© Merle Harton, Jr. | About | XML/RSS

The silence is getting louder

The Bush administration needs to conduct its business in secret, because the truth is too ugly for the world to see.

Consider yesterday's brief news that the auditor for US expenditures in Iraq, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which has been embarrassing the US administration for systemic corruption and incompetence in its handling of Iraq's rebuilding, has been ordered to close next year.¹ The closing was sneaked into a conference report that consolidated House and Senate versions of a military spending bill, and news about it surprised even legislators who were involved in the report.²

And then today there is more news that the Bush administration is asking a federal judge to keep secret the "alternative interrogation methods" used against persons detained in secret CIA prisons because the methods are "now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets."³ They are so sensitive and so secret that no one, not even the detainees' own attorneys, should know about them.

1.  "US stops audit of Iraq rebuilding," BBC, November 3, 2006.
2.  "Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office," New York Times, November 3, 2006.
3.  "US Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons," Washington Post, November 4, 2006. News article is archived at Truthout.org.