Nations: Ministry: Our warm silence

MINISTRY FILE: SILC-X
FILLETED: 01.02.06
CLEARED FOR: PUB/55

The Ministry of Undisclosable Purpose has always operated with discretion. To do less would be to betray the principles on which we were founded: the triple values of anonymity, autonomy, and action. Yet some claim that the secrecy of our operations is somehow an injury to you, or your democratically elected politicians.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Our silence is our gift to you: to allow you to live your lives in comfort and security, without unnecessary knowledge, without fear, and without involvement.

I made a very deliberate decision not to ask the president so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for the president if it ever leaked out. John Poindexter, National Security Adviser to President Reagan, on the decision to secretly sell guns to Iran

Equally, your silence is your duty to us, and to your fellow Ladonians. Only against a background of silence from the decent and the law-abiding can we easily identify the terrorists and their trouble-making sympathisers. Theirs will be the only lips moving.

But one way people can help as we're coming down the pike in the 2006 elections, is remember the effect that rhetoric can have on our troops in harm's way, and the effect that rhetoric can have in emboldening or weakening an enemy. George W. Bush

We will be listening. Listening on your phones, listening into your emails, listening in your workplaces. We will be listening in defence of your civil liberty.

In order to safeguard the civil liberties of the people, we have this [NSA domestic eavesdropping] programme fully scrutinized on a regular basis. George W. Bush

Help us to help you. Do not ask, for you do not wish to know. Do not protest, for our secrecy protects you.

Silence is unity, and unity is strength.