We hide from public eyes too often what should not be, because it might damage reputation or repudiate policy choice, in one way or another.
Then, to get at the truth, we break the law, leak documents, the holders of those documents get hacked (making one wonder if a secondhand redaction matters), and our enemies get access to a trove of free, public information.
As noted here, even when discussing the President's authority to assassinate:
¶ The war in Iraq spawned a reliance on private contractors on a scale not well recognized at the time and previously unknown in American wars. The documents describe an outsourcing of combat and other duties once performed by soldiers that grew and spread to Afghanistan to the point that there are more contractors there than soldiers. [An article on this topic is scheduled to appear in The New York Times on Sunday.] - NYT
