{"id":21149,"date":"2024-12-02T08:32:06","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T13:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21149"},"modified":"2024-12-02T13:39:01","modified_gmt":"2024-12-02T18:39:01","slug":"secrecy-and-the-divine-right-to-deceive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/02\/secrecy-and-the-divine-right-to-deceive\/","title":{"rendered":"Secrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin.<\/strong> The Supreme Court declared in 1936, \u201cAn informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment.\u201d Thus, conniving politicians have no choice but to drop an Iron Curtain around Washington.<\/p>\n

Politicians guarantee that Americans are left clueless on the most controversial or dangerous federal policies.<\/strong> The government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The total is equivalent to \u201c20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with double-spaced text on paper,\u201d according to The Washington Post<\/em>. 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\u2019 rascality.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers,\u201d George Orwell wrote in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>. This is where government classification\u2014i.e., secrecy\u2014comes 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.<\/p>\n

Secrecy was usually not a grave peril to most Americans\u2019 rights, liberties, and safety until the U.S. government began warring in the 1940s and on into this century.<\/p>\n

Secrecy helped deliver a death warrant for tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. P<\/strong>resident 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: \u201cLook, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you\u2019re stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid!\u201d Sylvester declared that he expected the American press to be \u201cthe handmaidens of government.\u201d Most of the American media has followed orders regarding foreign reporting most of the time since then.<\/p>\n

In March 1972, President Richard Nixon, as part of his \u201cpledge to create an open Administration,\u201d ordered radical changes in how Uncle Sam kept secrets. Nixon announced that the classification system \u201cfailed 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.\u201d He promised \u201cto lift the veil of secrecy which now enshrouds\u201d federal documents. Nixon\u2019s campaign against secrecy faltered after the Watergate coverup destroyed his presidency.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1978,\u00a0 <\/span>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 \u201cthere 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.\u201d In 1991, former National Security Council official Rodney McDaniel estimated that \u201conly 10% of classification was for legitimate protection of secrets.\u201d In 1997, a federal commission headed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) lamented that \u201csecrets in the federal government are whatever anyone with a stamp decides to stamp secret.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/em> reported in 2005 that federal agencies were \u201cclassifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like \u2018sensitive security information.\u2019\u201d William Leonard, former chief of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, complained of seeing information \u201cclassified that I\u2019ve also seen published in third-grade textbooks.\u201d<\/p>\n

But secrecy again signed a death warrant for thousands of Americans.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

According to the Barack Obama administration, even federal judges must bow to classification labels. \u201cWe don\u2019t think there is a First Amendment right to classified documents,\u201d Justice Department lawyer Catherine Dorsey told a federal judge in 2015. The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 James Risen spent almost a decade in the federal crosshairs after his 2006 book State of War<\/em> exposed the NSA\u2019s illegal warrantless wiretapping and other federal crimes. Robert Litt, general counsel for the Director of National Intelligence, compared journalism to drunk driving to justify punishing any journalist who published confidential information. But the Justice Department could not prove Risen\u2019s disclosures harmed anything except federal credibility.<\/p>\n

Secrecy leaves truth up to the discretion of today\u2019s political appointees. Secrecy lets government officials fill in the blanks as they please. Government secrecy can blindfold people as effectively as federal marshals descending upon a newspaper\u2019s printing presses with axes and sledgehammers. The more facts government suppresses, the more lies politicians can tell.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Will secrecy determine whether Americans are dragged into another world war in the coming months?<\/strong> The Joe Biden administration is encouraging the Ukraine government to become far more aggressive, if not reckless, in its attacks on Russia. But Americans are being treated the same as the downtrodden serfs whom Russian czars dragged into wars centuries ago. The Biden administration decided that Americans have no right to know the facts when their rulers swerve closer to Armageddon. Unfortunately, as in Saigon in 1965, most of the media is still shamefully \u201cthe handmaidens of government.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Secrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive by James Bovard Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin. The Supreme Court declared in 1936, \u201cAn informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment.\u201d Thus, conniving politicians have no choice but to drop an Iron Curtain around Washington. Politicians guarantee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[709,137,534,4433,3259,245,166,1849,55,1107,288],"class_list":["post-21149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-709","tag-george-w-bush","tag-james-risen","tag-jimmy-carter","tag-moynihan","tag-nixon","tag-orwell","tag-saddam-hussein","tag-secrecy","tag-ukraine","tag-vietnam-war"],"yoast_head":"\nSecrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Secrecy entitles rulers to deceive the ruled.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/02\/secrecy-and-the-divine-right-to-deceive\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Secrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Secrecy entitles rulers to deceive the ruled.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/02\/secrecy-and-the-divine-right-to-deceive\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-12-02T13:32:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-12-02T18:39:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Screenshot-2022-10-24-at-12-13-36-The-Libertarian-Institute.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"312\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"139\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jim\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@jimbovard\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Jim\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/jimbovard.com\\\/blog\\\/2024\\\/12\\\/02\\\/secrecy-and-the-divine-right-to-deceive\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/jimbovard.com\\\/blog\\\/2024\\\/12\\\/02\\\/secrecy-and-the-divine-right-to-deceive\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Jim\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/jimbovard.com\\\/blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/79550830ad81c14be529a2c37469974f\"},\"headline\":\"Secrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive\",\"datePublished\":\"2024-12-02T13:32:06+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-12-02T18:39:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/jimbovard.com\\\/blog\\\/2024\\\/12\\\/02\\\/secrecy-and-the-divine-right-to-deceive\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":989,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/jimbovard.com\\\/blog\\\/2024\\\/12\\\/02\\\/secrecy-and-the-divine-right-to-deceive\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/jimbovard.com\\\/blog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2022\\\/10\\\/Screenshot-2022-10-24-at-12-13-36-The-Libertarian-Institute-150x67.png\",\"keywords\":[\"9\\\/11\",\"George W. 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