Transparency
December 16, 2010
CHARLES DAVIS posts about Bradley Manning’s solitary confinement: The Obama Administration is Torturing Bradley Manning
Michelle Maiorca leaves a comment on the post expressing reservations about Manning’s treatment, but is rather deferential in doing so. She begins:
I realize not all gov’t business can be conducted on the front page of the newspaper, but… [Maiorca, in change.org comments.]
The question that arises, to me, is: Why? Why can’t the government of the most powerful economic and military force in the world operate completely in the open? It’s less (less = not at all) about the security of the homeland than about concealing the depravity and corruption of the mechanisms necessary for coercive power to work.
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Stump Lane 
The year+-long preparations for the invasion of Iraq were “conducted on the front page of the newspaper.” If they could “conduct” that “business” on the front pages of newspapers, what could they not conduct on the front pages?
don’t know that i’d call the preparations for the war in Iraq an especially open or transparent process. but the example is informative: the newspapers were such a magnificent and effective instrument of state propaganda in that case, that it’s hard to conceive of how exactly full transparency would hinder the governments work. ;-)