Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute of Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Growing Government Secrecy: A Threat to Representative Government

Government secrecy is rising at a dramatic rate and is costing taxpayers billions of dollars, says a new report by a coalition of nonprofit groups. It is, beyond this, a threat to genuinely representative government.

The federal government spent $6.5 billion last year [2003] creating 14 million new classified documents and securing previous secrets—more than it has for at least the past decade, says the report, released early in September.

“Excessive government secrecy hides problems that the public needs to know, and information embarrassing to officials,” says Rick Blum, the report’s lead author and the coordinator for <OpenTheGovernment.org>, a coalition of over 30 nonprofit groups fighting unnecessary government secrecy.

The coalition’s “Secrecy Report Card” says that the “dramatic rise” in document classification—60 per cent more secrets in fiscal year 2003 than in the year (FY2001) prior to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001—runs counter to recommendations by the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks. The commission’s report also finds that secrecy is impeding the government’s ability to fight terrorists.

The official in charge of information security at the Pentagon told lawmakers late in August that at least half of the information the U.S. government classifies every year should not be kept secret. “How about if I say 50-50?” Carol Haave told the House Government Reform, National Security, Emerging Threats and International Subcommittee, when asked to quantify the problem of over-classification.

Ms. Haave, the deputy undersecretary of defense for counterintelligence and security, said classification generally was not done maliciously, but because “people have a tendency to err on the side of caution.”

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT), the panel’s chairman, called the system for safeguarding the nation’s secrets “incomprehensibly complex” and “so bloated it often does not distinguish between the critically important and the comically irrelevant.”

Rep. Shays said there was broad agreement that many of the 14 million pieces of information the government classified last year did not need to be secret. “Some estimate 10 percent of current secrets should never have been classified. Others put the extent of over-classification as high as 90 percent, he said.

The chairman of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, says that “three quarters of the classified material” he reviewed should not have been classified in the first place.

Writing in The New York Times, Senators Trent Lott (R-MS) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) declare that,

The ability to make documents secret is one of the most powerful tools in government, and it has been used heavily for decades. The National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office reported 14.2 million classification actions for 2003—more than double the number recorded 10 years earlier. At its extreme, the culture of classification can impair the information-sharing among intelligence agencies necessary to ensure sound policymaking; it can also deprive the American people of their ability to judge the effectiveness of their government on national security matters.

To deal with this problem and provide necessary checks and balances, Lott and Wyden have written legislation to create an independent national security classification board. They note that,

It is our intent that this body will bring some common sense to bear on the national security classification system. The legislation would establish a three-person board, with the president and the bipartisan leadership in the House of Representatives and Senate each recommending one member, subject to Senate confirmation. The board would have two tasks: first, to review and make recommendations on the standards and processes used to classify information for national security purposes; and second, to serve as a standing body to act on Congressional and certain executive branch requests to re-examine classification decisions.

Wyden and Lott, one a liberal and one a conservative, share the view that,

The United States cannot preserve an open and democratic society when one branch of government has a free hand to shut down public access to information. The lack of an independent appeals process for Congress tips the scales too far toward secrecy for any administration, and it is vital that we right this imbalance. The 1946 Atomic Energy Act established the principle that some information is “born classified.” There are certainly important sources and pieces of information that must never be compromised. But over the years, millions upon millions of documents that weren’t born classified have inherited or adopted or married into classification. As we fight the war on terror, it’s a legacy we can no longer afford.

Bruce Berkowitz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues that U.S. intelligence agencies are so obsessed with keeping secrets that they are actually putting us at risk:

Recent investigations into the September 11 intelligence failure and misestimates of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have discovered an important new trend. Traditionally, secrecy has been vital to effective intelligence. But now secrecy is causing some of our most significant intelligence failures. Investigators examining the September 11 terrorist attacks found that intelligence organizations were often unable to share information with intelligence users and thus could not provide effective warning. In other cases, intelligence organizations could not share information with each other and thus were unable to work effectively together.

