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America's Secret History
by Eric Alterman
Thursday, May 06, 1999
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Courage Under Fire : Eric Alterman assesses President Clinton's decision to bomb
Yugoslavia.
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<Picture: Previous Article><Picture: Next Article><Picture><Picture>On April 29,
1999, just as the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia was finishing its first month,
the State Department quietly released "Foreign Relati
ons of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XV, Germany and Berlin."
"Between 1964 and 1968," read the volume's press release, "the administration of
President Lyndon B. Johnson was a participant in what Ambassador George C. McGhee
called the creation of a new Germany."
The description quoted above happens to be true, but in Germany, 1964, as in
Yugoslavia, 1999, the devil is in the details. And in both cases, the details will be
difficult to discern, much less trust. The virus of secrec
y has so infected our government that if current practices continue unabated, we will
never -- repeat never -- learn the truth of how President Clinton and Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright led us into this war -- or
what secret offers and guarantees were made to both sides.
The case for history
Journalism, as the saying goes, is the first draft of history. For something
approximating the truth beyond the day's spin on events, we need genuine history. The
U.S. government, however, has grown so addicted to the dru
g of secrecy injected regularly during the Cold War that it seems to believe it has
the right to protect its secrets from its own citizens forever.
The policy, on its face, is absurd. No one is asking that genuine foreign-policy
secrets of the kinds that appear to have been stolen recently from the Los Alamos
laboratories be made public. We are talking about history,
in some cases with incidents that took place almost a half-century ago.
Think about it. We live in a democracy, after all. The Cold War is over. And yet the
barons of the U.S. national security establishment refuse to level with interested
researchers about actions taken decades ago by the U.
S. government using taxpayer dollars in the name of our country's citizens. One
imagines that even Joe Stalin would be impressed.
A recent report to Albright by the State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical
Diplomatic Documentation highlights the problem. The committee, which is comprised of
some of the nation's most distinguished American
s and diplomatic historians, points "to an impending crisis for the Foreign Relations
series."
According to the historians, "the most immediate issue was the refusal of various
authorities to acknowledge a number of policy initiatives and covert actions, all 30
or more years in the past, that were integral to the '
thorough, accurate,' and 'comprehensive documentation of the major foreign policy
decisions and actions of the United States government' as required by statute." In
other words, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is re
fusing to cooperate with the laws on the books in order to protect its proprietary
information about operations it may have undertaken in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. As
a result, a full and comprehensive history of our na
tion's actions in the world can never be written.
A culture of secrecy
<Picture: Was everyone truly agreed on opening up the book?>
Was everyone truly
agreed on "opening
up the book"?
Based on an August 1997 report by the committee outlining the conditions above,
Albright, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and CIA Director George Tenet agreed
on the urgent need to establish a high-level panel wit
h representation from the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council
(NSC). The plan was to allow everyone concerned to review the classified documents
relating to U.S. covert actions and intelligence act
ivities selected for inclusion in Foreign Relations volumes
and recommend to the national security adviser whether the
time had come to finally open up the books.
Most of the security issues have since been settled, and
the NSC has agreed to declassification. Yet owing --
surprise, surprise -- to bureaucratic delays in the
committee's operation, none of the Foreign Relations
volumes affected has yet been published. As of today, for
example, we are still saddled with an official U.S. history
of the 1954 Guatemalan coup that pretends that the CIA
played no role in that democratically elected government's
overthrow. To citizens and scholars genuinely concerned
with coming to terms with their nation's role in history of
the region, as well as in the global Cold War, this is as
silly as it is insulting.
Moreover, the State Department's Foreign Relations series
is the merely the tip of a submerged iceberg of foolish and
unnecessary secrecy and deception on the part of our
government.
The CIA is once again withholding from the public an
overall budgetary figure for its fiscal-year spending. It
is doing so despite a successful lawsuit last year by the
Federation of American Scientists that forced the CIA to
finally give an overall budgetary estimate of $26.6 billion
in FY97 and $26.7 billion in FY98. (The Constitution of the
United States, Article 1, Section 9, requires that "a
regular statement and account of the receipts and
expenditures of all public monies shall be published from
time to time," though this article appeared to be under
suspension during the Cold War.) Even in the face of fully
executed court orders and constitutional precedent, the CIA
refuses to shed any light on the still-classified aspects
of its taxpayer-funded past.
Little hope
A battle currently is underway in Congress to try to
address some of the more egregious manifestations of our
government's secrecy culture. Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan's (D-NY) Government Secrecy Reform Act was
reintroduced in the 106th Congress in January with Sens.
Jesse Helms (R-NC), Trent Lott (R-MS), Tom Daschle (D-SD),
Fred Thompson (R-TN), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Charles
Schumer (D-NY) as co-sponsors.
The bill calls for all historical classified information to
be automatically declassified, with or without review
within 25 years. Agencies can request exemptions from the
Information Security Oversight Office for groups of records
(known as file series) that they consider to be
particularly sensitive, or agencies can identify specific
documents that should remain classified to protect the
national security. The bill's strong bipartisan sponsorship
would seem to presage its passage, but because of the
retirement of Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN), a sponsor of the
bill from the House in 1997, it currently has no
counterpart in that body.
Meanwhile, in a massive step backward, owing to the
reaction to the disclosure of classified data in a few
isolated cases regarding the nation's nuclear-weapons
systems, a new congressionally- mandated review plan,
designed "to prevent the inadvertent release of Restricted
Data" became law Jan. 28. It passed despite the fact that
at a recent public meeting, according to the FAS Project on
Government Secrecy report, Energy Department officials were
asked how many hundreds of inadvertent releases they
imagined had taken place. They answered "four." Not 400,
four. They have since changed their minds and now speak of
"hundreds" of inadvertent disclosures but one suspects that
their original answer fits the Michael Kinsley definition
of a "gaffe" -- when a public official accidentally tells
the truth.
One could devote hundreds of pages to the various attempts
to hide legitimate information from historians and citizens
under the rubric of "better safe than sorry" -- and indeed,
Moynihan has recently done just that -- but the upshot of
the problem is that the government's culture of secrecy
will not change without a concerted program of public
pressure. The CIA will not start telling the truth about
its past because the truth will somehow set it free. And
Bill Clinton will not stand up to the national security
bureaucracy just because he thinks it is not the right
thing to do.
People must get angry. They are going to have to demand the
right to their own history. One cannot help but feel
pessimistic on this count. After all, there is no sex in
this story, not much to interest a tabloid TV show. It is
merely the kind of information upon which the fate of
democracy ultimately rests.
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and MSNBC. He
is the author, most recently, of Who Speaks for America?
Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy(Cornell University
Press, 1998). He is also a contributing editor to
IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<Picture>Related Links
Read abstracts of volumes released by the State
Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic
Documentation. Selected volumes from the Truman,
Eishenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Administrations are
available online. The Office of the Historian highlights
the German adoption of a more European policy. Los Alamos
National Laboratory offers information resources online
including an extensive journal collection. Read the
complaint filed by Steven Aftergood on behalf of the
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) against the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) for disclosure of their FY1999
budget under the Freedom of Information Act. Refer to FAS's
Project on Government Secrecy page for more information.
A<>E<>R
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