“Where lies the security of the people?”
by zunguzungu
Glenn Greenwald is right:
It is a “scandal” when the Government conceals things it is doing without any legitimate basis for that secrecy. Each and every document that is revealed by WikiLeaks which has been improperly classified — whether because it’s innocuous or because it is designed to hide wrongdoing — is itself an improper act, a serious abuse of government secrecy powers. Because we’re supposed to have an open government — a democracy — everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That’s not just some lofty, abstract theory; it’s central to having anything resembling “consent of the governed.” But we have completely abandoned that principle; we’ve reversed it.
But principles are cheap; how many divisions has the pope got? It helps to have Gin and Tacos put it in context:
…the Cold War, and particularly the American misadventure in Vietnam, irrevocably altered the paradigm for government secrecy. “Classified” documents are supposed to be, according to the government’s own definition, information which would damage national security if released. Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret are merely ways of categorizing the extent to which the release of information would damage national security. Somewhere along the line, however, “national security” became synonymous with “stuff that embarrasses the government.” What were the Pentagon Papers, after all, except evidence that the military and government were lying on a massive scale – to Congress, the public, and themselves – about American involvement and the conditions on the ground in Vietnam? Information proving that our elected and unelected leaders are lying to us is not, on that basis alone, a matter of national security. They are a matter of political security. Maintaining state secrets has become an expedient way of protecting the government, not the nation.
Nuclear codes are a matter of national security. This crap isn’t. The “secrets” betrayed by this diplomatic cable dump range from the gossipy (“Prime Minister so-and-so has too much plastic surgery and a drinking problem!”) to the “Are you kidding? Everyone already knows that!” variety. The Russian mafia is intertwined with the government? My word! That is simply shocking. The effect of the most recent information dump is not, as Obama and Hillary have so idiotically warned, that “lives will be lost.” This isn’t blowing the cover of any double agents in the Kremlin. This is just making the government look stupid. If you think “We don’t want to be embarrassed” is a sufficient reason for the government to withhold information about its activities from the public, you have a very curious understanding of how this country is supposed to work.
Which is really the point. The cold war changed how the country is supposed to work, not because we were “at war” but because it came to be normal, banal, and unquestionable that we would be permanently in a state of military preparedness, that “security” came to be synonymous with a standing army. And when that process goes on long enough, it acquires a momentum of its own: when the Soviet Union ended, we lost the existential enemy that we needed to justify the existence of a permanent security state, but it was barely a decade before we found another one. Whew!
It can be difficult to get your head around how perverse this transformation has been, in the grand constitutional scheme of things. But it is. I’ve been reading Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt, and one of the naggingly strange things that strikes you in the lead up to WWI is how relentlessly pacifist the USA was (at least until Wilson’s decision to enter the conflict). One of Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogans was “He kept us out of the war,” while Roosevelt’s anti-Wilson whisper campaign was all about “Preparedness”: on the one hand, keeping us out of war was, as such, a winning electoral strategy; on the other hand, the US was almost completely unprepared for military conflict of the sort that had just broken out. We had a very insubstantial standing army and we liked it that way.
This is a very simplified version of a complicated story, of course, but taking an impressionistic Roosevelt-shaped snapshot of 1915 and comparing it to the present at least allows us to get a sense for how dramatically and unrecognizably different this nation has become, how far our daily political practice has moved from the presumptions and principles that inform its constitutional framework. People who claim to be “originalists” without expressing concern about the effect of a standing army on democracy are either disingenuous or uninformed, or both.
You probably already knew that. But one of the things people tend not to realize is that the founders weren’t just worried about standing armies because they felt like a powerful army would make civilian rule impossible (though certainly this was part of it). They also worried — and the irony of this kills me — that a standing army would be dangerous to a democracy because it would produce and necessitate Big Government. A permanent army requires a permanent transformation of the state: while a civilian militia could be mobilized in times of need, they believed* that the good thing about such a defense structure was precisely that it wouldn’t require the kind of permanent tax structure that a permanent standing army does. And the founders were not a little bit concerned about taxation, remember?
Which is why, for example, military appropriations were given a particular, special little feature in the constitution: unlike all other forms of appropriation, army funding was only to last two years. Which meant that every two years, when the nation direct-elected an entire new House of Representatives (and remember, the direct-elected two-year-term-serving “the People’s House” was to be a populist counterbalance to the aristocratic, appointed-for-six-years Senate), the populist House would have to actively choose to re-appropriate for the Army. If the burden had instead been placed on congress to repeal the army’s appropriation, a single element (say, an aristocratic senate) would be able to prevent such action from being taken. But the founders eventually settled on a design that was aimed to prevent exactly that scenario: by weighting the inertia of the system against a standing army — making it automatically expire every two years — the people were intended to have as direct a check on the military’s financial existence as possible, precisely because of the anti-democratic effect that a standing army was seen to have.