In the case of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, Berkowitz notes that,

Preliminary investigations into the intelligence estimates of the Iraqi WMD program suggest some of the results of these policies. For example, CIA analysts assessing reports from the field sometimes believed they were reading information from several sources that corroborated each other, when in fact the reports all came from a single source—and were wrong. The analysts did not know they were making a mistake because security rules designed to protect secrets—“compartmentalization” and “need to know”—prevented them from knowing the identity of the source. . . . The whole purpose of intelligence is to give us an information advantage over our adversaries. Secrecy protects this advantage by keeping our opponents from knowing what we know. But poorly designed systems for protecting secrecy can give away any advantage we gain when they prevent us from using our intelligence effectively.

Things have become so unpredictable that in May the Justice Department took the unusual step of retroactively classifying information it gave to Congress nearly two years earlier regarding a former FBI translator who charged that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings. Law enforcement officials say the secrecy surrounding the translator, Sibel Edmonds, is essential to protecting information that could reveal intelligence-gathering operations. But some members of Congress said they were troubled by the move.

“What the FBI is up to here is ludicrous,” said Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA).

To classify something that’s already been out in the public domain, what do you accomplish? It does harm to transparency in government, and it looks like an attempt to cover up the FBI’s problems in translating intelligence.

A congressional aid said:

I have never heard of a retroactive classification two years back. It would be silly if it didn’t have such serious implications. People are puzzled and, frankly, worried, because the effect here is to quash Congressional oversight. We don’t even know what we can’t talk about.

Senator Grassley said: “This is about as close to a gag order as you can get.”

J. William Leonard, director of the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, says:

It is no secret that government classifies too much information. What I find most troubling . . . is that some individual agencies have no idea how much information they generate is classified, whether the overall quantity is increasing or decreasing, what the explanations are for such changes . . . and most importantly of all, whether the changes are appropriate.

Lucy Daglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said:

The war on terrorism induced government officials to slam the doors shut on citizens who depended on access to public information to make informed decisions. While it may be necessary to close access to some extremely sensitive data in response to terrorism, there is no evidence to suggest that the public will only be safe if it is kept ignorant of government activity.

The rise in government secrecy, as measured by the number of newly classified documents, accelerated but did not begin during the Bush administration. In fact, government secrecy rose during much of the Clinton administration. In 1997, a commission led by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) spoke of a government “culture of secrecy,” and urged greater openness.

Many historians say they believe secrecy has become even more pervasive since the September 11 attacks. The White House says the increase in classified documents is a reflection of changing times. “One explanation is the increased use of e-mail, which has dramatically increased the number of items that have to be classified,” said a White House official.

And the second thing is that we are in a wartime environment, where intelligence plays such an important role. There is not only more classified information collected, but more analysis to be done with it as a result, and these are sensitive things that have to be classified in an appropriate manner.

Still, it seems beyond question that the penchant for secrecy is getting out of hand. In June, a federal judge in California accused the Justice Department of using frivolous claims to justify its refusal to release basic information about how the federal government develops lists of travelers who are banned from flying. Rep. Christopher Shays criticizes the federal government’s effort “to shield an immense and growing body of secrets using an incomprehensible, complex system of classifications. There are too many secrets.”

Public demand for information is rising with over 3 million requests for information from the 41 government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) last year alone. While FOIA requests have more than tripled since 1998, the resources devoted to processing them have held steady.

The number of agencies reporting no backlog of FOIA requests held steady at 12 from 1999-2001, but dropped to just seven last year. Anyone filing a written request today for documents from the Reagan Presidential Library should not expect an answer until 2008. The backlog is currently four years, up from 1.5 years in 2001.”

The government spent $120 to make and keep documents secret for every dollar it spent on declassification in 2003. By comparison, from 1997-2001, the government spent less than $20 per year keeping documents secret for every dollar spent declassifying them. This does not include the costs of classifying documents at the CIA. That information is classified.

The more secrets government keeps, the less possible it is for us as citizens to understand what our representatives are doing and whether it is, indeed, our will which is being carried out. Americans have traditionally been suspicious of government power and jealous of individual freedom. Excessive secrecy contradicts those concerns.

We should remember the warning of James Madison:

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 which knowledge gives.

