A nation's faults should not be its secrets. I think of the news that two hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over North Carolina in 1961. A safety maneuver kicked out parachutes, and the bombs landed without exploding.
But, can you imagine this news has been kept secret from the American people for 52, almost 53 years? While I have one Facebook friend who says he knew about the event more than a decade ago, the Guardian spins the story as new. (Maybe just the source of the story, an account written by Parker F. Jones years later, is new.)
I think of the 2007 attack upon innocent people by American soldiers in New Baghdad, Iraq, in 2007, of how the soldiers above in helicopters saw people walking down the street, with one carrying what they decided was a weapon -- it turned out to be a camera as he was a journalist -- and the helicopters swooped in and shot them dead. When a van pulled up to haul the dead away, they shot it up too. When one of the passengers in the van turned out to be a child, they suggested the people shouldn't be bringing children to a battle.
And, they kept it a secret -- classified information. It was not until 2010, when Pfc. Bradley Manning leaked the information to WikiLeaks that the American atrocity was unveiled. Manning, as you know, was recently convicted for releasing such information.
America's crimes should not be its secrets. We should not seek to cover up the bad we do, but rather should do all we can to apologize, and to try to mend the damage in any way possible. We should mourn over those who were killed, and mourn over our grave mistake. That is a free and open and honorable society. That is what we should aspire to be, not a nation of cover-ups.
We should not prosecute truth. We should not prosecute the telling of truth.
So, Saturday's news that America almost blew up a part of the Eastern Seaboard with two hydrogen bombs? Why should it have been kept secret for so many years? What part of "national security" is it that keeps us from revealing the truth?
The document detailing the near nuclear disaster was declassifed, allowing it to be released when journalist Eric Schlosser made a Freedom of Information search. But why was it classified all those years? Why?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-19/eric-schlosser-moves-from-big-macs-to-nuclear-accidents.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/20/goldsboro-revisited-declassified-document
http://news.yahoo.com/atom-bomb-nearly-exploded-over-north-carolina-1961-230654850.html
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BRITAIN_US_H_BOMB_ACCIDENT?SITE=OHCIN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
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