Journalist Risen: 'Mercenary Class' Now Permanent Fixture in National Security State

[JDPriestly]

32. In general, the Founding Fathers did not even want us to have a standing army,

much less a standing intelligence service to feed secrets to our standing army.

The problem is that to have a really effective intelligence service, you have to have a group of people who work in secret and share secrets only amongst themselves. Much of their information has to be off limits or protected from the public at large, that is the voters. When you have a government that relies in making decisions not on the consensus of the people, not on the will of the people, but on a select and secretive elite within the government that has information that voters are not allowed to have, you do not have representative or democratic government.

And that is where we are. The secretive agencies within our government have become so powerful. In contrast, the voters are so weak. The secretive agencies have so much information. The voters have so little. The secretive agencies have displaced voters as the source of final authority in our society. Only the secretive agencies know best, or so we are led to believe. So we are told.

The meaning: We no longer have a representative government. Let's don't even use the word democracy. Our government isn't really even representative any more. We don't have enough information about really important issues like ISIS, Syria, the Ukraine, who is reading our e-mails or collecting our phone information to talk about representative government.

It isn't that Obama is a bad president or that Congress is in disarray. The reality is that we voters are so ignorant about what is really going on that our votes are irrelevant. Many of us vote based on our whims. Ridiculous stuff.

How can we know what we are voting for? I really thought that Obama's policies on human rights and privacy would be much different than they are. It's very disappointing to watch him just go along with the status quo of corrupt intelligence agencies that keep their corruption secret.

Our government should have some secrets, but Congress should determine what is to be kept secret and what is not to be kept secret. The president should not be the last word on this.

I was shocked to learn that members of Congress are afraid to reveal "secrets" merely because the executive branch has identified them as "secret." Members of Congress should be responsible for telling the American people the truth and the whole truth. Secrecy be damned. If a member of Congress thinks we need to know that our e-mails are being collected and categorized and analyzed, he or she should have the authority to tell us that. If a member of Congress thinks that too much money is being spent for activities that are secret and not explained in detail to members of Congress, he/she should have the authority and the confidence to say so.

The executive branch should not have so much power. The president may be the commander in chief but to designate one man as the final word on what is secret and what is not makes the president vulnerable to all kinds of pressures from those who wish to control the country through the apparatus that finds out and protects secrets. It's a sick system.

There should be no legal liability, no repercussions against members of Congress who divulge intelligence secrets. If someone can think of some other way to control the excessive secrecy, I'd like to know what it is. Let members of Congress speak out on this issue and even on the explicit abuses or suspected abuses of secrecy as they see fit. Members of Congress should not be silenced for any reason other than being rejected at the ballot box. Even then, former members of Congress should be honest and open with us. So should the press. The press should be truly free.

Sorry for the incoherent rant, but this irks me. It makes our "democracy" into a sham, a farce. Ridiculous.