Quote, unquote: telling the truth about not telling the truth

And so we’ve reached an uncomfortable situation, it seems to me, where the government is committed to keeping information from Canadians, but not to explaining the need for it to do so. Witness the Prime Minister’s “no ransom,” “no political prisoners,” “no dangerous criminals” line when, as Norman Spector observed somewhere on this website, he could far more easily have said national security precluded his discussing it. He’d rather take a thousand-to-one longshot on a half-truth paying off—did he not foresee that Fung might one day tell her own tale?—than be forthright about not being forthright.

-- Maclean's magazine's Megapundit blogger Chris Selley, in a post about the controversy over the clampdown of information about CBC reporter Melissa Fung's kidnapping in Afghanistan. (Selley seems to come down on the side of the argument that it's quite acceptable and understandable to suppress such information, because it's a war.)