in Britain or the secret archives of the Cheka and its successor organizations in the former Soviet Union. By secreting information about acts positive or events negative, a state gains or maintains power that it would otherwise jeopardize or lose. In the paradox created by censorship, however, this report represents the proposition that investigation of informational failures must rest with the further concealment of information.

As always, Joe Lockard offers more than this snippet worth reading, so go, do, read, yes, now.

Posted by kevinmoore at July 28, 2003 09:03 AM | TrackBack