Why Reasonable People Think Government is Brain Dead

Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have fled...

From the ACLU web site:

ACLU Sues State Department to Declassify Diplomatic Cables Already Revealed by WikiLeaks

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today sued the State Department over its insistence on keeping classified a set of diplomatic cables describing the government’s efforts abroad to avoid attention or accountability over its actions connected to the "War on Terror," despite the fact that the documents have already been released by WikiLeaks. On April 12, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for 23 embassy cables that were widely disseminated by news organizations in November 2010. The government has refused to respond to the request, prompting today's lawsuit.

"Our current secrecy regime has become completely untethered from reality. The government's insistence that information published throughout the world remains 'classified' is not only ridiculous – it's a legal fiction that has permitted government officials to evade liability for illegal conduct," said Ben Wizner, litigation director of the ACLU National Security Project. "All too often, the government has employed secrecy not to protect the nation from harm, but to protect the powerful from embarrassment and accountability."

I can understand a government needing secrecy for state security, but why would any government insist on "secrecy" for any document published on the Internet? This is just bureaucratic madness. It delegitimizes the government to take such an idiotic stance.