February 10, 2020
OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:
The State of Secrecy by Richard Norton-Taylor review (Luke Harding, 10 Feb 2020, The Observer)
The "fetish" for keeping the public in ignorance is absurd and counterproductive, he argues. It led to disastrous wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) and to egregious acts by the spooks (MI6's collusion with the US in the abduction and torture of terror suspects, denied for years). Secrecy doesn't enhance national security. It radically undermines it, he thinks.Norton-Taylor is especially scathing about the "sclerotic" and "secretive" ministry of defence. It has wasted billions on "ill-conceived" weapons irrelevant to modern conflict. He's critical, too, of the foreign office, which won't release files on colonial-era abuses. They include the torture of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya and the murder of Malayan villagers in 1948. [...]It is this mystical culture that possibly explains why the committee didn't leak its own recent report into Russian meddling ahead of last year's election. Boris Johnson cynically sat on it. You would have thought at least one MP would put the public interest above medieval vows. And yet none did. Voters are still in the dark.
Come back, Admiral Poindexter, all is forgiven. If intelligence is any good it will withstand the marketplace.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2020 12:00 AM