Secrets sometimes necessary in a democracy
Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008
NEW YORK — Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and Ben Stein have worn me out—the idea of a “political documentary” makes me want to reach for a revolver. What this intellectually dubious age needs is not more agitprop—adults ought to be able to talk about issues without shouting. Still, I ended up at the Tribeca Film Festival’s press screening of a documentary called Secrecy, directed by a couple of Harvard professors—scientist and historian Peter Galison and filmmaker Robb Moss. According to the festival program notes, their “powerful and provocative” movie “examines the complexities and layers of our government’s obsession with secrecy and the effects it has had on individuals and on our government.” (For a moment I wished I’d stuck to my original plan—despite the cruel Sundance buzz, Savage Grace might make it to Matt Smith’s Market Street Cinema this year. ) On the other hand, government secrets are something I’ve thought a lot about, for I don’t know what my father did during most of the Vietnam War. There was much he couldn’t tell methat he wouldn’t tell me—even as he lay dying in a hospital room 25 years ago. He told me about a cobra and a Jeep in a Thai jungle. Somewhere in Southeast Asia there was apparently a landing strip used both by Soviet MiG-21 s and U. S. F-4 Phantoms. That was about all. It probably wasn’t as interesting as my imagination makes it out to be, and I’ve never doubted that it was necessary business.
All I know is that he grew his hair long for an Air Force man, and he was gone for months and months and when he returned it was on board a C-130 stuffed to the gills with Japanese Pachinko machines, Lion racing bicycles and Hitachi radios with built-in cassette recorder / players. We lived off-base, so my experience was different from other Air Force brats I’ve known for whom the war was a constant rumble. I never connected his absences with what Walter Cronkite was saying. Maybe I thought he was off on an extended shopping trip. Maybe that what he wanted me to think.
He was good at keeping secrets; he’d been a Golden Gloves boxer as a kid, and my mother never knew—until he told us near the end—that he’d had a couple of professional fights under an assumed name after they were married. He’d been off on TDY —a temporary duty assignment—and had taken the bouts to make extra money. (He’d won them. ) A couple of times, as a teenager and as a young adult, I’d asked him point-blank what he’d done during Vietnam. He told me he couldn’t tell me. He didn’t want to tell me. He didn’t want me to know.
So Secrecy might have had a different kind of resonance, for I grew up with the understanding that there is much that is not my place to know. Some questions are not to be asked.
I wouldn’t argue with the suggestion that the simple desire for information is one of the reasons I became a reporter and later a writer. I am curious about how things are put together, about how people become themselves. It is interesting to ask questions.
Yet I believe secrets are necessary to keep a free society free. There are things we ought not know about, actions that our government sanctions or suborns that would (and should ) give us pause if they were made public. In Secrecy, former CIA Jerusalem bureau chief Melissa Boyle Mahle bluntly explains that secrecy allows government to privately do things that “would seem inconsistent with our ideals if brought to light.” She says this matter-of-factly, with an adult recognition of how dangerous and terror-fraught the world can be. While it’s not the sort of thing people—especially government people—say out loud, it’s the honest truth: There is a dithered line between what we would like to believe we can accept and what is sometimes necessary.
I don’t pretend to know how to draw that line, but I understand the government’s efforts to keep unseemly secrets. Torture, we can agree, is not an appropriate tool of American interest—if only because torture is not an effective way to get anyone to tell you anything other than exactly what you want to hear. But the professionals know there are effective psychological techniques that involve discomfiting and confusing interview subjects. As Mahle says, you want the bad guys to feel insecure, even to be afraid. There will be some unpleasantness.
(In a telling moment, Mahle admits that her first response to the revelations of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison was a professional disgust that the soldiers had no compelling reason for their acts—they were abusing the prisoners for fun. )
And I also understand—and endorse—a free and vigorous press attempting to uncover those secrets. The world isn’t perfect—it is conceivable that journalists might obtain and print information that adversely effects national security. A report surfaces that U. S. intelligence is monitoring the chatter of Hezbollah terrorists, and the terrorists switch channels. Months later the same cell bombs the Marine barracks in Beirut. Maybe if the information hadn’t been made public, 247 lives could have been saved.
(Or maybe not—some in the intelligence community still contend that we don’t know exactly who bombed the barracks. “Islamic Jihad” —Hezbollah—took credit for the bombing. )
Newspaper reporters are almost always in possession of information that they don’t print—one can get hooked on the “inside baseball” dope that is part of the job’s psychic income. Usually it’s because the public appetite for detail is presumed limited and column inches are considered precious, but there are times when information is withheld because releasing it might impair a police investigation. Editors don’t like being told what they may or may not print, but most of them are willing to listen to reason. It’s generally in a newspaper’s interest to behave as a good citizen.
But government secrecy can only be tolerated in a democracy if the people trust the government to keep only those secrets that are genuinely necessary. And, as the documentary points out, our government has often used secrecy as a way of covering up its own incompetence and turpitude.
(The filmmakers demonstrate this through the sad history of United States v. Reynolds, the 1949 legal case that established the “state secrets” privilege which allows the government to squelch litigation, conceal conduct, withhold documents and detain terrorist suspects without due process protections. When the documents pertinent to the case were declassified in 2000, it turned out that no state secrets were in fact at issuethe government was simply grossly negligent. )
One of the things I like best about Secrecy is its relative even-handedness, but the film inevitably turns to the current administration and its war on openness. Under the circumstances, the Bush administration’s position that the president is the ultimate decider—that he isn’t necessarily bound by any act of Congress or decision of the Supreme Court and he alone can determine what we’re allowed to know—is profoundly troubling. Whatever else one thinks, it’s clear they have lost the trust of a lot of the American people.
pmartin@arkansasonline. com
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online