Ted Gup Quotes

#1. I don't think that the problems or the issues relate to any single piece of legislation. I think that they really do relate to the mindset that after eight years is pretty deeply embedded. It is not going to be easy to reverse itself.

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#2. I would argue that in times of war, sealed lips sink entire democracies. If we don't have access to vital information, we lose everything.

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#3. A one year study by the Washington Post has documented 620 cases in which experimental drugs have been implicated in the deaths of cancer patients ... And they amount to merely a fraction of the thousands of people who in recent years have died or suffered terribly from cancer experiments ...

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#4. Another factor is the post-9/11 security mentality, which views sunlight as toxic and imagines that somehow bin Laden is dependent upon our government documents, a "fact" that has never, ever been supported to my knowledge. So, that's the second factor.

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#5. He was a simple honest man. He never strayed,
He never drank, he never smoked, and he never kissed a maid.
And when he passed away his insurance was denied,
Because he never lived, they claimed he never died.

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#6. The mechanics vary from place to place and from office to office. The handling of SBUs can be different in the same agency just across the hall, one from another. There are virtually no standards.

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#7. The SBUs have spread like kudzu and are choking off everyone's ability to see what the hell's going on in government.

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#8. The level of trust is extraordinarily low and the level of suspicion extraordinarily high, and with good reason and on both sides. The press has hunkered down for very good reason, because it's being treated like a mushroom.

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#9. Secrecy doesn't attach to particular parties; it attaches to power. All of the bull work is in place for whomever succeeds. That's my concern.

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#10. There's no faster way or surer way to consolidate power and disenfranchise critics than to operate in secret. So this plays squarely into the promotion of the unitary executive. That's one factor.

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#11. It will be important to restore those provisions, those disclose provisions, those release provisions so that presidents are indeed held accountable and their information and papers are made public.

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#12. These human experiments have gone largely unchallenged and unquestioned by Congress, the medical profession, and the scientific community at large.

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#13. You have tens, hundreds of thousands of people in government, and just as many among contractors, who feel totally comfortable writing at the top of the document "internal use only," "official use only," and a million other synonyms, all of which amount to "none of your business" to the public.

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#14. There are benefits in the sense that there's still a certain level of confidence. But there are liabilities because you can coordinate and manipulate better as the instruments of oversight are more under your control. You don't have so many rogue operations.

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#15. In the vast majority of drug experiments, it is not uncommon for none or one or two of hundreds of patients to benefit from the drug.

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#16. The third factor is the natural predisposition of bureaucracies, both governmental and private, to exploit secrecy to whatever degree they are licensed to do so, and in this administration they're given virtually carte blanche.

Ted Gup