By Cliff Montgomery – July 17th, 2013
“You can’t go away when you’re under arrest.”
“That’s how it seems,” said K.
“And why am I under arrest?” he then asked.
“That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you.”
– Franz Kafka, The Trial
A Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) is one of the most important policy statements from any White House. Such a statement has the equivalent force of an executive order, thus it often possesses all the force of law. Yet it doesn’t have to be published in the Federal Register…which means that this legal authority can more easily be kept from the American public.
The Obama Administration seems to relish keeping these essential legal statements from the eyes of the public, regardless of whether the PPDs are classified.
Though the White House has issued over 20 PPDs, most have not been released by the administration.
Refusing to release unclassified legal guidelines which possess the force of law means that Americans are deprived of their Natural Right to rule their own supposed ‘democracy’. Perhaps even worse, it conceivably may produce a Kafka-esque situation in which a person is accused of breaking some part of a secret legal code they weren’t even aware was in existence.
Christian Beckner, who works at George Washington University’s land Security Policy Institute, recently pointed out that while the George W. Bush Administration often released its unclassified PPDs on such important matters as ‘homeland security policies’, the Obama Administration does not.
“Why this lack of transparency for a category of documents that had been publicly released in the previous administration?” wrote Beckner on his blog, land Security Watch.
“I suspect a primary cause of this is the integration of the land Security Council (HSC) into the National Security Council (NSC) in 2009,” Beckner mused. “The parts of the HSC that were absorbed into the new structure seem to have taken on the internal processes of the NSC, which has traditionally operated in the classified domain and worked on issues where federal agencies and international governments are the primary (if not sole) actors.
“However, for nearly all homeland security issues, the participation of non-federal stakeholders is essential. It’s not serving anyone’s interests for these directives to be kept [from the American people].”
