Photos Removed (Part II)

Thursday 11/30/06
2100

I had added a few comments yesterday to expand on my initial entry, but they took down the power and I lost it all. So here they are now, more or less:

On the one hand I support the program and do not mind taking down photos of the installation. They may seem innocuous in themselves, but taken in the aggregate they could provide insights into how we operate that could be useful to our enemies, which would obviously be bad.

On the other hand, it is too bad that I can’t be more open and show my surroundings more completely. We are a very open society, and are here to defend that way of life, yet because our enemies would exploit (and have exploited) that openness to harm us, we have to be less open and more restrictive. To a certain extent this just goes along with being in the military and being in a war zone. What really makes me angry are the restrictions on such freedoms that have had to be imposed at home. Many government departments have done so with their websites and other published information. Openness keeps our government honest and accountable to the people, and secrecy is inimical to that.

All the more reason to kill as many of our enemies as we can, as quickly as possible, while working to ensure they have a hard time recruiting more. (But that’s a larger subject.)

I had to laugh when I was thinking about this and an image crossed my mind from the movie “Good Morning, Vietnam!”. Adrian Kronauer (Robin Williams) was trying to joke around with the censors at the AFN radio station. Their stone-faced reaction to his jokes was probably a pretty accurate reflection of the official attitude. It’s also kind of timely that I just watched “Men in Black” the other night. In that movie, someone asks Tommy Lee Jones “Is this a joke?”, to which he replies “No, Ma’am, we at the FBI do not have a sense of humor that we know of.”

Oh, well – I’m still keeping my sense of humor about all of this, as far as possible.


Mood: Good
Music: Great American Marches I