-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 26, 2007 12:50:40 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The People vs The Secret State
Secrecy, Lies, and the Covert War on the Constitution
by Scott Horton
Harpers, April 25, 2007
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/04/horton-20070425lwyh
In an interview yesterday Senator Jay Rockefeller discussed one of
the great untold truths of the last six years. The Bush
Administration has blocked Congressional oversight of its
intelligence operations through a series of lies, tricks and
misrepresentations. But its principal tool has been simple: it
withholds information.
As Rockefeller said:
"Don't you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that
because I'm chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that I just say
I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All
of it. All of the time. I only get, and my committee only gets,
what they want to give me. "
What Rockefeller is describing is a matter of tremendous moment —
the blinding of Congress. It has some important historical
precedents, the contemplation of which can only lead to still
greater concern about the Bush Administration's attitudes towards
secrecy.
In one of his most important works in the years immediately
following the Great War, Max Weber took a close look at state
secrets and the role they play in a democratic society — first in a
series of speeches, then in the chapter “Bureaucracy” in one of his
principal works, Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft).
Weber articulated a number of indisputable truths, starting with
the fact that by classifying information as “secret,” it is
immunized from public discussion and verification. “Secret”
information is for precisely this reason prone to be false, or at
least less likely to be correct than data that is tested in the
public environment. Indeed, there is a consistent practice over
many societies and epochs of using security classifications to
shield information which has been consciously fabricated —
precisely to protect its falsity (this is one of the possible
readings of Franz Kafka's great parable “Before the Law” — the
ultimate irony of a secret law — written at the same time that
Weber was addressing the subject, and certainly propelled by some
of the same historical developments).
But the most important of the many observations that Weber made had
to do with the role that security classifications play in the
allocation of power within democratic societies. Weber noticed that
secrecy was used to empower a bureaucratic elite and to dis-
enfranchise elected democratic representatives. Those with access
to classified information could claim superior, inside knowledge.
They had to be trusted and followed, and it was not possible to
engage them in any debate or discourse. Indeed, all debate could
be dodged by always falling back on "classified information."
It doesn't take much analysis to understand what Weber was
referring to in his essay. Though he uses polite and scientific
language, he was outraged over what had transpired in the last
years of the Great War. The General Staff and the war
administration had wielded security classifications to silence the
parliament and exercise increasingly thorough control over the
levers of government, until at the end, and certainly by early
1917, Germany was a thinly veiled military dictatorship — its
nascent democratic institutions had been strangled.
Weber's observations could, with just a bit of tailoring, have been
written about the Bush Administration. It quickly seized upon a
cloak of warfare to corrupt the intelligence gathering process and
to realize the full anti-democratic potential of security
classifications.
But its manipulation of security classifications as tools in a war
against the constitutional order is if anything far more clever and
more pernicious than anything that was attempted by the German
General Staff and the aligned Beamtentum.
A key aspect of that operation has been the abusive wielding of
national security classifications — they have been used to:
*cloak deceit and misinformation from public scrutiny, as in
claims that the Administration possessed highly classified
information supporting the conclusion that there were weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq, when this was false and known to be false
when uttered;
*hide or obscure important policy decisions which are at odds
with prior established policy and with law by insuring that the
policies themselves are secret;
*hide criminal conduct — as in the introduction of torture,
cruel, inhuman and degrading conduct producing the most disturbing
serial and programmatic war crimes against detainees in the
nation's history, the felonious program of extraordinary
renditions, a program of unlawful surveillance, and a routine
pattern of felonious violations of the Posse Comitatus Act by
agencies of the Department of Defense;
*protect political figures from embarrassment — usually by
concealing the fact that they have knowingly made false statements
for purposes of misleading the public;
*launch false or misleading attacks on political opponents —
as was revealed in United States v. Libby, in which we learned that
Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush conspired to declassify
top secret information on a piecemeal basis so it could be used to
smear a political adversary; and
*frustrate Congressional oversight and decision-making and
erode Congress' ability to exercise independent judgment to hold
the executive in check.
These practices are not uncommon in the world. They are
characteristic of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes
everywhere. These practices, collectively, constitute a dagger
pointed at the throat of American democracy—and indeed, they have
been used by the Bush-Cheney government as part of a scheme to
subvert the democratic order envisioned in the Constitution. It's
hard to say which of these offenses is the gravest.
But the aspect that probably requires the most immediate action is
the conscious subversion of Congressional oversight. For the last
four years, the administration has illegally evaded oversight of
its intelligence programs, and particularly of its extensive
palette of extra-legal activities, by Congressional committees.
It has done so openly, and its actions went shamefully unchallenged
by the last Congress — probably the most corrupt in the nation's
history.
Vice President Cheney was the ringmaster of this project, and he
has attempted a public justification of it on several occasions —
usually citing leaks which seem suspiciously close to his office or
to congressional figures close to him. In the current
administration, Cheney has been the leaker-in-chief, regularly
disclosing classified information of even the highest sensitivity
when he felt it would meet his political interests to do so. The
most striking example of this came with the outing of a covert CIA
agent, Valerie Plame, as an act of political retaliation. The Libby
trial afforded a deep insight into how Cheney's mind works in this
regard. He spent a period of at least three weeks completely
obsessed with the project of leaking, scheming with staffers and
aides as to how to carry it out, and ultimately even involving
President Bush. His intent was criminal and reflected actual
malice. As several jurors noted when they emerged following the
Libby conviction, they could not understand why they were deprived
of the opportunity of passing on Cheney's criminality. Indeed,
there's not much question what the verdict would have been.
There is no more urgent agenda before Congress today than
reasserting its oversight function, and using all the tools at its
disposal —including subpoenas, hearings and the power of the purse—
to regain a check on a regime of secrecy which is reeling
dangerously in the direction of a police state.
It could yet make a difference.
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