It should not be so hard to write both poetry and fiction. Both arts, after all, make use of the same materials, words and punctuation. Poems...
Continue »
In The Book of Honor, Ted Gup uncovered some of the CIA's closest-held secrets: the names and stories of the seventy-one undercover operatives who were killed in the line of duty. Now he turns his attention to a broader range of American institutions, exposing how and why they keep secrets from the very people they are supposed to serve. Drawing on original reporting and startling analysis, Gup argues that a preoccupation with secrets has undermined the very valuessecurity, patriotism, privacy, the national interestin whose name secrecy is so often invoked.
Gup shows how the expanding thicket of classified information leads to the devaluation of the secrets we most need to keep, and that journalists have become pawns in the governments internal conflicts over access to information. He explores the blatant exploitation of privacy and confidentiality in academia, business, and the courts, and concludes that in case after case, these principles have been twisted to allow the emergence of a shadow system of justice, unaccountable to the public.
Drawing on Gup's decades of work as an investigative reporter, NATION OF SECRETSwill shake our faith in some of our most trusted institutions, piercing the veil of secrecy to reveal an alarming new threat to democracy in America. Gup presents a vision radical in its clarity, conservative in its roots, of a country teetering on the brink of losing its identity.
Review:
"In this probing expos, Washington Post investigative reporter Gup (The Book of Honor) surveys the post-9/11 mania for secrecy, focusing on the ubiquitous classification of routine information, the gutting of the Freedom of Information Act and the persecution of whistle-blowers. The government, he notes, is busy reclassifying information that has been in the public domain for decades, and a Pentagon report criticizing excessive secrecy was stamped Top Secret. It's all part of a national obsession with confidentiality, Gup argues, that afflicts corporations, universities and the press itself, whose reliance on unnamed sources corrupts and misleads its reporting. Gup's muckraking sometimes misfires (he reports on an intelligence operative who either murdered two other agents or was pulling his leg), and he ups the anxiety by conflating government secrecy with surveillance and wire-tapping programs. Democracy seems more gummed up than actually threatened by the problems he spotlights, such as the concealment of crimes, defective products and corporate chicanery, gossip replacing verifiable news, government pursuit of misguided policies based on secret information rather than public information that can be checked and debated. Still, this is a cogent critique of a tight-lipped America that is increasingly paranoid, dysfunctional and absurd. (June 5)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"'Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of the state.' The man who uttered those words was the guiding hand behind a weak leader. He was a clever strategist who centralized power, did not hesitate to mix religion with politics and dealt ruthlessly with domestic opponents. He also helped push his nation into a costly war. The quote and description might fit Vice... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) President Dick Cheney, at least according to his critics. In fact, the words were spoken about 400 years ago by Cardinal Richelieu, the top adviser to King Louis XIII of France. In his illuminating and biting new book, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage shows how Cheney has emerged as Bush's Richelieu, the most powerful vice president in history. 'Cheney made no secret of his agenda of expanding — or "restoring" — presidential power,' Savage writes in 'Takeover.' 'He repeatedly declared that one of his goals in office was to roll back what he termed "unwise" limits on the presidency that were imposed after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.' To help do that, Savage says, Cheney brought on board a one-time CIA and Pentagon lawyer named David Addington. The hidden hand's hidden hand, Addington was described by Lawrence Wilkerson — former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff and, thus, a bureaucratic rival to Addington — as a force who both used Cheney's influence and influenced Cheney in turn. According to Wilkerson, Addington was the leader of a small group of administration ideologues who stood behind their policymaking bosses, 'whispering in their ears ... telling them they have these powers, that the Constitution backs these powers, that these powers are "inherent" and blessed by God and if they are not exercised, the nation will fall.' It was just such arrogance, Savage argues, that had led to the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan presidency. And vigorously defending the administration's right to ship arms to Iran and cash to Nicaraguan fighters were a young congressman, Dick Cheney, and his young aide, David Addington. Among Cheney's more recent accomplishments, Savage says, was a key role in President Bush's use of signing statements to, in effect, cross his fingers when enacting laws. The practice allows a president to sign a statute while simultaneously asserting that the law doesn't mean what it seems to or is constitutionally faulty and can be ignored, at least in part. Savage won a Pulitzer Prize this year for articles showing that while other presidents occasionally used this device, Bush has employed it with unprecedented frequency. In 'Takeover,' Savage reports