The silence of power is the loudest alarm a republic can sound

The Washington Examiner reports a fact that ought to stop every citizen cold: more than 440 American service members have been injured in what the lead describes as the ongoing war in the Middle East, and nearly five months have passed without a single public briefing from the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I did not live to see this particular conflict, and I will not pretend to judge its strategic wisdom — that judgment belongs to those who possess the current intelligence. But I need no modern knowledge to name what is happening here. This is the concealment of the human cost of war from the very people who bear that cost and who fund it with their taxes and their children.

I wrote, in the Declaration, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Consent is not a ceremony performed once at the ballot box and then forgotten. It is an ongoing transaction, renewed by information, sustained by accountability, and broken the moment that those who hold power begin to decide for themselves what the public is permitted to know about the blood being shed in its name. A general who will not report his casualties to the civilian public is not protecting operational security — he is protecting himself from judgment.

I was no pacifist. I sent the Navy to Tripoli without a formal declaration of war, and I have been criticized for it ever since — some of that criticism fairly earned. But even in that episode, I returned to Congress to report, to account, to seek authorization. The principle was not that the executive could never act swiftly; it was that swift action must be followed by swift accounting. Five months of silence is not swift action followed by accounting. It is the posture of an administration that has decided the legislature and the press, and through them the people, are obstacles to be managed rather than masters to be served.

The press is the instrument by which the citizen governs at a distance. I quarreled with newspapers throughout my public life — some of what they printed about me was slander, and I said so — yet I never doubted that a free and adversarial press was more essential to liberty than a clean one. When the executive branch refuses to brief the media on the condition of its own wounded soldiers, it is not merely being unhelpful. It is dismantling the very circuit by which a republic corrects itself. The injured service member becomes invisible; the policy that produced the injury escapes scrutiny; the officials responsible face no reckoning. That is not a government answerable to its citizens. That is, in the precise meaning of the word, an arbitrary power.

I will speak plainly on what I must mark as inference, since I cannot know the particulars of this war from where I stand: if the number of injured were small, or if the cause were unambiguously popular, history suggests that administrations announce such figures readily. Silence of this duration and completeness is rarely the product of caution. It is more often the product of a cost that those in power fear the public will not willingly bear once it is seen clearly. That fear, however understandable in a political sense, is a confession — a confession that the policy could not survive the informed consent it requires to be legitimate.

The remedy is the one the framers designed and that every generation must choose to use: the Congress must demand the briefings, in open session where the public interest requires it, and in classified session only where genuine operational necessity compels. The press must continue to press. And citizens must insist — loudly, persistently, without apology — that no government of a free people has the right to hide its wounded. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance; and vigilance begins with knowing the price being paid.