Nation of Secrets The Threat to Democracy & the American Way of Life

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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.