“Writing in his masterwork Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in 1922, Max Weber showed that the “bureaucratic class” (Beamtentum) manipulated state secrets in order to undermine democratic institutions. By wielding security classifications, they could claim an information monopoly and render the parliament impotent. Weber later revealed that he was thinking in particular of the General Staff and their political machinations in the last years of World War I. Germany had been turned into all but a military dictatorship, and Weber’s study showed, correctly,
that the claims of state secrecy were the single most effective tactic used to destroy the nascent Wilhelmine parliamentary democracy. Now, Max Weber never met Dick Cheney, but Cheney is just the man he had in mind; he is for America today what Ludendorff was in the third Oberste Heeresleitung in 1918. We all know what security classifications mean to Dick Cheney. You invoke them to keep your lurid dealings with oil executives, defense contractors and foreign potentates out of public sight. But then when you have a political adversary in the crosshairs, security classifications count for nothing. And today we learn just how literally true this is.” (Harpers)
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