Nation of Secrets - The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life

Zusatztext “A frontal attack on secrecy. . . . It should be the cornerstone of a concerted effort to build a defense against the encroachment on the public's right to know.” — The Chicago Tribune "Makes clear the danger of out-of-control secrecy."— The Plain Dealer "It burns with the moral ardor that arises from a sense of crisis." — Bloomberg News "An eye-opening and very important book. . . . I learned something from each chapter." —James Fallows! National Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly Informationen zum Autor Ted Gup Klappentext Award winning journalist Ted Gup exposes how and why our most important institutions increasingly keep secrets from the very people they are supposed to serve.Drawing on his decades as an investigative reporter, Ted Gup argues that a preoccupation with secrets has undermined the very values--security, patriotism, and privacy--in whose name secrecy is so often invoked. He explores the blatant exploitation of privacy and confidentiality in academia, business, and the courts, and concludes that in case after case, these principles have been twisted to allow the emergence of a shadow system of justice, unaccountable to the public. Nation of Secrets not only sounds the alarm to warn against an unethical way of life, but calls for the preservation of our democracy as we know it. 1 Silent Encroachments The greatest threat to liberty, warned the nation’s Founding Fathers, comes not from abroad, but from within, and advances slowly, under cover of secrecy. “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations,” warned James Madison, a framer of the Bill of Rights. Today his words seem prescient. What was once unthinkable—what would have been resisted as an intolerable affront to democracy and American values if it had befallen us all of a sudden—is now routine, a way of life. As I finish the first draft of my study of secrecy, I scan the day’s news. It is Thursday, February 2, 2006. There are no portentous headlines. As news days go, this one is seemingly unremarkable, which may just be the most remarkable thing about it. If nothing else, this day provides a snapshot of a nation slipping further into the shadow of secrecy, conducting its affairs beyond public scrutiny, and not just at the White House or in Congress, but across a wide swath of American life--in city councils, corporations, courts, clinics, universities. Secrecy has engulfed them all. Today the Justice Department resisted calls from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to turn over legal memoranda that are said to offer the legal justification for President Bush's domestic surveillance program, the one that went forward in secrecy without warrants or recourse to the courts, as required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The president insists that the secret surveillance within America was perfectly legal. But the legal memos said to support that claim are classified, beyond the reach even of Congress. This day a blistering report is released that examines the government's inability to cope with Hurricane Katrina. The report cites the failure to establish a chain of command in the face of a catastrophe that claimed 1,307 lives and left thousands of Americans to fend for themselves. But the president, also on this day, refuses to turn over documents that might set forth who was responsible for the calamitous response and explain how it occurred. Emergency relief planners see it as a matter of some urgency—the next hurricane season is only months away. But providing those documents, says the White House, invoking executive privilege, would undermine the candor of advice the president receives. This same day, at a Capitol Hill hearing on intelligence, Porter Goss,...

Product details

• Authors: Ted Gup
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 14.10.2008
• EAN: 9781400079780
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7978-0
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 20 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education