Wednesday
As the story behind Retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven’s 2018 Washington Post opinion piece has recently come to light, I am reprinting a blog post I wrote at the time. The Navy Seal who headed the Osama Bin Laden raid was apparently vacationing in a remote location when he heard that Donald Trump had revoked former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance. The voice mail he left for Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty was printed as an opinion column. You will see why his response reminded me of a Bertolt Brecht poem.
Reprinted from August 20, 218
A Bertolt Brecht poem came to mind when Retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven came to the defense of former CIA Director John Brennan, who was recently stripped of his security clearance by a Donald Trump angry at his criticisms.
Vox has the story of what happened:
The man who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 has a message for President Donald Trump: Revoke my security clearance, too.
Retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven, who led US Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014, wrote a short, but blistering op-ed for the Washington Post on Thursday afternoon, challenging the president on his decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.
In the statement, he praised Brennan’s service to America, and his “unparalleled integrity.”
McRaven continued, writing, “I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.”
The poem I have in mind is Brecht’s “Burning of the Books”:
When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the
Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath and wrote a letter to those in power
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you:
Burn me
The security clearance incident occurred during the same weekend that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani declared, “Truth isn’t truth,” a statement consistent with Trump’s instruction to to his followers last month, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” As George Orwell memorably informs us, autocrats’ first target is always the truth:
[Winston Smith] picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable, what then?
All patriots, like Brennan and Admiral McRaven, need to hold to the old arithmetic. And step up to the bonfire.
