Congressman Cliff Stearns is mad, darned mad, that previously secret memos about programs to break the law by torturing prisoners have been released to the public. Stearns quotes short-time CIA chief Porter Goss to warn that, if the government keeps releasing secrets like this, then pretty soon, there won’t be any secrets at all! “We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets.”

What Representative Stearns seems to have forgotten is that the purpose of having government intelligence services is not to be secret, but rather, to gather intelligence. If intelligence can be gathered without secrecy, so much the better.

A little critical thinking might help Representative Stearns evaluate whether secret American government torture programs were of any use. Stearns claims that the secret torture protected Americans from terrorism, but the only evidence he has to support this claim is that government officials that approved and defended the torture say that it protected Americans. The actual information about the actual practice of torture by the American government shows no evidence that the torture stopped any terrorist attacks. In fact, the formerly secret information shows that the torture gave government agents false information that wasted the time of intelligence agencies. Also, much of the torture was done not with an aim of preventing terrorism, but with the aim of finding information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Intelligence agencies, when they are secret, are supposed to conduct their operations in service to the law. The secrecy that Cliff Stearns defends amounts to nothing more than a conspiracy to commit serious crimes that didn’t help the American people one jot. That’s not what I’d call intelligence.