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1/1/04
Hypocrisy on Secrecy
U.S. News & World Report Dec. 22, 2003 spends
several pages on an investigative report called "Keeping Secrets: The Bush
administration is doing the public's business out of the public eye. Here's
how--and why." The tactics of the piece are typical of liberal propaganda,
and particularly of journalistic self-righteousness.
The piece analyzes several kinds of secrecy, trying to
make the case that there is a cloak of secrecy over the whole administration
that implies something nefarious is happening behind closed doors. Some of
the cases might indeed deserve some examination, but the fact is that for most
of the secrecy cited there are important reasons, and thus they cannot be lumped
together and treated as part of the same trend.
The kinds of secrecy alleged are as follows:
- Business and consumer information. The prominent example is
in the automotive industry, where reports of potential safety hazards in cars
and tires are being quashed. This is worthy of examination, since the
effect of the secrecy is mostly to protect companies from publicity that might
affect their competitiveness.
- Health and safety information related to local and regional
infrastructure. The article emphasizes the negative impact on
consumers and communities trying to obtain information that is important in
pursuing remedies or recompense for health and safety issues. It
attempts to deemphasize the fact that if we were to provide such information
publicly, terrorists would be given key insights. For example, it might
seem to benefit a community to know where there might be stockpiles of
hazardous chemicals stored by enterprises located there. It might also be even
more damaging for them if a terrorist found out where it was, and planted a
bomb to create a community-wide chemical disaster. This point,
therefore, does not point to any kind of nefarious secrecy to protect friends
of the administration from public accountability.
- Secrecy in federal courts. Even in cases not directly
touching national security issues, the Executive Branch has been asserting a
"state secrets" protection against allowing certain information to be revealed
in court. The article provides only one potentially damaging example:
that of a former CIA agent suing the agency; the government demanded the
return of some documents containing a certain bit of information that, it
later turned out, had been released previously due to "a clerical error."
The plaintiff's attorney might be right to suspect that this was just an
excuse to deny the plaintiff information critical to his case, but even if so,
this is not official administration policy: it's a low-level abuse of a policy
designed to protect the nation's security. This, too, provides no
support for the case that the administration's penchant for secrecy is in any
way nefarious.
- Executive privilege. The article falls back on the
tried-and-true gambit of Democrats and populists, attacking the same privilege
used by every president since Eisenhower, and by Democratic governors like
Howard Dean, to keep confidential the advice they get from various parties
when pursuing policy objectives. Democrats and populists want to know
who gave Dick Cheney advice when he was working to put together the
administration's energy policy. The policy itself is public, so the
impact of the secrecy is minimal, and Bill Clinton never disclosed such
information, either. So there's a short list of people guilty of the
same kind of secrecy: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Howard
Dean, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
There's no case for any new level of nefarious secrecy here.
The facts outlined in the article make two things clear:
first, that we now face a conflict between concerns about national security and
concerns about the comfort and health of individuals and communities; and
second, that the Bush administration's new levels of secrecy are (with perhaps
one arguable exception, as noted above) in the vicinity of this critical
juncture. There is little support for the idea that secrecy, for its own
sake, is a central theme for the Bush administration, much less that anything
nefarious is at work in their policies.
Those who believe the Bush administration has taken
secrecy too far, and thus compromised individual freedoms and rights too much in
favor of our collective right to national security, should make the case in
those terms, rather than put their own credibility at risk by trying to turn the
argument into a nigh-slanderous accusation involving nefarious plots and
conspiracies.
Modified: 09/10/2004
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