U.S. Strangling its Democracy

Published on Sunday, April 30, 2006 by the Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)
by Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON — It has little to do with Sept. 11, 2001.

To understand the furor over leaks about a CIA-run network of secret prisons or, perhaps, the president's authorization of warrantless snooping on Americans' communications, the date to remember isn't 9/11. It is March 23, 2001.

On that day — just weeks after George W. Bush was inaugurated — White House counsel Alberto Gonzales instructed the archivist of the United States to delay release of thousands of President Ronald Reagan's papers, which were about to be made public under a Watergate-era law governing the release of unclassified presidential documents.

The Gonzales letter to John W. Carlin, then chief custodian of the nation's historical records, was written six months before the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon would provide an all-purpose justification for choking off public access to information. The letters would be followed, soon enough, with an executive order that vastly expanded the power of a sitting president — Bush — to keep secret not only his own papers, but those of presidents who preceded him. Bush claims this authority even if a former president wants them made public. The order is being challenged in court by scholars and journalists.

Now a longtime CIA officer, fired from her job, stands accused of leaking information about the existence of the secret overseas prisons for alleged terrorists — though her lawyer says she isn't responsible for the leak and did not have access to the information that resulted in Pulitzer Prize-winning stories by The Washington Post. Meanwhile, government gumshoes are on the trail of whoever revealed to The New York Times the clandestine wiretapping of Americans that was authorized by the president, evading the courts and Congress.

We have seen before a vindictive president who pursued his political opponents and his antagonists in the media for exposing his wrongdoing and embarrassments. But this president is, in his way, less constrained than even Richard Nixon.

He has allowed intelligence, military and other agencies to scrub files at the National Archives, reclassifying thousands of previously public documents that date as far back as World War II and the Korean conflict. Some were considered so benign that the State Department already had published them in official histories. Archives officials announced Wednesday that about a quarter of the documents had been reclassified in a way that was "clearly inappropriate."

FBI agents seek to rummage through the files of the late Jack Anderson, the muckraking columnist whose most significant exposes were written in the 1960s and 1970s. "I explained the stuff we have is really dusty — old, ancient history," says Mark Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor who is writing a book about Anderson and who has access to his files. No matter. The history cops visited Feldstein's home, flashed their badges and said they wanted to retrieve classified documents.

In California, the Bush administration fights in federal court to keep University of California political science professor Larry Berman from seeing 40-year-old documents from Lyndon Johnson's presidency. The CIA says the presidential daily intelligence briefs (PDBs) cannot now — or ever — be revealed. Nor, the agency says, can any presidential brief of any White House ever be made public.

"This government's argument today is that these are the crown jewels," Berman said in an interview. The author of several books on Johnson and the Vietnam War, Berman requested briefs from 1965 and 1968. Other presidential intelligence briefs from the Johnson White House were made public in the early 1990s and are posted on the Internet. We have not, since then, been attacked by the Vietnamese. Nor have we suffered from release of two briefs that were published by the 9/11 investigative commission.

This administration is not the first to select for public airing secrets that are a political help, such as its claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, while seeking retribution against those who reveal secrets that hurt. The politics of revenge can be reversed in an election. The rewriting of history cannot.

Just a week ago, the U.S. government celebrated victory after a long effort to get Germany to open a trove of Holocaust files. The accuracy of history, itself, was at stake. History is the lens through which we see more clearly events that partisan passion and cultural myopia cloud in the present. If it is true that democracy dies in the dark, the surest way to kill it is to continue marching down this path of suppression.