Democracy cannot meaningfully function without an informed citizenry, and such a citizenry is impossible without broad public access to information about the operations of government.
Democracy can't function without an informed citizenry.
The US intelligence community is deeply allergic to the Freedom of Information Act. It is fair to say that the intelligence community does nearly everything in its power to avoid compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.
I'm not interested in embarrassing the United States. We as a nation need to foster a broader understanding of national security, and when in the name of national security the US government both overtly and covertly aligns itself with the apartheid state and against heroic freedom fighters for racial justice ... Not only in 1962 but also keeping in mind that Mandela was on the US terror watch list until 2008, that kind of myopic understanding of national security has devastating consequences.
The notion that the records of government are the property of the people is radically democratic, but it is broken in practice.
I am calling on all citizens with access to unreleased records pertaining to illegal, unconstitutional, or immoral government activities to return those records to their rightful owners, the American people.
Mandela today is almost universally held as a heroic freedom fighter, and of course rightly so.
As Harvard historian of science Peter Galison has demonstrated, the universe of classified knowledge now far exceeds the universe of unclassified knowledge. That's a staggering thought. There is far more classified knowledge in the world than unclassified. And that disparity grows all the time.
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Michael Hastings Journalist