The Secret Government

It’s fascinating to see how public tolerance of government abuses and downright violation of the law and constitution has increased over the years. Follow the link for the 90 minute PBS documentary from 1987 that deals with how the U.S. sold weapons to Iran, despite its embargo and used the funds to support the ‘contras’ in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra Affair) before going over the history of U.S. government abuses and illegal clandestine operations in the name of national security post WWII. Now, compare this to the relatively low public reaction to legislation such as the PATRIOT law (and its equivalents in Europe), the reaction to the Iraq war and the minimal buzz in the European press on the matter of the alleged CIA flights transporting illegally detained muslims post the 11th of September of 2001 from Europe to places where they could be interrogated and indeed tortured. No matter what you think of Moyers and PBS, Reagan and US policy in the 1980s and the 2003 Iraq war one thing is clear: people today seem much more apathetic to the abuses by the ‘secret’ governments in both the United States and Europe, even when these affect their own rights, privacy and freedoms, not ‘just’ the fate of some other country or people.