Posted on 08/26/2004 9:33:18 AM PDT by TFine80
The national security state began to threaten the Constitution itself. From the time of the Vietnam war (itself the product of a huge intelligence failure): We thought the Soviets and the Chinese were collaborating, when in fact they were almost at war with each other, the executive branch has been more and more tempted to use secrecy to avoid responsibility, even legality. The Iran-Contra affair was only the latest such episode.
Worse, we are poisoning the wells of our historical memory. Of late, the Soviet Union has been going through an extraordinary period of exhuming the worst crimes of its hideous history * * * The United States has no such history.
The national security state consumes the Presidency. It grows more and more insulated from the people. * * *
Senator Moynihan, himself, predicted the collapse of communism in a commencement address at New York University in 1984.
As a lesson of history, he recalls President Woodrow Wilson's prophecy of the price we would pay for rejecting membership in the League of Nations. President Wilson warned that in the absence of U.S. participation in the League of Nations we would have to maintain a `great standing army' with the `most modern of armaments.'
President Wilson warned of a President, under these circumstances, whose primary role was to function as a military chief. Under such a system:
Plans must be kept secret. Knowledge must be accumulated by a system which we have condemned, because we have called it a spying system. The more polite call it a system of intelligence. * * *
And you know what the effect of a military government is upon social questions. You know how impossible it is to effect social reform if everyone must be under orders from the Government. You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation.
Amazing that with all Kerry's current blather about "intelligence", he once joked that it should be demonized as a "spying system" instead of an "intelligence system."
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