1. Black Vault News and Special Interest | Unlocking government
Secrecy shouldn't be the standard
Government secrecy may be necessary in rare instances. As a rule, it isn't. Here are current examples of secrecy as a self-serving shield for potential abuses of power rather than as protection of the public interest.
· Many Americans are familiar with the Bush administration's domestic-spying program -- the tapping of Americans' phones and Internet communications when one of the parties is abroad. Fewer know that several telecommunications companies cooperated with the government, and have so far been cleared of revealing to what extent they've given customers' records to the government. The administration is looking to grant them permanent immunity from suits resulting from that cooperation.
· Soldiers depend on the military to be their legacy's custodian when they're killed. In Pat Tillman's case -- the NFL star turned Army Ranger, and killed in Afghanistan in 2004 -- his death from bullets by his own platoon was covered up and the Pentagon lied to his parents for weeks before slowly (and still incompletely) owning up to the circumstances of the killing. How many other soldiers' families are fighting misguided Pentagon secrecy?
· One of President Bush's earliest executive orders was to seal presidential papers, including 68,000 documents from the Reagan administrations -- and give all sitting or previous presidents the authority to keep the seal on. That means even if, say, former President Clinton wanted his papers released, Bush could keep the seal on. The Reagan documents include communications between President Reagan and the first President Bush. Congress' attempts to override the order have failed.
More examples abound. But government secrecy isn't a phenomenon particular to the 9/11 generation. A bipartisan commission on government secrecy in 1997 painted a picture of a government so paranoid that even information published in newspapers and found on public search engines could be classified. The stress on secrecy led to public distrust of government, conspiracy theories and ineffective governance, as one government agency's information-seeking stumbled on another's classification policies.
Those were the results of a culture that took root in the early days of the Cold War in the late 1940s. The only previous secrecy commission, in 1955, had done much to foster that culture by calling for punishing anyone disclosing classified information and extending the government's wiretapping authority.
Sound familiar?
National security is the rationale. Shouldn't secrets be kept from potential terrorists looking to blow up nuclear power stations or chemical rail lines while planning their deeds over cell phones and the Internet? Not according to the 9/11 commission, whose co-chairman, Thomas Kean, two years ago criticized the surge in renewed secrecy on national-security grounds: "The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public," he said.
Yet declassification fell from 200 million pages in 1997 to about 25 million pages in 2004 while classification rose from about 6 million documents in 1996 to 16 million in 2004. CIA officials even re-classified tens of thousands of pages that had been made public at the National Archives. The Bush administration has used 9/11 to add thicker chains to the padlock.
The next president would do well to revive the 1997 commission's recommendations -- declassify most secret information after 10 years (and all of it after 30), and restrict secrecy to a strict minimum through a standard classification system, rather than, as Commission Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it at the time, "whatever anyone with a stamp decides to stamp secret." Those who benefit most from secrecy are those who want to keep things secret. The public benefits least and is eventually most harmed.
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/opnOPN79012708.htm
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