America over-classifies information. The designations ‘secret,’ ‘top secret,’ ‘for your eyes only,’ and many others like them are thrown around too freely; too many folders and dossiers receive the dreaded stenciled stamp that indicates their contents may not be perused by the wrong people. The consequences of this bingeing on classification are predictable: all around us, ‘leaks’ and ‘unauthorized disclosures’ take place; many stand accused of dangerous ‘whistleblowing,’ of ‘criminal activity,’ of espionage. When all is secret, violating secrecy restrictions is easy–as is posturing as a protector of ‘secrecy vital to the national interest’; and the penalties for such ‘violations’ can be ratcheted up arbitrarily. (Just ask Chelsea Manning, who is due for early release tomorrow from a three-decade prison sentence–thanks to a presidential commutation.)
In this national context, the furore over the alleged disclosure by Donald Trump of supposedly top-secret information to visiting Russian dignitaries looks ever so precious. Unsurprisingly, no one is quite clear–or can be–about what was leaked, and what its significance was; what we do know, or are offered words of reassurance to that effect is Something Very Very Secret was disclosed. We cannot find out how secret or how important, or indeed, any other relevant details, because those, of course, are a Secret. I do not doubt for a second that Donald Trump is a bumbling incompetent, a buffoon who should not be allowed within a mile of the Oval Office, that his foreign policy blunders may yet be the death of us all. But I’m afraid the mere reporting that Something Very Very Secret is now no longer so fails to move me when it is quite evident from many other contexts that very often, such classification is a case of bureaucratic overkill. Especially when the reassurances that such a disclosure should be considered an actionable problem are forthcoming from the very people who simultaneously over-classify while demanding ever more cover, legal and otherwise, for their activities.
The reaction to Donald Trump’s ‘leaking’ has been predictable: impeachment! These dreams of impeachment, in response to ‘unauthorized disclosures of classified information’ are not just a political fantasy; they also perpetuate a long-running fraud on the American polity–that when the government and the administration decides to get into a tizzy about some supposed ‘violation of secrecy’ it gets the citizenry worked up in response. At that moment, all questioning of the unhealthy layers of classification and secrecy that continue to build up around our rulers’ activities is suspended, and we all chime in with syncopated chorus of outrage: How dare you disclose?
It has been a depressing feature of ‘liberal’ responses to the Trump administration that so many unsavory political alliances have now become increasingly respectable: among them, none will be more surprising than the willingness of so-called ‘liberal and ‘progressive’ factions to find, in the Deep State and its national security agencies, the ones that have done so much to abrogate the civil liberties of so many Americans, their best political allies.
