Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin. The Supreme Court declared in 1936, “An informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment.” Thus, conniving politicians have no choice but to drop an Iron Curtain around Washington.
Politicians guarantee that Americans are left clueless on the most controversial or dangerous federal policies. The government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The total is equivalent to “20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with double-spaced text on paper,” according to The Washington Post. If those cabinets were laid end to end, they would stretch almost to the moon. The feds have accumulated the equivalent of hundreds of pages of secrets for each American, blighting any hope for citizens to learn of their rulers’ rascality.
“All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers,” George Orwell wrote in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is where government classification—i.e., secrecy—comes in handy. The more information government classifies, the easier it becomes for politicians to dupe the American people. In Washington, deniability is better than the truth.
Secrecy was usually not a grave peril to most Americans’ rights, liberties, and safety until the U.S. government began warring in the 1940s and on into this century.
Secrecy helped deliver a death warrant for tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. President Lyndon Johnson fabricated claims about an alleged North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to sway Congress to give him unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam. Johnson assumed he was entitled to deceive Americans to vastly expand the war he decided to fight to boost his 1964 presidential election campaign. But other federal officials claimed a prerogative to blindfold the American people. When Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester visited Saigon in 1965, he hectored American correspondents covering the Vietnam War: “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid!” Sylvester declared that he expected the American press to be “the handmaidens of government.” Most of the American media has followed orders regarding foreign reporting most of the time since then.
In March 1972, President Richard Nixon, as part of his “pledge to create an open Administration,” ordered radical changes in how Uncle Sam kept secrets. Nixon announced that the classification system “failed to meet the standards of an open and democratic society, allowing too many papers to be classified for too long a time. Classification has frequently served to conceal bureaucratic mistakes or to prevent embarrassment to officials and administrations.” He promised “to lift the veil of secrecy which now enshrouds” federal documents. Nixon’s campaign against secrecy faltered after the Watergate coverup destroyed his presidency.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter created the Information Security Oversight Office to oversee classification but secrecy regime continued and grew. In 1989, former Solicitor General of the United States Dean Erwin Griswold complained that “there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.” In 1991, former National Security Council official Rodney McDaniel estimated that “only 10% of classification was for legitimate protection of secrets.” In 1997, a federal commission headed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) lamented that “secrets in the federal government are whatever anyone with a stamp decides to stamp secret.”
In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the percentage of Americans who trusted the federal government doubled. The George W. Bush administration exploited the new credulity to boost the number of classified government documents almost tenfold. The New York Times reported in 2005 that federal agencies were “classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like ‘sensitive security information.’” William Leonard, former chief of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, complained of seeing information “classified that I’ve also seen published in third-grade textbooks.”
But secrecy again signed a death warrant for thousands of Americans. President George W. Bush persuaded Americans to support invading Iraq by blaming Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks, among other pretexts. Bush could vilify Iraq thanks to a sweeping coverup of the role of the Saudi government in bankrolling and directly assisting the 9/11 hijackers.
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