The Secret About Secrecy

There are quite a few things that we as Americans are subjected to which we take little or no notice of since we don't know life without these things. For example, we all take televisions and cars for granted, even though they are brand new in the historical sense; we simply can't remember a time before them, so as far as we're concerned they were here at the creation.

Our government has changed so radically in the last 60 years that anyone under 80 years old can be forgiven for having no concept of what has happened to our system of government. Put another way: nobody in this nation under the age of 80 can remember a time in which this nation was not on a war footing.

This may seem like a bit of a shock, so I'll repeat it: this country has been at war or in a state of war preparation for 70 years. Only people who can remember life in 1940 have any direct connection to an America without an imperial government, without the Bomb, without a "Commander in Chief", without an "aggressive totalitarian foe".

After World War II, unlike each of its previous wars, the United States did not demobilize. It did not return to a republican form of government. Instead, it became a permanent national security state, complete with secret armies scattered across the earth.

This shift, or rather this earthquake, required a whole series of new things that we simply assume are perfectly natural (intelligence agencies who do not inform the people what it does in their name and with their money, promoting military expenditures above all other social responsibilities, granting the president warmaking powers in direct violation of the Constitution, blah, blah, blah)

The point here is that the American republic was put on life-support in 1941, as it always is during war. But in 1945, instead of being revived from its self-induced and self-protecting coma, the republic was killed in its bed by the emerging imperialists.

Many sins came with this, but the one I'm focusing on here is secrecy. Secrecy violates the most fundamental element of a free nation: an informed citizenry. Voting is nice, but when officeholders don't tell the people what they're doing, voting is pointless.

Of all the insidious institutions and practices ushered in by the national security state, government secrecy is perhaps the most damaging. The government began classifying mountains and reservoirs of information, something it had never before done. The power elite of the new national security state (White House, CIA, Pentagon) began to classify nearly everything they did as top secret.

So we have lived our entire lives in a nation where the leaders of the government simply feel no need to inform citizens what they are doing on our behalf. The reason our leaders give, of course, is that we must keep secrets from our enemies, but if you really think about it, they're much more concerned with keeping secrets from US.

That's the secret about secrecy: the government is above all concerned with keeping its actions secret from us, not from our enemies. A couple examples may clarify my point.

Kennedy and Cuba Let's compare what Kennedy was telling the American people with what he was doing: he was telling the American people we had no intent of invading Cuba while privately doing exactly what he said he wasn't. He was lying. Very clear cut.

But here's the thing: since all of his actions were "top secret", he could tell the American people whatever he wanted. He was ordering all sorts of unwise, illegal, and dangerous actions without telling the citizens, the people who he served and who paid for his adventures with their tax dollars.

So let's think about this: Why did Kennedy keep his Cuba activities secret? His answer would be "to keep it secret from our enemies". Okay. Let's flesh out that reasoning. The enemy in this case would be Cuba. Does anyone think that Cubans did not realize that their ships were being blown up, that their sugar cane was being burned? Of course they knew. They lived there.

So Kennedy's excuse is pathetically easy to eviscerate. The enemy knew what we were doing in Cuba because....well, because we were doing it to them. So it was no "secret" to the Cuban people that the American president was at war with them. It was only a secret to the American people.

The only faction in this sordid equation that did NOT know what was going on in Cuba was the American people. The American president knew. The enemy knew. We didn't. Our enemies knew more about our actions than we did. The president's conduct was kept "top secret" because he didn't want us to know about it.

So when Castro's Soviet friends put missiles into Cuba, they rightly called them defensive. Kennedy went on TV and assured the American people that there was absolutely no reason for Cuba to fear the U.S. and that therefore the missiles were clearly offensive. He risked Armageddon to protect that lie. Again, Kennedy knew the truth. Cuba knew the truth. The Soviet Union knew the truth. The American people did not.

Nixon and Cambodia

During the Vietnam war, President Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country. It was, of course, top secret. Why? To keep it secret from our enemies, we were predictably told.

To accept that, you must believe that the Cambodians didn't know that their own country was getting the shit bombed out of it. Again, the "secret bombings" were secret to absolutely nobody except the American people.

This is what the government does: it classifies nearly everything. Most of what it classifies has absolutely nothing to do with national security. There are two main intentions in this mass secrecy.

The first is simply to be free to do things the American people would never tolerate. The second is to cover up evidence of your own sins and crimes.

So, an example of the first might be the decision to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954 at the behest of the United Fruit Company, which had employed the CIA director at the time. In general, Americans might not like the idea of paying its government to use violence to overthrow a democratically elected government of a small and poor state on the orders of American banana planters. So, it had to be secret.

The Guatemalans knew all about it of course; they couldn't help but notice the death squads that replaced their democratic government. But the American people didn't know a thing.

An example of the second might be the Iraq War. Relying on "top secret" information, we were told that there was "no doubt" that Iraq had WMD, but that to show this doubt-smashing evidence would be too dangerous. So we had a war instead. And there were no WMD, top secret information aside.

So now the question is, what was in those "top secret" documents which led us to war? Think we'll ever find out? No, because for the American people to find out what the hell happened would be a threat to national security. It's one thing for everyone else in the world to know this sins and crimes of our government, but for the American people to know this is the greatest threat to the secret keepers.