Reed J. Irvine, 1922-2004: Remembering His Contribution to a More Responsible Free Press

The death of Reed Irvine, the founder of the media watchdog group Accuracy In Media, in November at the age of 82, takes from us a man whose hard work, dedication and doggedness has left its mark in creating a more responsible free press in the American society.

This writer first met Reed Irvine in the mid-1960s. Just out of law school, I was working as a member of the staff of Senator Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT), a member of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its Internal Security Subcommittee. His staff aide in charge of foreign policy and internal security matters was David Martin, who devoted much of his life to fighting Communism and was the author of a number of landmark studies of the Cold War in the Balkans. Like many leading anti-Communists at the time, Martin was a liberal who viewed Nazi and Communism as twin evils. A veteran of World War II, he saw the defeat of Nazism leaving Communism as the major enemy of human rights and civilization. The theater of war at the time was Vietnam.

David took me to the monthly MacDowell Luncheon Group, which met at the old Occidental Restaurant in downtown Washington, just blocks from the White House. The group consisted of liberals and conservatives who were dedicated to a strong national defense and a policy of forcefully resisting Communist aggression. It was named after Arthur MacDowell, a labor leader who, like many in the AFL-CIO, viewed Communism as an enemy of unions and the right of workers to strike and improve their conditions. In fact, while many in business were eager to trade with the Soviet Union—even in areas of strategic importance—labor unions took a much stronger position against providing such assistance to an enemy.

Reed Irvine, then an economist at the Federal Reserve Board, was a leader in this group and we quickly became friends. It was his view, bolstered by other members of the group, that with regard to the war in Vietnam as well as earlier Communist advances—in Cuba, China and Eastern Europe—the media got the story all wrong. All too often, our leading journalists painted Communism in a positive light, believing them to be idealists attempting to create a better world. From Reed I began to learn some of the history of this phenomenon.

The forerunner of the many American reporters who have accepted Communists at their own word may be Walter Duranty, who served as correspondent for The New York Times in Moscow in the 1930s.

In the midst of the enforced famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s, Duranty visited the region and denied that starvation and death was rampant. In November, 1932, Duranty reported that “there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.” When the famine became widely known in the West, and reported in his own paper and by his own colleagues, playing down rather than denial, became his method. Still denying famine, he spoke of “malnutrition,” “food shortages” and “lowered resistance.”

In the Times of August 23, 1933, Duranty wrote: “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” and went on to declare:

The food shortage which has affected almost the whole population last year, and particularly the grain-producing provinces—that is, the Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Lower Volga Region—has, however, caused heavy loss of life.

He estimated the deaths at nearly four times the usual rate. The usual rate would, in the regions named, “have been 1,000,000” and this was now in all probability “at least trebled.”

In his important book about Soviet collectivization and the terror-famine of the 1930s, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest declares that Duranty’s

. . . admission of two million extra deaths was made to appear regrettable, but not overwhelmingly important and not amounting of “famine.” Moreover, he blamed it in part on the “flight of some peasants and the passive resistance of others.” . . . Duranty blamed famine stories on émigrés, encouraged by the rise of Hitler, and spoke of “the famine stories then current in Berlin, Riga, Vienna and other places, where elements hostile to the Soviet Union were making an eleventh-hour attempt to avert American recognition by picturing the Soviet Union as a land of ruin and despair.

 

What Americans got was not the truth—but false reporting. Its influence was widespread. What Walter Duranty got was the highest honor in journalism—the Pulitzer Prize for 1932, complimenting him for “dispassionate, interpretive reporting the news from Russia.” The citation declared that Duranty’s dispatches—which the world now knows to have been false—were “marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity.”

A decade later, in the late 1940s, China became the great battleground. The fashionable theme of journalists covering China was that the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek were hopelessly corrupt and inefficient. Mao Zedong was portrayed as brilliant, incorruptible, efficient, loved by the masses—and not a Communist, but as an “agrarian reformer.”

In the case of Cuba, Fidel Castro, as he launched his revolution against the government of President Batista, told The New York Times correspondent Herbert Mathews that he was out to restore constitutional government and democracy to Cuba, that he was not a Communist, and Mathews passed it on. What was ignored was the evidence that Castro was indeed a Marxist and had participated in the violent Communist-led riots in Bogota, Colombia in 1948.

