Sue Gough's gist to state the bolded bit (once more cited below) was decidedly not about arms-wide openness, but the latter part whereby DoD continues to reserve the right, and indeed to dutifully uphold its obligation, to protect sensitive information, sources and methods. All the FOIA requests you cited are precisely a testimony to what Gough stated, rather than proof of the opposite. They tell us absolutely nothing about a coverup of aliens.
"The Department is fully committed to openness and accountability to the American people, which it must balance with its obligation to protect sensitive information, sources, and methods."
P.S. By the way, you dont seem even a bothsidesist anymore who's impartial to both 'sides' (was that all just a veneer?). Now you seem resolutely far more distrustful of any and all USG sources than you are of Grusch. You're fully entitled to do so, but you didn't seem transparent about it at first.
I don't think denying FOIA requests tells us anything about a coverup regarding aliens. I think it's fair to say a lot of folks around here who are skeptics (and again, I count myself as a skeptic) would also be in favor of more transparency with regards to this topic or just the topic of UAPs in general. I agree that transparency should always be weighed against the interest of national security. I accept that the United States government has a responsibility to keep its citizens safe, and to keep its citizens safe it must keep many secrets. The most obvious example is information regarding nuclear weapons. I don't want, or need, to know anything about how said weapons are made, how they're stored, or any kind of in formation that if placed in the wrong hands could lead to the deaths of millions of people. Such secrets are morally justified and I have no objection to them.
Where we seem to be disagreeing is
the extent of the secrecy and how much credence we give the claim that
any and all UAP related footage is classified for the sake of national security.
All of it? If I believe, for good historical reasons, that these departments have a tendency to
over-classify things under the guise of "national security", when in fact the
real reason for many instances of classification have nothing to do with national security but rather because it exposes a lot of immoral shit they've done, and reveals
embarrassing information about the agencies in question, then I'm going to be less inclined in the future to simply accept at face value any and all claims of classification on the basis of national security.
The declassification of JFK related files is a good historical example of what I mention above. Rather than reveal any kind of conspiracy behind the scenes to assassinate JFK, said files just revealed a lot of
embarrassing and immoral things that the CIA and other government agencies were
involved with both domestically and abroad:
External Quote:
Of the documents' delayed release, Robert Kennedy Jr. once asked, "What are they hiding?"
The answer, I strongly suspect, is activities of the
CIA and other U.S. government agencies and actors in foreign countries that could embarrass the federal government and compromise the relationship the current administration has with these nations.
As revealed in the 1975 Church Committee report on Foreign and Military Intelligence and many documents since, for decades, the CIA was directly involved in overthrowing foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Indonesia's President Sukarno, and Chile's President Salvador Allende and General Rene Schneider.
Let's not forget that the CIA attempted to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro so many times that Fidel famously said, "If surviving assassinations were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal." And the CIA did assassinate Castro's revolutionary co-conspirator, Che Guevara, in Bolivia in 1967. The CIA was also involved in rigging elections in Latin American counties to favor dictators and politicians friendlier to American business interests.
Then there's the CIA's Project MK-ULTRA, also exposed by the Church Committee, showing that since the 1950s, the agency had engaged in mind-control experiments involving LSD and other mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting people—including U.S. citizens protected by the Constitution—with an aim toward developing drugs and procedures that could be used in interrogations.
As well, there is the Kennedy-era document called Operation Northwoods, officially titled "Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba." It included numerous false flag operations as a pretext to killing Castro and overturning his Communist regime, such as staging a phony attack on the
U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, employing a fake Russian MIG aircraft to buzz a real U.S. civilian airliner, hijacking planes, faking an attack on a U.S. ship to make it look like Cubans did it, and developing "a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington" that would harass U.S. citizens, all to be blamed on Castro.
The point being, previous examples of declassification throughout our nation's history tend to reveal
some fodder for conspiracy theorists (MK Ultra, Operation Northwoods), but by and large the biggest threat of releasing such documents was not the threat to national security but rather threats to
public perception of the agencies involved, of our government, and of historical figures. Even if we
grant that declassifying certain materials can present threats to national security, that doesn't settle the question because the immediate follow-up question is how risk averse are these agencies and just how much of a threat is allegedly being claimed here? Take for example a scenario where we're debating whether or not to release the photos of how prisoners were treated at Abu Ghraib prison. A case can be made that releasing said photos can pose a threat to national security on the grounds of international outcry against the US, and the photos bolstering anger and resentment among individuals already at high risk of becoming radicalized. How is this kind of alleged threat quantified so that we can assess the relative merit of releasing such photos weighed against the potential risks? If you're an
extremely risk averse agency, you might never release such photos because any declassification that could, no matter how unlikely, lead to any potential risk would be deemed unacceptable to release. Do we have any idea how risk averse they are? Such information matters when deciding how much to trust their claims of risks to national security, dont you think?
Kirkpatrick has testified to the following:
External Quote:
"I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous," Kirkpatrick stated in Wednesday's hearing. "The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of
balloons, [uncrewed] aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources."
I believe him. This has nothing to do with distrusting his assessment, this has to do with transparency. Considering that most cases resolve into perfectly mundane phenomena, can we at least see
those? Of the over 600 or so cases in your portfolio,
there doesn't exist a single one that can be shared with the public without it potentially being a threat to national security? Does he believe that? Do
you?
We know how quickly they're
able to declassify footage from otherwise classified systems like the MQ-9 when it serves propaganda (I don't mean it derogatorily here, merely descriptively) reasons such as this one:
Source: https://youtu.be/8-DMtqJoJ7I
And most recently they did the same with the footage released
a few days ago. But when it comes to UAP related footage, including any footage obtained on that same MQ-9 platform, said footage is deemed classified and unreleasable due to all footage pertaining to said platform being classified (even though they just demonstrated, twice, how easy it is to remove or blur information from said videos that reveal info about the drone's capabilities without said footage posing a threat to national security).
My skepticism extends to being skeptical about claims made by government officials and agencies considering the long documented history of the self-serving nature of many of its
justifications for keeping said material classified.
Nothing about what I'm claiming assumes or implies an alien coverup of any kind. When it comes to
anything related to the UAP topic, transparency is the
last thing they should be taking credit for. And they certainly have not earned the public's trust to the extent that I should always just accept at face value any claim they make about the necessity of secrecy for the sake of national security. They don't have a track record that should give anyone confidence that their
stated justifications for secrecy are their
real motivations for such, whatever those may be.
