“Our cadre of evil geniuses can think of many ways to motivate Saudi behavior, and we should be using them all. For example, cautious people that we are, the Pentagon should commission a secret study of how we might intervene to restore order in the former Saudi Arabia after some massive terrorist attack annihilates the Saudi royals, taking some of the oil infrastructure up with them. When that study is leaked (to Bob Novak, of course, not the New York Times) how much more uneasy will rest the heads on which the Saudi crowns lie? Enough, perhaps, to make some greater effort against those Saudis whose business it is to exhort and export terrorism?”

fm “Bedtime for Bashar” by Jed Babbin / Spectator
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/mi…..207547.pdf

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Pres G W Bush at a press conference on Sept 30, 2003, in response to a question about the Plame investigation, probably in response to a question from WaPo’s Dana Priest:

THE PRESIDENT: …There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington… There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is…. And this [Plame] investigation is a good thing… Washington is a town where there’s all kinds of allegations… people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources, or people outside the information — outside the administration…. I want to know who the leakers are.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news…..930-9.html
——————–

Now, ordinarily in a democracy, the domain of ‘information’ would be a very large circle that encompasses all available knowledge, because at its core a democracy assumes free flows of information. We’ll call it the ‘knowledge domain’. Hence, a democracy has to place a high value on verifying information for reliability, or ‘truthfulness’ because of its role in decision-making (whether for commerce, government, military, etc.)
Within that large democratic ‘knowledge domain’ would be a smaller circle titled “WH_HighlyClassified” — a subset of restricted information, nested within the larger ‘information domain’. However, whether it is in the larger (public) domain, or whether it is temporarily restricted to a sub-domain of WH users, all information derives its value from it’s truthfulness.
In this view, information has use only if it can be verified, tested, examined.

But an ‘oligarchic view of information’ is evidently something rather different. And in that view, information domains don’t overlap — they’re separate, almost unrelated entities. GWHB and GWBush have both expressed this view, but GWBush is much farther along the ‘authoritarian’ end of the spectrum.

GWBush posits two completely separate, unrelated ‘information domains’ — ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of his administration. Draw one circle on the left half of a sheet of paper; another completely unrelated, separate circle on the right side. Circle 2 has no relationship to Circle 1.

To illustrate GWBush’s language:
Circle 1 = ‘people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources,…’
This implies that a critical JOB FUNCTION of anyone ‘inside the information’ is to leak (’anonymously’). He specifically refers to these people as ’so-called leakers’.
This is how an oligarch would view information — as something to be controlled, leaked, manipulated.
Oligarchs derive power from controlling and manipulating ‘information’.

Circle 2 = ‘…people outside the information — outside the administration’.
Being ‘outside THE information’ = ‘outside’ the administration.
You are never part of a larger whole; you are either ‘in’ or you are ‘out’.

GWBush is an oligarchic tyrant in an Open Source world.
Leonard, Feingold, Whitehouse, Aftergood seem to understand that in an open source world it is extremely important (for commerce, science, and the creation of what Fukiyama calls ’social capital’/trust) that information be held to certain standards for congruence with reality.

They must surely be quite close to the soft, tender underbelly of whatever bureaucratic beast Cheney, Bush, and their minions have constructed.

Great post, EW.

Thanks for reminding me.

makes it increasingly difficult to reserve the integrity

Shouldn’t that be “preserve“?

– MarkusQ

If they don’t want to keep files of their dirty work, how are they going to have trophies of their ‘achievements’ for later generations of this new American century to marvel at? Money might be too generic–wondering if they are keeping trophies in some other manner.