Secrecy: the nation's favored fraud

If there is any doubt at all that the terrorists have won - that they have managed with a single day's freakish hits to revamp the most open society on earth into an emerging police state where suspicion and secrecy are the twin watch-towers of government and cowering and conforming the prevailing instincts of an allegedly free press or an even more alleged political opposition - then last week's creation of the Department of Homeland Security should put all such doubts to rest.

The New Deal was a "reorganization" or an "expansion" of government. The creation of the Homeland Security Department is a coup within the government. What Ollie North once did illegally in a White House basement - free-lancing policy with public money and accountability to no one - a $37 billion department with 170,000 employees will now do legally in what is sure to be a high-rise of basements and metaphorical windows on Washington's Bureaucracy Row. Like a Wall Street firm beholden only to its board room, the second-largest government department is now a proprietary arm of the presidency. It operates beyond congressional scrutiny and public accountability, and guarantees secrecy to its own machinations or to those of any private business with which it deals.
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thanks to Cursor