: re: A Debate Over How Long Democracy Can Wage Battles in Shadows

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, May 15, 2015 at 5:37 PM
Subject: re: A Debate Over How Long Democracy Can Wage Battles in Shadows
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   No one seriously asserts that a government can function without any secrets. "Secrecy has always been traditional and accepted in wartime, but traditional wars have an end." In the world before 1945, wars began with a diplomatic declaration and ended with a treaty. Captured combatants were interned for the duration of hostilities, and war secrets (e.g. troop movements) were allowed to the military leaders by the sovereign People until the war's end. 

      We haven't lived in that world for seventy years now. The U.S. government is still holding secrets from WWII and there is no prospect that the "war on terror" will ever end. The result has been an unremarked coup d'etat. An electorate that no longer knows the issues at stake in our elections is participating in a sham; it isn't "sovereign" in any meaningful sense.
Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/us/politics/nsa-opens-debate-over-how-long-democracy-can-wage-battles-in-shadows.html