As John Dewitt put it:
“Where lies the security of the people? What assurances have they that either their taxes will not be exacted but in the greatest emergencies, and then sparingly, or that standing armies will be raised and supported for the very plausible purpose only of cantoning them upon their frontiers? There is but one answer to these questions. — They have none.”
I’d quibble with the term ‘pacifist’ applied to pre-WWI Americans: there was plenty of support for expansion into the Pacific and Carribean (once the decidedly non-pacifistic conquest of the continent was complete). Whether you date it to the Monroe Doctrine, or the 1853 Perry mission to force Japan into international engagement, there seems to be a pretty early shift from anti-standing-army minimalism to what could be described as an “enough power to get the job done” approach. The debate in the 1910s wasn’t about the status of the military, but about following through on TR’s expansion of the role of America in the world (from his military career on).
I’m not convinced that the rise of secrecy is about policy and ideology, by the way. Two other factors seem critical: the technology necessary to reproduce and distribute large quantities of ‘secure’ information (esp. copy machines) and the increase in the scope of government bringing in larger numbers of less reliably elite-minded staff which needed greater discipline (in a Foucauldian sense) to maintain a closed shop.
You’re right, of course; I think reading Morris has left “pacifist” tattooed in my brain, but that’s because of the TR-centric perspective it’s written through. But the difference between “enough power to get the job done” and the “enough power to get every job done ever forever” is still so vast that it’s where I wanted to put my focus (even if I’m elsewhere focused hard on those smaller transformations in the military’s purpose).
As for your second point, the jump from “Secrecy” to “military” might be a bit abrupt, but the slippage G&Tacos flags between “military secrets” and “all secrets” is where I was trying to go; “security” changes its meaning when a state of war is normalized, since every “state secret” becomes, by a wixkedly unspoken extension, a “state [of war] secret.” Though your nuancing of the point certainly stands.
You’re right about the ‘permanent state of war’ problem, certainly, and the Cold War has a lot to do with that. I liked Phil Cunningham‘s take on the documents in that regard: ‘It’s a Manichean view that reduces the planet earth to a giant game board of friends and enemies, informants and subjects.’
Phil Cunningham’s view was very enlightening. It brings to mind the Brenton Woods System. The System also played a role in the viability of a standing army and the ‘permament state of war’.
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A really good answer, full of rationality!
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It’s interesting how the author of ginandtacos says “”People will die if these secrets are revealed!” is not only a bald-faced lie in most instances but also the argument of last resort among people who believe that state power should be absolute and unaccountable.”
One of his commentators just linked proof of how dangerous the leak of these documents are: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8166084/Taliban-prepare-to-punish-WikiLeaks-Afghan-informers.html
So it is a bald-faced lie now? Why do Greenwald and Co. continue to ignore and downplay these effects?
You have to be kidding.
“Proof of how dangerous the leak of these documents are”
Right, the Taliban want to punish collaborators is what the article says, unsurprisingly, which is why the overwhelming majority of names and places are missing in the documents. That is a good example of the kind of proof that exists for these claims. None.
Thank you for your post. I appreciate your analysis. All the best.
[…] However, nothing in the WikiLeaks cables reveals the identity of operatives, and as noted by other bloggers, has to do mostly with gossip between diplomats and capturing of well-known “secrets.” […]
Fantastic commentary. I came here from a link from Digby and Glenn Greenwald and after reading this article promptly decided to bookmark this page.
I arrived via Obsidian Wings – and ditto on the instant bookmark. Great blog
Very interesting! The change of the US into an isolate country with practically no serious military power into a global superpower one after IIWW, has shifted dramatically the underpinnings of the political system and the values which created the country. Taking this point, the description of French author Emannuel Todd about the decline of the US in his book “Apres l’Empire” is clear: the States has became a “dummy” giant which needs desperately to be involved in wars against four level countries, basically because the security system is now at the top of the bureaucratic and decision device (this wars show openly how incompetent is the US Army). The problem that will have the US is that has no chance to challenge Europe, China, and even Russia, India or Brazil. Very good articles. Cheers. 🙂
Where Americans anti-war? Probably the people, but never the state.
