[Reader-list] Defining Secrecy

[A. Mani]

(From http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24886 )


Disclosure and Deceit: Secrecy as the Manipulation of History, not its
Concealment

by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson

	
Global Research, May 21, 2011


The declassification of official secrets is often seen as either a
challenge or a prerequisite for obtaining accurate data on the history
of political and economic events. Yet at the same time high government
intelligence officials have said that their policy is one of
'plausible deniability'. Official US government policy for example is
never to acknowledge or deny the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere
its forces are deployed, especially its naval forces. The British have
their ‘Official Secrets’ Act. When the Wikileaks site was launched in
2007 and attained notoriety for publication of infamous actions by US
forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, this platform was heralded and
condemned for its disclosures and exposures.

Julian Assange is quoted as saying that when he receives documents
classified under the UK Official Secrets Act he responds in accordance
with the letter of the law – since it is forbidden to withhold or
destroy, his only option is to publish. The question remains for
historians, investigators, and educated citizens: what is the real
value of disclosures or declassification? Given the practice of
plausible deniablity, does disclosure or declassification constitute
proof, and if so by what criteria? Both facts and non-facts can be
concealed or disclosed.

Information is not self-defining Ultimately there remain two
questions: does the secret document (now public) really constitute the
'secret'? What is the 'secret' for which we use the document to
actually refer? Is secrecy the difference between the known and
unknown, or the known and untold?

Some benefit can be found by borrowing theological concepts. We can
distinguish between a mystery revealed and a supernatural truth which,
by its very nature, lies above the finite intelligence. But a secret
is something unknowable either by accident or on account of
accessibility. I believe that the popularised form of disclosure
embodied in Wikileaks should force us to distinguish between those
beliefs we have about the nature of official action and the conduct of
people working within those institutions and the data produced.
Wikileaks is clearly a platform for publishing data but much of the
response to these documents is more based on mystery than on secrecy.
That is to say that the disclosures are treated as revelation in the
religious sense – and not as discovery in the sense of scientia –
knowledge. Why is this so? Wikileaks is described as a continuation of
the ethical and social responsibility of journalism as an instrument
to educate and inform the public – based on the principle that an
informed public is essential to a democracy and self-governance. By
collecting, collating and disclosing documents 'leaked’ to it,
Wikileaks also attacks what Assange calls the invisible government,
the people and institutions who rule by concealing their activities
from the people – and brings to light their wrongdoing.

There are two traditions involved here that partially overlap. In the
US the prime examples are the 'muckraking journalism’ originating in
the so-called Progressive Era, spanning from 1890s to 1920s, and more
recently the publication of the Pentagon Papers through Daniel
Ellsberg. While liberals treat both of these examples favourably,
their histories, however, are far more ambivalent than sentimentally
presented. To understand this ambivalence, itself a sort of plausible
deniability, it is necessary to sketch the history of journalism in
the US – the emergence of an unnamed but essential political actor –
and some of the goals of US foreign policy since the end of the 19th
century. This very brief sketch offers what I call the preponderance
of facticity – as opposed to an unimpeachable explanation for the
overt and covert actions of the US.

First of all it is necessary to acknowledge that in 1886 the US
Supreme Court endowed the modern business corporation with all the
properties of citizenship in the US – a ruling reiterated with more
vehemence this year by another Supreme Court decision. As of 1886,
business corporations in the US had more civil rights than freed
slaves or women. By the end of the First World War, the business
corporation had eclipsed the natural person as a political actor in
the US. By 1924 US immigration law and the actions of the FBI had
succeeded in damming the flow of European radicalism and suppressing
domestic challenges to corporate supremacy. Thus by the time Franklin
Roosevelt was elected, the US had been fully constituted as a
corporatist state. US government policy was thereafter made mainly by
and for business corporations and their representatives. Second,
professional journalism emerged from the conflict between partisan
media tied to social movements and those tied to business. The first
journalism school was founded in 1908 at the University of Missouri
with money from newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer. As in all other
emerging professions at that time, it was claimed that uniform
training within an academic curriculum would produce writers who were
neutral, objective, and dispassionate – that is to say somehow
scientific in their writing.

