While it may seem trite to say that authoritarianism thrives in an environment of government secrecy, it’s important to remember the reverse: Only by narrowly defining what is legitimate for our leaders to hide from us can we ensure that our interests as citizens are met and that we aren’t being hoodwinked into bad policy, including the worst bad policy of all, unjustified warfare.
Politicians and generals, as well as crony contractors and other camp followers have every reason to keep as many of their doings secret as possible. T’was ever thus. Better for a ruler to hide documents than to explain them. Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the ‘80s, citizen pressure to pry open secret files had good success.
The Freedom of Information Act, passed in 1966 and amended to make it truly effective in 1974 and subsequent years, has helped shine a great deal of light into shadowy government corners.
Still, through various means, officials have managed to keep secret reams of what ought to be public information. One preferred technique includes a kind of passive bureaucratic resistance that makes less tenacious seekers give up in frustration. Another method is to play games with the rules about which documents should remain “classified” and which should not.
For instance, those heroic secrecy busters at
The National Archive wrote recently that:
”The oldest Freedom of Information Act requests that are still pending in the federal government date back to the late 1980s,
before the collapse of the Soviet Union” …
The Archive is conducting a full-fledged audit of the way the Freedom of Information Act functions, and fails to function, throughout the government. It is demonstrating by example the
kind of penetrating oversight of the FOIA that Congress has largely neglected.
The importance of getting to the root of government secrets is displayed in this
Miami Herald piece about former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger:
BY DANIEL A. GRECH
BUENOS AIRES - At the height of the Argentine military junta's bloody ''dirty war'' against leftists in the 1970s, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Argentine foreign minister that ''we would like you to succeed,'' a newly declassified U.S. document reveals.
The transcript of the meeting between Kissinger and Navy Adm. César Augusto Guzzetti in New York on Oct. 7, 1976, is the first documentary evidence that the Gerald Ford administration approved of the junta's harsh tactics, which led to the deaths or ''disappearance'' of some 30,000 people from 1975 to 1983.
The document is also certain to further complicate Kissinger's legacy, which has been questioned in recent years as new evidence has emerged on his connection to human-rights violations around the world -- including in Chile, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
Kissinger and several top deputies have repeatedly denied condoning human-rights abuses in Argentina.
Kissinger’s record is an especially
egregious example of how secrecy protects government officials from censure, disgrace or prison time.
Since 9/11, the Bush Administration has worked diligently to increase government secrecy, aided by congressional and citizen fears that terrorists may take advantage of open records.
In his November 9, 2003, speech to the MoveOn folks, the man who would have been President, Al Gore,
hit the nail on the head :
Indeed, this Administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. A government of and for the people is supposed to be generally open to public scrutiny by the people -- while the private information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from government intrusion.
But instead, this Administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about American citizens. Under the rubric of protecting national security, they have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep it secret. Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism.
They are even arrogantly refusing to provide information about 9/11 that is in their possession to the 9/11 Commission – the lawful investigative body charged with examining not only the performance of the Bush Administration, but also the actions of the prior Administration in which I served. The whole point is to learn all we can about preventing future terrorist attacks ...
Another hero in the effort to keep the information flowing is Steven Aftergood, whose efforts were profiled November 26 in the
Washington Post by Dana Priest:
Around lunchtime on Sept. 26, a security officer at the Space Vehicles Directorate on Kirtland Air Force Base shot an e-mail to Steven Aftergood, who was sitting in his frayed tweed chair at his computer, in his office on K Street.
"Questions/concerns have been voiced by our scientists and engineers regarding material on your web," the officer informed him. "Please advise on your collection methods and who provides authorization to you allowing publication of what is presently on your web site."
"Collection methods?" Aftergood chuckled, then responded: "Authorization for publication of material on our web site is contained in U.S. Constitution, Amendment 1.
www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am1.
"If you have other specific concerns, let me know."
Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, is an army of one, the David in an era of Goliath-strength government stealth. ...
He often scoops the national media with anecdotes about government attempts to keep information secret. ...
In fact, the government's classification chief, J. William Leonard, has bookmarked Aftergood's Web site because it is usually easier to find critical national security documents there than on government Web sites. ...
Only fools or partisans, like those involved in the Plame Affair, seek to publicize information that would endanger the lives of Americans for no good purpose (or for personal gain or electoral gain). But such secret information remains a tiny portion of the total that government officials try to keep us citizens from seeing. Thanks to the National Security Archive, Steven Aftergood and others like them, we get to see more than we otherwise would have.