The fourth President of the United States, James Madison, said:
“A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”
It seems to me that the democratic principles that Madison talked about and guided President Lyndon Johnson in signing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law in July of 1966, is fading out of the American idea of democracy.
Wikileaks, a journalistic project dedicated to freedom of information, started putting dents in he fancy façade of different secrecy machineries, governmental and non-governmental, since late 2006. From 2009, Wikileaks has been publishing massive amounts of American secret documents on variety of issues. Most notable among these were Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs as well as the 2010 U.S. Diplomatic Cable leaks.
This was a great service by Wikileaks to the idea of democracy for which Americans and others should be thankful to this organization. Still, the American propaganda machine managed to divert the focus from the idea behind Wikileaks to the person who runs this organization, Julian Assange. I admit that even I am uncomfortable with what I hear about his personal life, it for heaven’s sake, it is his personal life and should not have to do anything with what he does. I am yet to meet an American who comfortably says: I am glad these documents were made public as I would like to know what my government is doing behind closed doors.
The response of the American government to this uncomfortable situation is: more secrecy. The American government is using its infamous fear tactic by blowing the potential consequences of these leaks out of proportion. They warn Americans of “threat to national security!” In the meantime, they are using unbelievably strong rhetoric against those who helped these documents out of the secrecy machine.
Bradley Manning was just (February 2011) charged by "aiding the enemy," “a capital offense under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” According to this code of conduct, “aiding enemy” is punishable by death penalty, if convicted. At the same time, there are calls for Assang's assassination and/or execution from high-level American officials. This is the second leg of the fear tactic, which is often done under the guise of the first fear leg, i.e. national security threat. And the public, fearful of what can happen to them if anyone knows about the inner working of the American government are silent on the issue. Instead of embracing this service done by Wikileaks and demanding more freedom of information to ensure the robustness of democracy in the U.S., Americans are allowing the government to dig a deeper hole of secrecy for them.
How did we got to be so secretive?
In May 1997, in a hearing on government secrecy, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan testified to Senate’s Committee on Governmental Affairs based on the work of the Moynihan Secrecy Commission, a bipartisan statutory commission. “It is at times terribly necessary and used for the most legitimate reasons,” he said about secrecy. “But secrecy need not remain the only norm: we must develop a competing culture of openness, fully consistent with our interests in protecting national security, but in which power is no longer derived primarily from one's ability to withhold information.” He further suggested, “it is time to reexamine the foundations of that secrecy system. The Information Security Oversight Office report to Congress last week estimated the direct costs of secrecy at $5.2 billion in 1996 alone. The same Office reports that … in a single year, roughly 400,000 new secrets were created at the Top Secret level alone -- the disclosure of any one of which would cause ‘exceptionally grave damage to the national security.’”
Another observer of government secrecy, George F. Kennan, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, said in response to Moynihan Secrecy Commission report that:
“It is my conviction, based on some 70 years of experience, first as a government official and then in the past 45 years as an historian, that the need by our government for secret intelligence about affairs elsewhere in the world has been vastly over-rated. I would say that something upwards of 95% of what we need to know about foreign countries could be very well obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly legitimate sources of information open and available to us in the rich library and archival holdings of this country.”
Turning a blind eye on all of this, the U.S. government has since moved towards more secrecy, while other Western democracies are moving towards more openness. On February 2010, the British Justice Ministry announced the reduction from 30 year to 20 years of the time confidential government documents remain classified. This is while UK is among the least liberal European countries.
Since the Moynihan Commission’s report, scores of regulations have passed to further secret-ize the workings of the American Government. During the Bush era, it was determined that a "sound legal basis,” which has no legal definition onto itself, can be a reason for withholding information. Even the ostensibly progressive Obama administration did not let secrecy alone. On December 2009, Obama issued an Executive Order (# 13526), “which allows the government to classify certain specific types of information relevant to national security after it has been requested. That is, a request for information that meets the criteria for availability under FOIA can still be denied if the government determines that the information should have been classified, and unavailable.”
A nation who accepts to be rejected access to public information, arguing that secrecy is necessary for “my” security and interest, is advocating for nothing but a big brother approach to government. However good it feels to cast one's vote at the ballot box, a democracy without democratic approach to information is not far from the rule of a benevolent dictator. What makes a benevolent dictator legitimate in the eyes of the public is not his/her willingness to rule based on public’s interest. But rather his/her ability to convince the public that whatever s/he does is in their interest, even if they don’t know why. And that is exactly what secrecy is good for: manipulation of the public's perceptions and beliefs.