A professional journalist would not allow his or her writing to be
corrupted by bribery or political allegiances. These professional
journalists would work for commercial enterprises but be trained to
produce value-free texts for publication.. The US has always refused
to call itself an empire or to acknowledge that its expansion from the
very beginning was imperial. The dogma of manifest destiny sought to
resolve this contradiction by stipulating that domestic conquest was
not imperial. Control of the Western hemisphere has always been
defined as national security, not of asserting US domination.
Likewise, it is impossible to understand the actions of the US
government in Asia since 1910 without acknowledging that the US is an
empire and recognising its imperial interests in the Asia–Pacific
region. It is also impossible to understand the period called the Cold
War without knowing that the US invaded the Soviet Union in 1918 with
13,000 troops along with some 40,000 British troops and thousands of
troops recruited by the ‘West’ to support the Tsarist armies and
fascist Siberian Republic. It is essential to bear these over-arching
contextual points in mind when considering the value of classified US
documents and their disclosure, whether by Wikileaks or Bob Woodward.
It is essential to bear these points in mind because the value or the
ambivalence of ‘leaks’ or declassification depends entirely on whether
the data is viewed as ‘revelation’ or as mere scientific data to be
interpreted.

Revelation and heresy For the most part the disclosures by Wikileaks
have been and continue to be treated as ‘revelation’ and the
disclosure itself as heresy. This is particularly the case in the
batches of State Department cables containing diplomatic jargon and
liturgy. The ‘revelation’ comprises the emotional response to
scripture generated by members of the US foreign service and the
confirmation this scripture appears to give to opinions held about the
US – whether justified or not. Just as reading books and even the
bible was a capital offence for those without ecclesiastical license
in the high Middle Ages, the response of the US government is
comprehensible. It is bound to assert that Wikileaks is criminal
activity and to compel punishment. Yet there is another reason why the
US government reaction is so intense. As argued above, the primary
political actor in the US polity is the business corporation. In
Europe and North America at least it is understood: (1) that the
ultimate values for state action are those which serve the interests
of private property; and (2) that the business corporation is the
representative form of private property.

This in turn means that information rights are in fact property rights
manifest as patents, copyrights, and trade or industrial secrets.
Since the state is the guardian of the corporation, it argues that the
disclosure of government documents should only be allowed where the
government itself has surrendered some of its privacy rights. This is
quite different from the arguments for feudal diplomatic privilege,
even though business corporations have superseded princely states. The
argument for state secrecy now is that the democratic state
constituted by business corporations is obliged to protect the rights
and privileges of those citizens as embodied in their private property
rights – rights deemed to be even more absolute than those
historically attributed to natural persons, if for no other reason
than that corporations enjoy limited liability and immortality, unlike
natural persons. When the US government says it is necessary for other
states to treat Assange as an outlaw and Wikileaks as a criminal
activity, it is appealing on one hand to the global corporate
citizenry and on the other, asserting its role – not unlike the Roman
Catholic Church of the Middle Ages – as the sole arbiter of those
rights and privileges subsumed by Democracy in the world. Many of
those who lack a religious commitment to the American way of life have
still recognised the appeal to privacy and ultimately to private
property which are now deemed the highest values in the world – so
that trade, the commerce in private property, takes precedence over
every other human activity and supersedes even human rights, not to
mention civil rights.

Ellsberg In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New
York Times, which began their publication. This leak was treated as a
landmark, although it would take several years before the US withdrew
its forces from Vietnam and many more before hostilities were formally
ended. What then was the significance of the ‘leak’? The documents
generally point to the failures of the military, omitting the role of
the CIA almost entirely. Today it is still largely unknown that
Ellsberg was working with the CIA in counter-insurgency programs in
Vietnam. Did the Pentagon Papers thus serve the interests of plausible
deniability – a disclosure of secrets designed not to reveal truth,
but to conceal a larger truth by revealing smaller ones? On the other
hand, the collection of essays, Dirty Work, edited by Philip Agee and
Lou Wolf, showed how the identity of CIA officers could be deciphered
from their official biographies, especially as published in the
Foreign Service List and other government registers. This type of
disclosure allows the competent researcher to recognise ‘real’ Foreign
Service officers as opposed to CIA officers operating under diplomatic
cover. Agee and his colleague Lou Wolf maintained that disclosure of
CIA activities was not a matter of lifting secrets but of recognising
the context in which disparate information has to be viewed to allow
its interpretation.

