Wednesday - September 05, 2007

The Left Doesn't Get It: State Secrets vs. the Individual

As the resident Lockean, I still believe that deep down people are good, that the Creator endowed us with natural rights that no man or government can interfere with, and that government should be limited and held to high standards, backed by the threat of rebellion when it gets out line.

That is probably why I found this story funny. One too many speeding revenue enhancment tickets issued while other more important issues go unattended:

Somebody crunched a cop car with the bucket of a backhoe, and police in this Clermont County community plan to crack down on the vandals.

The long arm of the lawbreaker’s excavator landed on the roof of a surplus cruiser parked near the Miami Township Civic Center, 6101 Meijer Drive.

The Hyundai backhoe had been parked on the adjacent property of Loveland Excavating, about 200 yards from the cruiser, Detective Nick Colliver said.

“They either thought they were being funny or were angry,” Colliver. “This was just deliberate. There’s no doubt about it. They drove it from Loveland Excavating straight up to the cruiser, dropped the bucket on it and crushed it.”

Which brings us back to our main point. Even though good government is limited, there are cases and times when it needs to be secretive. And there are times when the need for secrecy, the common good, and the preservative of the state and its security are more important than the individual.

To have the view mentioned above, it does require that one holds some things as morally superior to others and worth preserving in the first place. A world view that the left abandoned in favor of moral relativism. Oh, and by the way, what are the chances that this polysci prof is a conservative?

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency may refuse to release documents from 40 years ago to the public to protect long-held secrets, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the CIA did not have to give up the documents under the Freedom of Information Act aimed at opening up government activity to the public.

Larry Berman, a California political science professor, had sought two documents, one from 1965 and another from 1968, known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB), in which the CIA briefed then President Lyndon Johnson.

During those years, the United States was waging war in Vietnam and engaged in a tense stand off with the Soviet Union.

"The extreme sensitivity of the PDB enhances the plausibility of the CIA's assertion that disclosure of the requested PDBs could cause harm even 40 years after their generation," Raymond Fisher wrote for a three-judge panel.

Author: The Lockean
Technorati Tags: CIA Natural Rights
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