CLANDESTINY?

It started, when I was younger, with unmarked police cars. It has grown in innumerable ways to police women posing as prostitutes to catch Johns, to adult police officers professing on the Internet to being minors to lure sex offenders. It is the insidious drive to convert America into a secret society.

There is nothing inherently sacred about speech, nothing holy about the press, nothing sacrosanct about meetings. What those three things have in common is the open exchange of knowledge. The Founding Fathers understood that the vibrant, confident, energized country they sought to establish required the free exchange of information. They knew that throughout history, all authoritarian, abusive governments were rooted in secrecy and thrived on the distrust it generated among the people. Hitler rewarded and gave medals to young children who told the Gestapo what their parents spoke about in the privacy of their homes. Underlying our guaranteed freedoms of speech, the press, and assembly, is our right to the free exchange of information...that is, the right to exist in an open, trusting, benevolent society.

As a campaigner, Barack Obama promised an open, transparent Administration...inordinately appealing to those who believed that the public's general support of the war in Iraq was founded in the secrecy of, and the falsehoods issued by, officials of the prior Bush Administration. As President, to date, Obama has run as closed an Administration as could be imagined, fraught with secret conferences and negotiations, secret deals to obtain votes, and more. Do you believe one word of what is told to you publicly?

I deplore child molesters, but I refuse to believe it is necessary to change the character of our country to catch them. For if it is, we will all be victims of Government molestation...which has already begun.