At a meeting in Coral Gables, Florida in February, 1983, American journalists who covered Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution in 1959 say that they misread Castro’s goals and political leanings at the time. “We put him where he is,” said ex-Time correspondent Jay Mallin, who was host of the reunion “He was a figment of our imagination.” Sam Summerlin, a former Associated Press bureau chief in Havana, said. “Now we are living it down.”

When he retired from the Federal Reserve Board, Reed Irvine founded the media watchdog group Accuracy In Media in 1969. It was Reed’s view, at that time, that the Vietnam War was lost not on the battlefield but on the home front. The Viet Cong was portrayed in the media not as a Communist army supported and controlled by Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese but as “nationalists” who wanted only a better life and independence for the people of South Vietnam. If Americans lost the will to defeat Communist aggression in Vietnam, Reed believed, one of the factors which produced such an attitude was the role played by the media.

He believed that this could be seen most clearly with regard to the Tet Offensive, a Communist defeat that the American press reported as a Communist victory.

In February, 1968, the Communists launched their Tet Truce Offensive and suffered a stunning military defeat. They expected the South Vietnamese in the cities to rise up and support them. This did not happen. Instead, the Viet Cong elite was wiped out.

The American news media told a very different story. Television was especially effective in convincing the public that they had been deceived when government spokesmen told them that great progress had been made in bringing the situation in Vietnam under control. In 1977, Peter Braestrup, in his book Big Story, documented American media coverage of the Tet Offensive. Braestrup, who was a reporter for The Washington Post in Saigon at the time of the offensive in 1968, shows how the defeat suffered by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese from January 31 to March 31, 1968 was transformed by the American media into a political defeat for the U.S. Day after day, Viet Cong power and accomplishments were extolled.

Accuracy In Media played an active role in highlighting media misreporting of subsequent Communist efforts. It pointed out, in the case of Nicaragua, that  the media, from the beginning, portrayed the Sandinistas—before they assumed power and in the years since—as being worthy of American support. Earl E. T. smith, who was U.S. Ambassador to Cuba at the time Castro came to power, told a 1979 conference sponsored by Accuracy In Media that the press had played a vital role in the Sandinistas’ rise to power in Nicaragua, as it had in Castro’s overthrow of the Batista government. Smith’s conclusion:

The media are doing everything in their power to overthrow rightist dictators who are pro-American and anti-Communist. They look with favor on leftist dictators who are pro-Communist.

Some years ago, Reed Irvine said:

We’ve fought the good fight. Someone had to start pointing out there were serious errors being made in the media—and a lot of them were the fault of the ideological biases of the reporters and editors.

Before Accuracy In Media was started, the very idea of a media watchdog group was viewed as fanciful. Now, the media are being carefully monitored by a host of groups, from various perspectives, using Reed Irvine’s approach as a model.

When Reed Irvine entered this field, the one-sided nature of the media and its overwhelmingly liberal worldview was beyond question. In its obituary of Irvine, The New York Times declared that,

Ideologically, it (Accuracy In Media) paved the way for the tide of conservative talk shows, web sites and news programming that would follow decades later.

Michael Hoyt, executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review, states

I think he was the first to really sound the trumpet of liberal bias. I believe he represented a resentment that was larger than him. . . . That had a lasting impact.

In the years since the fall of Communism, both Irvine and Accuracy In Media moved on to other areas of media bias and misreporting. The organization remains very much alive, which is a notable legacy. But it was the media’s misrepresentation of our nation’s enemies which first brought Reed Irvine into this fray and it is his lasting accomplishment in this area which may be his most significant contribution.

All of us in life act in a somewhat different manner when we know someone is looking over our shoulder and carefully monitoring what we are doing. In a free society, nothing is more important than having a free and fair press so that the information upon which citizens make their decisions is accurate. If today’s media is less one-sided, more open to a variety of points of view, engaged in a real competition of ideas, Reed Irvine may take part of the credit. He left the nation’s media environment far better than he found it.     *

“The worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community.” –Theodore Roosevelt