that the 'chief architect' of the expanded policy was Addington. He says Cheney ensured that all legislation would be routed through the vice president's office before reaching the president's desk, and 'Addington then scoured the bills for any new laws that he believed would infringe on the president's constitutional powers as he saw them, drafting signing statements for Bush to sign.' After seven years in office, Savage notes, 'Bush had attached signing statements to about 150 bills ... challenging the constitutionality of well over 1,100 separate sections in the legislation.' By contrast, all past presidents combined had used the technique to challenge about 600 sections of bills. The CIA's use of harsh interrogation tactics was another area where Cheney applied his muscle, according to Savage. When Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced an amendment to prohibit methods outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, Cheney immediately began lobbying Congress against the measure. The amendment passed by lopsided votes of 90 to 9 in the Senate and 308 to 122 in the House, effectively making it veto-proof, 'but Cheney and the administration's legal team weren't finished,' Savage writes. Late on a Friday night, the White House quietly issued a signing statement in dense legalese, referring to sections of the bill only by their numbers; it rendered a year of congressional debate irrelevant by asserting that the president still had authority to waive the torture ban whenever he saw fit. Ted Gup is similarly concerned about the rise of secrecy, though he sees it as a problem throughout society. A former Washington Post investigative reporter and author of a book about the CIA called 'The Book of Honor,' Gup devotes several chapters in his new book, 'Nation of Secrets,' to national security issues. But he also explores the more subtle and nuanced aspects of the topic: how secrecy affects us in our everyday lives, in city councils, corporations, courts, clinics and universities. Traditionally, campuses embrace openness and transparency. But increasingly, Gup writes, 'at universities and colleges around the nation, presumptions of openness have given way to a permissive secrecy, mirroring government's own move into the shadows.' At Georgetown University, for example, David Shick, a junior, died when his head hit the pavement after a fellow student punched him. Yet Shick's parents were not allowed to learn the results of a university hearing on the matter unless they signed an agreement barring them from revealing the information, even to their two other children. Federal law requires universities to report all serious crimes, but, Gup points out, 'compliance is shoddy at best.' The University of California, for example, reported that in 1998 its nine campuses had a total of 90 rapes. The Sacramento Bee found that more than twice that number actually had been documented by campus officials. Courts, too, are under pressure to seal their records in product liability, police brutality and discrimination cases, thus preventing the public from learning what cars or toys to avoid, which cops are bad and how businesses discriminate. One study cited by Gup found that fewer than 1 percent of the cases brought before the federal bench resulted in sealed settlements. But of the records that were sealed, a very high proportion (40 percent of one sample of 1,270 cases between 1997 and 2001) were in lawsuits of 'special public interest,' the most serious malpractice and product liability cases. In other words, secrecy is most common in exactly those circumstances where openness would be of most benefit to the public. When and how state secrets should be protected is the topic of 'Top Secret,' by Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. His slender but extensively researched book wrestles with complex legal issues that have arisen since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He notes that in an effort to stop leaks, Bush administration officials have considered prosecuting not just public employees who give classified information to the press, but also reporters who receive the information. 'This is a novel question,' Stone writes. 'In all American history, no journalist has ever been prosecuted under such a theory.' Looking at the question strictly as a matter of constitutional law, Stone comes down largely on the administration's side. The government could punish a reporter for receiving classified information from a public employee, he contends, if the journalist expressly sought the leak, knew it would result in imminent and grave harm to national security and realized that publishing the information would not meaningfully contribute to public debate. But even if the government could bring such a case, Stone argues, that doesn't mean it should. 'The United States has made it through more than 200 years without ever finding it necessary to prosecute a journalist for soliciting a public employee to disclose confidential national security information,' he writes, suggesting that wise officials ought to accept customary limits on their power. Cardinal Richelieu would probably disagree. James Bamford is the author of 'Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret NSA' and 'A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies.'" Reviewed by James Bamford, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Synopsis:
In this follow-up to "The Book of Honor," Gup exposes how and why American institutions keep secrets from the very people they are supposed to serve. He argues that a preoccupation with secrets has undermined the very values in whose name secrecy is so often invoked.
