It was back in the late fifties/early sixties when Garry Moore hosted an interesting television show called "I've Got a Secret". The premise was simple, really. People would appear in front of a panel who had to guess the secret of the guest. If they failed, the guest won money. If they guessed, the guest won less money. Famous people would go on the show, too. Before a famous guest would go on, the panel would put on blindfolds (sequined, naturally) and would usually let Garry voice the answers to the panelists' questions. You Tube has some of the old kinescopes available 24/7 - I was delighted to watch Ted Lewis from Circleville, Ohio fail miserably. One of the panelists nailed him in no time flat.
Lewis came from an era when, if you had a secret - you kept that secret, secret. For instance, in the days leading up to WWII, the British got a hold of a cipher machine and a code book used by the Nazis and were thus able to keep up with what Hitler's war machine was up to and was able to thwart Adolph Hitler's evil plans at will. It was code-named 'Enigma' and it was one of the most closely held secrets during the war. Nobody felt compelled to report 'Enigma' to the press, or to complain that they felt threatened by the existence of the machine - in large part because no one knew that the thing existed.
We fooled the Japanese, too, by using Navaho 'Code Talkers'. No one had any second thoughts about lending the Japanese one or two Navahos so that they could understand what was being said about them by those sinister round-eyed American devils. No sir!
Well, these days, things have changed. Television is no longer in black and white, most television game shows require no thinking whatsoever and apparently it's okay to blab vital secrets in such a way that people who wish to do us harm know that they're being listened to, forcing them to use different channels of communication. If certain people would have kept their mouths shut about what the NSA has been doing, chances are that we could still be short-circuiting terrorist plans like we supposedly had been doing, that is, until the whistle was blown.
Now, part of the problem is that certain people in our government are inept boobs who have no business being in charge of a household, much less being in charge of a government program or of the military. This Bradley Manning fellow is probably right in some respects. Our military is prone to pulling boners far too often for comfort. It's not really the fault of the little guy (the kids who volunteer to be in the armed services). The people who know better are the worst offenders. We have a problem which needs to be fixed - BUT - there's no sense bringing the problem to the attention of others who can do nothing about the problem. What should have been done was for Manning to bring the situations he had reported to the attention of someone in the Pentagon who could have done something about those situations. It may have taken a while, but, Manning would not be on trial at the moment.
At least that's what I think about it.
Imagine what sort of damage Bradley Manning would have done if he were to have pulled a similar trick during WWII and tipping the Germans off about the existence of a British 'Enigma' decoder - or giving the Japanese helpful hints on how to speak Navaho? One set of secrets which were dropped out of that war were hints on building nuclear weapons by the Rosenbergs (sic). Incidentally, they were executed for passing secrets to the Russians sixty years ago this week. Manning will likely spend a few years in the brig, but that's about it.
Same thing goes for the fellow hiding out over in Hong Kong at the moment. Perhaps the people in the fourth estate who are climbing all over themselves to get 'scoops' on these blabbermouths need to be reminded that they may be enabling the next bomb or the next terrorist invasion.
And as far as screaming bloody murder about the discovery that there are agencies monitoring phone calls and the internet, be reminded that those agencies were enabled by those same people - afraid of the next pressure cooker bomb or the next airplane flying into a building just after 9/11.
Didn't I just say something about being sick of this mess?
I'm becoming incoherent.
Be Seeing You!
bdharrell
No comments:
Post a Comment