CLOAK & DAGGER CULTURE MAKING A MOCKERY OF NATIONAL SECURITY?

As I noted last week, the rise of the militarists after 9/11 has created a new environment in Washington.

Today, military hawks manipulate military budgets in a way that's not financially prudent for our nation. Worse, they have a tendency to classify everything that crosses their desks as "top secret". Consider the following, which even the experts acknowledge creates redundancy and overkill.

* We have over 10,000 counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence locations across the country.
* We have over 850,000 intelligence personnel with "top secret" access.
* We also produce over 50,000 intelligence reports (no doubt all "top secret") every year.

In a few words, Washington is in the process of developing a cloak and dagger culture that pretty much makes a mockery of top secret clearance.

Helping us understand this is Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert.

In one of his most incisive and lucid clips, Stephen Colbert makes it clear that the war crazies are starting to make a joke of security and what gets classified. Colbert uses the recent WikiLeaks release of 92,000 Afghan War related documents to help us understand that, in reality, "there's no new broad revelations" in the document dump, and that the government is pretty much classifying stuff that we already know about. More specifically ...

* Civilians have been killed by U.S. forces.
* Pakistan helps al Qaeda.
* Afghanistan is a tough place to wage war.

Watch the Colbert clip. It's pretty funny. His "ObviLeaks" reference is classic.

- Mark