The excellent Tom Paine, safe in Moscow, on secret inquests:
I cannot see how it can possibly jeopardise national security for state agents who kill to be cross-examined. Their identities can be protected during a public inquest as the law now stands. Why would a respectable government want more?
Because, perhaps, it thinks it will need, quite soon, to cause large numbers of dissidents to ‘disappear’, and for the public to be by then so accustomed to the idea that anyone can be taken off the street and done away with in secret that nobody will bother asking about the results of the ‘inquests’, which can then be abandoned.
I believe that this may be seen as a consequence of catastrophe theory.
