Politics & Power Quote by Kate Adie

Adie’s sentence carries the cool insistence of a reporter who’s watched “national security” become a multipurpose solvent, dissolving accountability whenever war gets politically awkward. She starts with a blunt premise - no direct threat to the UK - and uses it to strip away the most convenient moral alibi for secrecy. If the war isn’t defensive, the state’s claim to exceptional powers looks less like prudence and more like narrative management.

The key move is her pivot from geopolitics to epistemology: “Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information.” She treats information not as a luxury of peacetime but as a democratic prerequisite, especially when the public is being asked to underwrite lethal action. The subtext is that officials know the argument for war is fragile; that’s why they police the flow of facts. “Obstructing” implies active interference - not mere caution, but a deliberate throttling of scrutiny.

Adie’s final clause lands hardest: “nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.” “Used” is unsentimental and faintly accusatory, reframing troops from heroic symbols into instruments of policy. It’s also a quiet defense of soldiers themselves: secrecy doesn’t just mislead voters, it puts service members in harm’s way for reasons that may not survive daylight.

Contextually, this comes out of the post-1991 and especially post-2003 Iraq debates, when embedded journalism, restricted briefings, and heavily curated intelligence claims made “freedom of information” feel less like an abstract principle than a battleground. Adie is arguing that if war is elective, transparency isn’t optional.