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Activists crawl through web to untangle
US secrecy
By William Fisher
New York, New York, Nov. 29 (IPS) — To combat the Bush
administration’s penchant for secrecy, US citizens have been forced
to unearth new sources for information they once read in their daily
newspapers. But thanks to a few dedicated individuals and not-for-profit
groups — and the Internet — such material is easier to come
by than ever before.
“The Bush administration has taken secrecy to a new level. They
have greatly increased the numbers and types of classified documents,”
says Steven Aftergood, who conducts one of the most widely used “open
government” programs — the Federation of American Scientists
(FAS) Project on Government Secrecy.
“They have made it far more difficult and time-consuming to obtain
documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And they have
imposed ‘gag rules’ on an ever-widening group of government
employees,” Aftergood added in an interview.
“Open government’’ sites on the World Wide Web provide
a wide variety of information.
For example, on the Internet pages of George Washington University’s
National Security Archive you can read Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
manuals from the 1960s and the 1980s specifying approved methods of
prisoner abuse as well as one of the last major pieces of the puzzle
explaining US and UK roles in the August 1953 coup against Iranian Premier
Mohammad Mossadeq.
Or, just posted, the telephone conversations of former US Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger, berating high-level subordinates for their
efforts in 1976 to restrain human rights abuses by military dictators
in Chile and Argentina.
OpenTheGovernment.org is a new coalition of 33 organizations dedicated
to combating unwarranted government secrecy and promoting freedom of
information.
Among recent postings on that site: an evaluation by The Reporters Committee
for Freedom of the Press on “the likely impact of attorney general
nominee Alberto Gonzales on press freedoms and the public’s right
to know,” based on Reporters Committee research of Gonzales’
performance as a judge on the Texas Supreme Court from January 1999
to December 2000 and as White House counsel since January 2001.
The FAS Project on Government Secrecy publishes Secrecy News, which
recently disclosed: “Americans can now be obligated to comply with
legally-binding regulations that are unknown to them, and that indeed
they are forbidden to know.”
According to Aftergood, the “variety of Internet-based sources
has increased substantially during the Bush administration. Freedom
of Information Act requests are on the rise, passing three million for
the first time last year.”
Another site, BushSecrecy.org, sponsored by the highly respected Public
Citizen organization, chronicles and documents the administration’s
obsession with secrecy, as well as steps being taken to fight it.
The website provides a variety of electronic links to up-to-date summaries
of each of the administration’s major secrecy initiatives, with
additional links from those summaries to key documents, such as executive
orders, congressional materials, judicial decisions and legal briefs
filed by both sides in the court battles raging over these issues.
The new Coalition of Journalists for Open Government has been established
“to provide timely information on freedom of information issues
and on what journalism organizations are doing to foster greater transparency
in government.”
The coalition’s website reports “the Department of Homeland
Security is requiring all of its 180,000 employees and others outside
the federal government to sign binding non-disclosure agreements covering
unclassified information. Breaking the agreement could mean loss of
job, stiff fines and imprisonment.”
Like many “open government” websites, the coalition distributes
a free email newsletter. Other sites charge for documents. One such
is InsideDefense.com, which provides primary source documents gathered
by a team of Pentagon reporters, and issues a free weekly publication,
The Insider, to alert readers to new documents.
The FAS government secrecy project recently provided a sampling of other
Internet sources. A few examples:
GlobalSecurity.org which says it provides “bottomless resources
on all aspects of national security policy, and then some;”
The Resource Shelf offers news on all aspects of government information
policy and links to valuable source documents;
The Memory Hole collects and publishes elusive records and documents
that have been withdrawn from the public domain;
Cryptome promises a rich collection of new official and unofficial documents
on security policy;
Project on Government Oversight performs independent investigations
to promote openness and government accountability;
Electronic Privacy Information Centre offers declassified documents
and insights on cryptography policy and privacy; and
Nautilus Institute’s Global Disclosure Project specializes in nuclear
weapons policy and strategy.
Some “open government” websites are maintained by individuals,
usually associated with universities. For example, the Guide to Declassified
Documents and Archival Materials for US Foreign Policy and World Politics,
a road map to declassified foreign policy records, is the work of David
N. Gibbs of the University of Arizona.
FOI.net provides resources on national and foreign freedom of information
law from Alasdair Roberts of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public
Affairs at Syracuse University.
Most other observers interested in open government agree the Bush administration
is unlikely to change its attitude toward fuller disclosure and, they
predict the number of alternative sources will continue to grow.
But even the continuing proliferation of new information sources will
not correct some of the problems arising from excessive government secrecy.