Before WWI. Germany and USA where in competition of who where the strongest empire. The Hispano-American war was created by the USA for controlling Puerto Rico, as its position was key to controlling both the Caribbean and the Atlantic (this was before airplanes). And this was planned years before the USS Maine was sunk.
After WW2. We had a lot of weapon manufacturing companies. “The War Machine”. So what do you do when you have a lot of weapon companies. How do you move the weapons?
The solution, create wars. The more wars you have, the more weapons are sold.
Wars are not about ideals. Wars are about resources and (more recently) money. Want to minimize wars? Eliminate the weapon manufactures and make the government do its own weapon manufacturing. No profit to be made, no reason to create wars.
I certainly would agree that National Security has little to do with security for the people, and I also agree that it is as much a euphemism to hide the lies and follies of elected politicians as it is a mind-numbing formula to justify the existence of a security apparatus. The question though is: whose security, security in whose interest? The idea of remnants of the cold war seem to fall far short of getting to the crux; instead I feel we should explore whether there were ever wars without an economic objective, especially in America. And while I’m no expert in US history, I’d like to join Jonathan Dresner’s concern and counter the pacifist image of the pre-WW I era with references to Americas aggressive military history. From the colonial wars in the 17th & 18th century and the War of Independence to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the history of the United States is littered with acts of military aggression against other people, internally and externally. Describing any period of that nation as pacifist without embedding such comment in this wider context is euphemistic in itself.
Interesting account of the chronology of government secrecy. However, I think there may be better explanations for the shift (the US was comparatively isolationist pre-WWI, but still had its own empire and sphere of influence). My guess is that classification became important as the government became better at compiling information, and the media became quicker to distribute it. And the country also became more democratic in the 20th century, so politicians were more accountable and also put more effort into ‘PR’. Lincoln arrested and intimidated anti-civil war journalists, but 20th century presidents have focused more on controling the information leaked to the press.
But the larger transition which is pointed to the move to American economic hegemony, in which percieved economic and political interests are maintained through back-room dealings, often backed up with economic or military firepower. In this world, US military superiority must be absolute–the US military can reshape countries such as Iraq or the Balkans even with intensive political restraints (such as keeping casualties low, even while fighting an urban ground war). Operations such as Iraq, etc require a large force with high-end technology. Combine “soft power”, a large military force, and wartime propaganda and you create a situation where the government is interested in obscuring all information about what is going on.
[…] this post, Bady discusses the normalization of the war footing that took hold on a permanent basis during the […]
I think this discussion is unencumbered with any actual experience or insight into how government officials write cables.
There is no question that the sheer volume of cables and communications within government now has multiplied beyond anything near what it was like 100 years ago or 50 years ago. Don’t forget that there used to be “the diplomatic pouch” (and still is) that contained actual handwritten letters. Officials and journalists for that matter might take trips to a foreign capital and sit there for weeks having conversations off the record because time and politics moved differently before the 24/7 news cycle and the advent of the fax and then the Internet. In my own lifetime I have seen events take several weeks to unfold as diplomatic dispatches made their way back and forth and journalists taking weeks to cover them; today, this might all occur in the space of an hour.
What you see in a cable today is something that might have been in a private verbal conversation years ago, and that has to be factored in. You wouldn’t demand that every verbal conversation be taped and transmitted, yet suddenly, the artifact of the cable text makes you demand that.
It’s also too facile to say that the cables are filled with mere personalities and gossip. Within each one of those sorts of cables there’s usually some really pertinent (and hitherto disclosed) event. For example, it might be gossip of the sort that used to be at the bar frequented by diplomats to say Gulnara Karimova is “the most hated woman in Uzbekistan” (the president’s daughter). But read further and you see there are many more important matters of state — that she might be involved with a company that might be run by a mafia that might be corrupt, etc. and that Hillary Clinton’s presentation of a human rights award to an Uzbek woman caused Karimov to become so angry, that U.S. diplomats said that Karimov might pull the agreement to ship deliveries to NATO troops in Afghanistan through Uzbekistan. I think if you read many of the cables, especially in groups around certain dates, you will come away saying that it’s not just merely frank character descriptions but usually some more material point.
There seems to be an awful lot of crankiness about government secrecy on the left — and little demand for less secrecy from the socialist governments they admire, or of WikiLeaks itself, of course, and little recognition that it’s ok to conduct diplomacy in private for the pursuit of national interests. What’s really going on here is that the critics don’t like the government in power, so they are seizing on the method of secrecy to try to undermine it. Vote in another government then, if that’s your problem.
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