A good way to assure yourself and the world that you are good is to attack something evil. Another way, almost as good, is to attack something associated with that evil. If you want assurance that you're really good you can tear the hell out of it.
That's Julian Assange's way. Secrecy is associated with the KGB and the CIA and the Nixon plumbers. Assange starts WikiLeaks and tears the hell out of it. He's free of any need to think specifically of secrecy's actual operations, or ask how each operation might be logically connected to a good or an evil. The logic of association licenses him to be vague.
The students who burned down the ROTC building in the sixties. operated under the same license. The Army was associated with an evil war. Destroy its ability to produce officers. Ignore the specific need for an Army and its officers — as, say, in Arkansas when Governor Faubus tried to keep black students out of school.
That's the way of all the Americans railing against "Washington." Washington is associated with evil politics. Elect people who will repudiate it. Don't ask where you will put them. (Scatter them around the country? Install them on ships? Send them to the moon?)
Can anything be said for this poor "logic" of association? Sure. It's the only way lazy thinkers can think themselves good.
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