To put it trivially: in order to find something you have to know the
thing for which you are searching. In order to be meaningful,
disclosures of intelligence information must explain that intelligence
information seeks to deceive the US public. For example, the CIA and
those in the multi-agency task forces under its control produced an
enormous amount of reports and documentation to show what was being
done to fulfil the official US policy objectives in Vietnam. One of
these programs was called Rural Development. This CIA program was run
ostensibly by the USAID and the State Department to support the
economic and social development of the countryside. This policy was
articulated in Washington to fit with the dominant ‘development’
paradigm – to package the US policy as aid and not military
occupation. And yet, as Douglas Valentine shows in his book The
Phoenix Program, Rural Development was a cover for counterinsurgency
from the beginning. The Phoenix Program only became known in the US
after 1971, and then only superficially. The information released to
the US Congress and reported in the major media outlets lacked
sufficient context to allow interpretation. There was so little
context that the same people who worked in the Phoenix program in
Vietnam as 20-year-olds have been able to continue careers operating
the same kinds of programmes in other countries with almost no
scrutiny.

Two people come to mind: John Negroponte, who is alleged to have
provided support to death squads in Honduras during the US war against
Nicaragua and later served as ambassador to occupied Iraq, began his
foreign service career in Vietnam with one of the agencies
instrumental in Phoenix. The other person died recently: Richard
Holbrooke began his career with USAID in Vietnam, went on to advise
the Indonesian dictatorship, went to manage the ‘diplomatic’ part of
the US war in Yugoslavia and finally served as a kind of pro-consul
for Central Asia with responsibility for the counterinsurgency in
Afghanistan. As the secret weapon in US imperial policy, the
counterinsurgency or rural development or ‘surge’ policies of the US
government never include an examination of the professionals who
managed them. It used to be said among some critics that one could
follow General Vernon Walters’ travel itinerary and predict military
coups. But that was not something ‘leaked’ and it did not appear in
the mainstream media analysis.

The illusion of objective neutrality So if much of what we see
‘leaked’ is gossip in the service of plausible deniability, what
separates the important gossip from the trivial? I suggest it is a
return to consciously interested, humanistic values in historical
research. We have to abandon the idea that the perfect form of
knowledge is embodied in the privilege of corporate ownership of
ideas, and domination of the state. We also have to abandon the
illusion of objective neutrality inherited from Positivism and
Progressivism, with its exclusionary professionalism. Until such time
as human beings can be restored to the centre of social, political and
economic history we have to recognise the full consequences of the
enfranchisement of the business corporation and the subordination of
the individual to role of a mere consumer. If we take the business
corporation, an irresponsible and immortal entity, endowed with
absolute property rights and absolved of any liability for its actions
or those of its officers and agents, as the subject of history it has
become, then we have to disclose more than diplomatic cables. We have
to analyse its actions just as historians have tried to understand the
behaviour of princes and dynasties in the past. This is too rarely
done and when often only in a superficial way. I would like to provide
an example, a sketch if you will, of one such historical analysis,
taking the business corporation and not the natural person as the
focus of action.