For example, Timothy H. Edgar, legislative counsel of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) told IPS: “Basic information that is crucial
to oversight of the government’s new spy powers under the Patriot
Act — such as how it is using new powers to obtain personal records
— has been cloaked in secrecy, making it impossible to judge the
effectiveness of these powers or their impact on civil liberties.”
The Return of PSYOPS: Military’s media
manipulation demands more investigation
Dec. 3 — The Los Angeles Times revealed this
week (12/1/04) that the US military lied to CNN in the course of executing
psychological warfare operations, or PSYOPS, in advance of the recent
attack on Fallujah. This incident raises serious questions about government
disinformation and journalistic credibility, but recent discussions
of the government’s propaganda plans have excluded some valuable
context.
In an Oct. 14 on-air interview, Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN Pentagon
reporter Jamie McIntyre that a US military assault on Fallujah had begun.
In fact, the offensive would not actually begin for another three weeks.
The goal of the psychological operation, according to the Times, was
to deceive Iraqi insurgents into revealing what they would do in the
event of an actual offensive.
This operation raises obvious questions about the government’s
use of media to broadcast disinformation at home and abroad—not
to mention questions about journalistic gullibility and reluctance to
question official claims. But the CNN story has received little pick-up
so far from other news outlets—and when it is covered, it’s
treated like an isolated episode, even though recent history shows that
US government plans to deceive journalists and the public are widespread
and systematic, not aberrational.
Shortly before the launch of the “war on terror,” an unnamed
Pentagon war planner seemed to warn journalists everywhere when he told
Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz: “This is the most information-intensive
war you can imagine.... We’re going to lie about things.”
(9/24/01)
In February 2002, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon’s
Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was “developing plans to provide
news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations”
in an effort “to influence public sentiment and policy makers in
both friendly and unfriendly countries.”
The story got widespread attention, and the Pentagon announced that
the office would be eliminated. But considerably less media attention
was paid when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later said that, while
the OSI had been closed, its mission would be taken up by other agencies.
As Rumsfeld put it, “I went down that next day and said ‘Fine,
if you want to savage this thing, fine—I’ll give you the corpse.
There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep
doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.’”
(FAIR Media Advisory, 11/27/02) So the revelation that a misinformation
campaign bearing a striking resemblance to the description of the OSI
was actually being carried out ought not to come as a total surprise.
Earlier this year, another Los Angeles Times scoop (6/3/04) revealed
that one of the most enduring images of the war—the toppling of
the statue of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad square on April 9, 2003—
was a US Army psychological warfare operation staged to look like a
spontaneous Iraqi action:
“As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged
on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam
Hussein. It was a Marine colonel—not joyous Iraqi civilians, as
was widely assumed from the TV images—who decided to topple the
statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological
operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.”
CNN’s history of voluntary cooperation with PSYOPS troops is also
worth considering. In March 2000, FAIR and international news organizations
revealed that CNN had allowed military propaganda specialists from an
Army PSYOPS unit to work as interns in the news division of its Atlanta
headquarters.
As FAIR reported at the time (3/27/00), some PSYOPS officers were eager
to find ways to use media power to their advantage. One officer explained
at a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways to “gain
control” over commercial news satellites to help bring down an
“informational cone of silence” over regions where special
operations were taking place.
And a 1996 unofficial strategy paper written by an Army officer and
published by the US Naval War College (“Military Operations in
the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier”) urged military
commanders to find ways to “leverage the vast resources of the
fourth estate” for the purposes of “communicating the [mission’s]
objective and endstate, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective
psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy,
and enhancing intelligence collection.”
Of course, the full extent of these programs is not yet known. But the
fact that the US government is intentionally lying to journalists, and
by extension to the public, should be big news. Unfortunately, the L.A.
Times report is generating little mainstream media attention. CNN’s
Aaron Brown reported the story (12/1/04), admitting that “none
of us are particularly comfortable when we’re talking about things,
about ourselves if you will.”
Brown also made another, even more revealing comment:
“There is an important and explicit bargain between the press and
the Pentagon in a time of war. We don’t do anything to endanger
the troops or operations. They don’t lie to us. Each is essential
in a free society and each is made more complicated by the information
age, but it seems that sometimes in an effort to mislead the enemy the
military has come close, very close, to crossing the line and misleading
you.”
Of course, in this case the military did not come “very close”
to misleading the public; they did mislead the public. And while Brown
may have confidence that such a “bargain” exists between the
press and the military, it would appear that the Pentagon does not agree.
If journalists were more willing to accept the old adage that “all
governments lie,” we might all be better served.
Source: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
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