TED GUP is an investigative reporter who has been a staff writer for the Washington Post and a correspondent at Time magazine. He is the author of The Book of Honor and the recipient of a George Polk Award and a Worth Bingham Prize. A professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University, he lives in Pepper Pike, Ohio.
CAUGHT IN A PINCERS BETWEEN SECRECY AND SURVEILLANCE, any American might wonder if liberty is slipping away, silently and by increments. If every citizen knows less and less about what her government is up to because of pervasive secrecy while government accumulates more and more information about peoples’ personal lives via infinitely inclusive National Security Agency data-bases with the obsequious assistance of private corporations, can freedom long endure? As the pincers tighten, where in the future lies the tipping point separating the free society from a police state?
SOMETIMES SECRECY AND SURVEILLANCE COMBINE creating a double whammy against American freedom as in the case of the administration’s unconstitutional withholding of information from Congress about NSA domestic spying activities.
TO UNDERSTAND THE DANGERS of domestic spying, bypass Orwell but read Edwin Black’s book on the history of the Hollerith punch card. To see where our hidden government is headed, read Gup’s “A Nation of Secrets,” the latest intelligent addition to the library that forewarns.
SECRECY BLINDS LIBERTY. Without useful information and knowledge on which to base judgments and to act, the citizen is left wandering in the dark to rush dangerously toward any faint glimmer of light including a will-o’-the-wisp over quicksand or that of an oncoming train.
GUP TRACES THE DEVELOPMENT OF SECRECY as a growth industry. The Freedom of Information Act designed as a check against excessive secrecy has been shut down since 9/11. Novel ways and justifications for allowing more people to stamp “secret” on more and more documents are outlined, all of which denies America the knowledge needed for a functioning free democracy as well as access to our own history.
HERE THEN IS A PARTIAL LIST of those effects destructive of liberty resulting from “abusive secrecy.”
EXCESSIVE SECRECY PREVENTS A SOCIETY FROM LEARNING FROM ITS MISTAKES. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So wrote Santayana implicitly defining both insanity and stupidity. Secrecy hides information that might shed light on present circumstances. Secrecy prevents a national memory from developing and infuses America’s collective wisdom with Alzheimer’s.
FOR EXAMPLE, America should have learned that the deliberately blurred official account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which served as the basis of US involvement in Vietnam, might have served as a lesson to question more deeply claims of WMDs in Iraq. But, according to Gup, the American government intentionally kept secret follow-up studies by Hanyok in 2001 of the Tonkin incident for the purpose of preventing doubts from being raised about Iraq possession of WMDs. Gup thus points out that America became involved in two costly wars based on unproven accusations.
GOVERNMENT SECRECY COVERS UP NEGLIGENCE, CORRUPTION, AND WRONGDOING AND SPAWNS CONSPIRACY THEORIES. Efforts to prevent investigations of 9/11 were designed to avoid accountability for a variety of security failures which when taken together might paint an accurate picture of what went wrong. It is natural for government officials to sweep their mistakes under the rug and relaxed standards for classification make this easier than ever.