In 1945, George Orwell referred to the threat of nuclear war between
the West and the Soviet Union as a ‘cold war’. He made no reference to
the 1918 invasion of the Soviet Union by British troops. In 1947, US
Secretary of State Bernard Baruch gave a speech in South Carolina
saying ‘Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold
war’. The speech had been written by a rich newspaperman named Herbert
Swope. In 1947, George Kennan published his containment essay, ‘The
Sources of Soviet Conduct’, in Foreign Affairs under the name ‘X’. In
it he describes a supposed innate expansionist tendency of the Soviet
Union – also no mention of the US invasion or the devastation of WWII,
which virtually destroyed the Soviet Union’s manpower and industrial
base. In April 1950, NSC 68 is published – classified top secret until
1975 – outlining the necessity for the US to massively rearm to assert
and maintain its role as the world’s superpower. At the end of summer
1950, war breaks out in Korea. President Truman declared an emergency
and gets UN Security Council approval for a war that lasts three
years, killing at least 3 million Koreans – most of whom die as a
result of US Air Force saturation bombing of Korea north of the 38th
parallel. Truman proclaims that US intervention will be used to
prevent the expansion of the Soviet Union or as Ronald Reagan put it
then – Russian aggression. After being utterly routed by the army of
North Korea, the US bombs its way to the Yalu only to be thrown back
to the 38th parallel by China. In 1954, the US organises the overthrow
of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala and begins its aid and covert
intervention in Vietnam beginning a war that only ends in 1976.
Meanwhile Britain suppresses the Malaysian independence movement.
Between 1960 and 1968, nationalist governments have been overthrown in
Indonesia, Congo, Ghana, Brazil. Cuba is the great surprise amidst the
literally hundreds of nationalist, anti-colonial movements and
governments suppressed by the US.

William Blum has catalogued the enormous number of overt and covert
interventions by the US in his book Killing Hope. The amazing thing
about much of what Blum compiled is that it was not ‘secret’. It was
simply not reported or misreported. Blum makes clear – what should be
obvious – that the Soviet Union was not a party to a single war or
coup from 1945 to 1989 and that the US government knew this. Much of
this early action took place when John Foster Dulles was US Secretary
of State and his brother was head of the CIA. The Dulles brothers were
intimately connected to corporations they represented in their
capacity as ‘white shoe’ lawyers in New York. In fact the founder of
the OSS, the CIA’s predecessor, William Donovan, was also a corporate
lawyer both before and after his service in the OSS. In other words
the people who have commanded these foreign policy instruments have
almost without exception been the direct representatives of major US
business corporations. In each case the public pretext has been the
threat of communism or Soviet expansion. Yet the only consistent
quality all of these actions had was the suppression of governments
that restricted the activities of US or UK corporations. Of course,
communism has long been merely a term for any opposition to the
unrestricted rights of business corporations.

One could say people like Donovan or Dulles were seconded to
government office. However, the direct financial benefit that someone
like Dulles obtained when he succeeded in deposing Arbenz in Guatemala
came from his shareholding in United Fruit, the instigator and
financial backer of the CIA co-ordinated coup. Perhaps the more
accurate interpretation of this secret activity is that the business
corporation, which previously employed law firms and Pinkertons, had
shifted the burden of implementing corporate foreign policy to the
taxpayer and the state. Now the interest of the US in Latin America
has been well researched and documented. But the persistence of the
Vietnam War and the silence about the Korean War have only been
matched by the virtual absence of debate about the overthrow of
Sukarno and the Philippine insurgency. The Philippines became a
footnote in the controversy about US torture methods in Iraq and
elsewhere as it was shown that the ‘water cure’ was applied rigorously
by American troops when suppressing the Philippine independence
movement at the beginning of the 20th century.

Lack of context not knowledge The study of each of these Asian
countries – and one can add the so-called Golden Triangle; and I would
argue Afghanistan now – has been clouded not by lack of evidence or
documentation but by lack of context. If the supposed threat posed by
communism, especially Soviet communism is taken at face value – as
also reiterated in innumerable official documents both originally
public and originally confidential – then the US actions in Asia seem
like mere religious fanaticism. The government officials and military
and those who work with them are so indoctrinated that they will do
anything to oppose communism in whatever form. Thus even respected
scholars of these wars will focus on the delusions or information
deficits or ideological blinders of the actors. This leads to a
confused and incoherent perception of US relations in Asia and the
Pacific. The virtual absence of any coherent criticism of the
Afghanistan War, let alone the so-called War on Terror, is symptomatic
not of inadequate information, leaked or otherwise. It is a result of
failure to establish the context necessary for evaluating the data
available. It should not surprise anyone that ‘counter-terror’
practices by US Forces are ‘discovered’ in Afghanistan or Iraq, if the
professional careers of the theatre and field commanders (in and out
of uniform) are seriously examined.

Virtually all those responsible for fighting the war in Central Asia
come from Special Operations/CIA backgrounds. That is what they have
been trained to do. If we shift our attention for a moment to the
economic basis of this region, it has been said that the war against
drugs is also being fought there. However, this is counterfactual.
Since the 1840s the region from Afghanistan to Indochina has been part
of what was originally the British opium industry. China tried to
suppress the opium trade twice leading to war with Britain – wars
China lost. The bulk of the Hong Kong banking sector developed out of
the British opium trade protected by the British army and Royal Navy.
Throughout World War II and especially the Vietnam War the opium trade
expanded to become an important economic sector in Southern Asia –
under the protection of the secret services of the US, primarily the
CIA. Respected scholars have documented this history to the present
day. However it does not appear to play any role in interpreting the
policies of the US government whether publicly or confidentially
documented. Is it because, as a senior UN official reported last year,
major parts of the global financial sector – headquartered in New York
and London – were saved by billions in drug money in 2008? Does the
fact that Japan exploited both Korea and Vietnam to provide cheap food
for its industrial labour force have any bearing on the US decision to
invade those countries when its official Asia policy was to rebuild
Japan as an Asian platform for US corporations – before China became
re-accessible (deemed lost to the Communists in 1948)? Did the
importance of Korean tungsten for the US steel industry contribute to
the willingness of people like Preston Goodfellow, a CIA officer in
Korea, to introduce a right-wing Korean to rule as a dictator of the
US occupied zone? Is there continuity between Admiral Dewey’s refusal
to recognise the Philippine Republic after Spain’s defeat – because
the 1898 treaty with Spain ceded the archipelago to the US – and the
refusal of General Hodge to recognise the Korean People’s Republic in
Seoul when he led the occupation of Korea in 1945? As John Pilger
suggests, were the million people massacred by Suharto with US and UK
support a small price to pay for controlling the richest archipelago
in the Pacific? Was the Pol Pot regime not itself a creation of the US
war against Vietnam – by other means?

Is it an accident that while the US was firmly anchored in Subic Bay,
armed and funded Jakarta, occupied Japan and half of Korea, that the
US was prepared to bomb the Vietnamese nationalists ‘into the Stone
Age’? It only makes sense if the US is understood as an empire and its
corporate interests are taken seriously when researching the history
of the US attempts to create and hold an Asian empire. The resistance
to this perception can be explained and it is not because of an
impenetrable veil of secrecy. It is not because of the accidentally or
inaccessibly unknown. Rather it is because US policy and practice in
the world remains a ‘mystery’, a supernatural truth, one that of its
very nature lies above the finite intelligence. The quasi-divine
status of the universal democracy for which the USA is supposed to
stand is an obstacle of faith.

Engineering consent In the twentieth century two conflicting
tendencies can be identified. The first was the emergence of mass
democratic movements. The second was the emergence of the
international business corporation. When the Great War ended in 1918,
the struggle between these two forces crystallised in the mass
audience or consumer on one hand and the mass production and
communication on the other. As Edward Bernays put it: ‘This is an age
of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad
technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In
this age too there must be a technique for the mass distribution of
ideas.’ In his book, Propaganda, he wrote ‘The conscious and
intelligent manipulation of organised habits and opinions of the
masses…’ was necessary in a democracy, calling that ‘invisible
government’.