SIMILARLY, SECRECY SUPPRESSES EXCULPETORY EVIDENCE AND PERMITS RUMORS SOMETIMES DELIBERATELY PLANTED FOR POLITICAL REASONS to take hold which falsely accuse innocent persons of negligence or misdeeds and delay or prevent their acquittal in the court of public opinion. . . or law. Then there is the Washington Post-60 Minutes expose of Nov. 2007 which shows how the FBI kept secret knowledge of a faulty forensic “bullet lead analysis” test used to convict the accused over 4 decades. Explain that to your 8th grader when discussing the American system of justice. The other side of this coin is when out of court product liability settlements are reached and the nature of the dispute is sealed, then the general public is deprived of knowledge about the possible harmful characteristics of a product.
SECRECY BREAKS THE LINKS OF CONNECTIVITY. The security puzzle cannot be solved if pieces are hidden away, if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.
Lack of coordination and information sharing among government agencies prevented anyone from connecting the dots of strange pilot training and people who were on watch lists. Warnings from lower level officials were not recognized. Presumably this problem has been solved for government agencies, but it remains a hindrance for the press and for citizens who can stand as the first line of defense only if they are fully informed.
GOVERNMENT SECRECY SILENCES DISSENTERS in numerous ways. First, people simply don’t know what’s happening and therefore can’t protest against some outrageous government activity such as barbaric medical experiments (Tuskegee and syphilis, 1932-1972;LSD, 1970s). More recently, there is the case of Abu Ghraib. Furthermore, the fact of domestic spying without court supervision remained a rumor until it became public knowledge after which broader debate about its use took place. During the period of secrecy the 4th Amendment was suspended (and still is) because the press and the public remained unaware. For those in the public and the press who want to know the facts of an issue, secrecy laws can be used to intimidate by threatening prosecution so that those persons who continue to pursue knowledge might wind up in prison. Tell that to your 8th grader when explaining Jefferson’s vision of a free press.
SECRECY ALLOWS GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS TO SPIN HISTORY to their favor. Witness the finger pointing that surrounds assessments of what went wrong with Iraq each trying to implant an official version of history for future generations. This was a stated reason why one particular author got the assignment to write an “approved” account of the current presidency.
ABUSIVE SECRECY EXTENDS FAR BEYOND THE EXECUTUVE BRANCH AND REACHES INTO THE judicial process, the journalism profession, the corporation, and even the university. The seeds of secrecy have been widely sown and are set to grow into a pervasive authoritarianism. The more astute among our enemies have hope when they see that we do their work for them. From within, America is subverting her own freedoms.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (13 of 26 readers found this comment helpful)
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"In this probing expos, Washington Post investigative reporter Gup (The Book of Honor) surveys the post-9/11 mania for secrecy, focusing on the ubiquitous classification of routine information, the gutting of the Freedom of Information Act and the persecution of whistle-blowers. The government, he notes, is busy reclassifying information that has been in the public domain for decades, and a Pentagon report criticizing excessive secrecy was stamped Top Secret. It's all part of a national obsession with confidentiality, Gup argues, that afflicts corporations, universities and the press itself, whose reliance on unnamed sources corrupts and misleads its reporting. Gup's muckraking sometimes misfires (he reports on an intelligence operative who either murdered two other agents or was pulling his leg), and he ups the anxiety by conflating government secrecy with surveillance and wire-tapping programs. Democracy seems more gummed up than actually threatened by the problems he spotlights, such as the concealment of crimes, defective products and corporate chicanery, gossip replacing verifiable news, government pursuit of misguided policies based on secret information rather than public information that can be checked and debated. Still, this is a cogent critique of a tight-lipped America that is increasingly paranoid, dysfunctional and absurd. (June 5)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Synopsis"
by Libri,
In this follow-up to "The Book of Honor," Gup exposes how and why American institutions keep secrets from the very people they are supposed to serve. He argues that a preoccupation with secrets has undermined the very values in whose name secrecy is so often invoked.
Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.
Don't Miss