Like his contemporary Walter Lippmann, a journalist, he believed that
democracy was a technique for ‘engineering the consent’ of the masses
to those policies and practices adopted by the country’s elite – the
rulers of its great business corporations. By the 1980s the state
throughout the West – and after 1989 in the former Soviet bloc – was
being defined only by ‘business criteria’, e.g. efficiency,
profitability, cost minimisation, shareholder value, consumer
satisfaction, etc. Political and social criteria such as participatory
rights or income equity or equality, provision of basic needs such as
education, work, housing, nutrition, healthcare on a universal basis
had been transformed from citizenship to consumerism. The individual
lost status in return for means tested access to the ‘market’. In
order for the state to function like a business it had to adopt both
the organisational and ethical forms of the business corporation – a
non-democratic system, usually dictatorial, at best operating as an
expert system. As an extension of the property-holding entities upon
which it was to be remodelled, the state converted its power into
secretive, jealous, and rigid hierarchies driven by the highest
ethical value of the corporation – profit.

Journalists and ‘corporate stenographers’ While historical research
should not be merely deductive, it is dependent on documents. The
veracity of those documents depends among other things on
authenticity, judgements as to the status, knowledge or competence of
the author, the preponderance of reported data corresponding to data
reported elsewhere or in other media. A public document is tested
against a private or confidential document – hence the great interest
in memoirs, diaries and private correspondence. There is an assumption
that the private document is more sincere or even reliable than public
documents. This is merely axiomatic since there is no way to determine
from a document itself whether its author lied, distorted or concealed
in his private correspondence, too. Discrepancies can be explained in
part by accepting that every author is a limited informant or
interpreter. The assumptions about the integrity of the author shape
the historical evaluation. In contemporary history – especially since
the emergence of industrial-scale communications – the journalist has
become the model and nexus of data collection, author, analyst, and
investigator. Here the journalist is most like a scholar. The
journalist is also a vicarious observer.

The journalist is supposed to share precisely those attributes of the
people to whom or about whom he reports. This has given us the
plethora of reality TV, talk shows, embedded reporters, and the
revolving door between media journalists and corporate/state press
officers. In the latter the journalist straddles the chasm between
salesman and consumer. This is the role that the Creel Committee and
the public relations industry learned to exploit. The journalist
George Creel called his memoir of the Committee on Public Information
he chaired – formed by Woodrow Wilson to sell US entry into World War
I – How We Advertised America. The campaign was successful in gaining
mass support for a policy designed to assure that Britain and France
would be able to repay the billions borrowed from J. P. Morgan & Co.
to finance their war against Germany and seize the Mesopotamian
oilfields from the Ottoman Empire. Industrial communications
techniques were applied to sell the political product of the dominant
financial and industrial corporations of the day. The professional
journalist, freed from any social movement or popular ideology, had
already become a mercenary for corporate mass media.

The profession eased access to secure employment and to the rich and
powerful. The journalists’ job was to produce ideas for mass
distribution – either for the state or for the business corporation.
Supporting private enterprise was at the very least a recognition that
one’s job depended on the media owner. Editorial independence meant
writers and editors could write whatever they pleased as long as it
sold and did not challenge the economic or political foundation of the
media enterprise itself. In sum the notion of the independent,
truth-finding, investigative journalist is naïve at best. We must be
careful to distinguish between journalists and what John Pilger has
called ‘corporate stenographers’. This does not mean that no
journalists supply us with useful information or provide us access to
meaningful data. It means that journalism, as institution, as praxis,
is flawed – because it too is subordinated to the business corporation
and its immoral imperatives. Wikileaks takes as its frame of reference
the journalism as it emerged in the Positivist – Progressive Era – a
profession ripe with contradictions, as I have attempted to
illustrate.

Were Wikileaks to fulfil that Positivist–Progressive model, it would
still risk overwhelming us with the apparently objective and unbiased
data – facts deemed to stand for themselves. Without a historical
framework – and I believe such a framework must also be humanist – the
mass of data produced or collated by such a platform as Wikileaks may
sate but not nourish us. We have to be responsible for our
interpretation. We can only be responsible however when we are aware
of the foundations and framework for the data we analyse. The
deliberate choice of framework forces us to be conscious of our own
values and commitments. This stands in contrast to a hypothetically
neutral, objective, or non-partisan foundation that risks decaying
into opportunism – and a flood of deceit from which no mountain of
disclosure can save us.

_______________________________________________________________________________________



Best

A. Mani


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A. Mani
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