Q. Well, what do you make, General, of the principle of the people's right to know . . ?Government secrecy and official deception are far greater threats to the security of mankind and our democratic freedoms than global warming, or transnational terrorism. But it is hard to visualize the threats of government lying and secrecy for the average person. Global warming advocates draw people's attention to forest fires, and floods, while skimming over contradictory facts and figures, with the intention to instill the kind of fear that shuts down critical thinking. Terrorist experts point to the collapse of the World Trade Center, and of Arabs waving their AK-47s in the air while shouting Allahu Akbar as evidence that the growing Islamic menace in the world is the biggest danger to the survival of democratic Western nations.
A. I don't believe in that as a general principle.
- Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor, interviewed on the CBS morning news, June 17, 1971. (from David Wise's The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power; 1973, pg. 53).
It doesn't matter that both global warming and terrorism are manufactured threats, because once shocking images of an advancing threat, however false, are installed in people's minds through extraordinary events captured on television and the sympathetic words of leaders, then that threat becomes emotionally real. And since most people tend to be stubborn, they won't be convinced by evidence after the fact that the threat they think is real is not actually real. They'll hang on to the illusion, brush off truth-tellers as conspiracy theorists, and continue believing in the existence of the threat that they were made to believe by diabolical criminals, not knowing that their willful ignorance is the only threat that should have concerned them.
Ignorance is not normally seen as a threat to human survival and democracy, but simply as an unfortunate state for a person to be in, and the precursor to enlightenment. That limited view needs to change because nothing is more dangerous than ignorance in a time of war, and there is added danger today because we don't live in just any time of war, but in the time when conflict between nations can escalate to a nuclear showdown. The lives of millions of human beings are at stake.
If we don't know the origins and reasons of the current war on terror, and the other one that's presently lurking in the background, world war three, then how can we possibly end them, and lessen the damage that they are causing, or will cause in the near future? We must know the whole truth about the war on terror if we want to create peace in our lifetime.
Our leaders in government see it differently. They work on the assumption that the truth should not be communicated to us, and they justify their reasoning by saying that it is for our own safety. Decisions about war and other crises are best left to them because they can better select the right course, and we must follow them in blind faith as they take us down our collective human destiny.
The quote above by General Maxwell D. Taylor's is a common principle held by high-level government and military officials in Washington, Ottawa, London, Canberra, Paris, Berlin, Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, and other capitals. The modern state, dominated by secret intelligence and military interests, is against the people's right to know because it profits insanely from public ignorance. It is in America, where the U.S. national security establishment has most exploited the world's ignorance in the pursuit of criminal ends, that the right to know must be won. Generals like who say that “A level of responsibility toward our people needs to be balanced with a need or right to know," must be rebuked.
The existence of our freedoms depend on our complete knowledge of the facts. There is no good in the right of free speech if you are lied to and denied facts by your government, and thus, forced to rely on government propaganda, secondhand accounts, and other dubious sources of knowledge, to form an opinion about the official policies enacted by government officials. There is no good in a free press if it lacks the correct information that it requires to perform its vital role as a check against government tyranny, and government corruption.
The most direct and tragic consequence from a lack of knowledge in a time of war is the loss of innocent life. Over 50,000 American soldiers died in the Vietnam war along with more than a million Vietnamese because of a fabricated event. Throughout the conflict soldiers thought they were killing and dying to protect America, and ensure its freedoms, but they were lied to by their President, as was the rest of the country about the origins of the war.
Investigative journalist and author David Wise wrote a book in 1973 called The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power, focusing on the lie that led to the Vietnam war in 1964, the nature of the lawless executive, and the role of the press as it relates to the government. Wise won the first ever Orwell award for the book, which is handed out annually by the National Council of Teachers of English and "recognizes writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse." Democracy Now's Amy Goodman won it in 2009.
In his book, Wise gave one of the the best accounts about how the lie about the Gulf of Tonkin incident was generated, and its effect on motivating public opinion about the necessity of sending American soldiers thousands of miles away from America to fight a war. Wise:
"The controversy over the Tonkin Gulf incident has tended to focus on whether, or to what extent, American destroyers were in fact attacked on the night of August 4. Regardless of whether any attack took place, the messages between Washington and the Pacific that day demonstrate that at the time neither the President nor McNamara was certain that an attack had occurred.There are many more examples besides the Gulf of Tonkin incident that proves the U.S. war machine operates on deception, and treachery. That is why it is critical for the survival of America, and of freedom in the West, that we all know what the whole truth is about the war on terror. Since this war is global, the consequences of not knowing the lie about the 9/11 attacks are also global.
There was an unseemly scramble for "evidence" to support the actions the President had determined to take. That evidence was still frantically being sought at 11:37 pm., when Johnson stood before the cameras in the Fish Room and began: "My fellow Americans . . ."
Three days later Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution, authorizing the President to take "all necessary steps" in Southeast Asia. And so America moved down the path to war, on the strength of "doubtful" torpedo reports by a twenty-three-year-old sonarman and a single bullet hole in a destroyer. Much later Senator Albert Gore, then a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, noted that McNamara and Pentagon official John McNaughton had retrieved the bullet that struck the Maddox and had displayed it to the committee. "Every time they came up here they waved that bullet around," Gore said. "One bullet and you went to war--Helen's face is insignificant by comparison.
But during the 1964 campaign, in the weeks after Tonkin Gulf, Lyndon Johnson appeared to promise the voters that there would be no war. Dedicating a dam at Eufaula, Oklahoma, on September 25, he declared: "There are those that say you ought to go north and drop bombs, to try to wipe out the supply lines . . . We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don't want to get involved in a nation with seven hundred million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia."
At Akron, Ohio, on October 21, Johnson said: "But we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."
Eventually, of course, he sent 536,000 American boys to help the Asian boys in Vietnam, and a good many American voters later felt they had been misled." (pg. 45- 46).
If you are being deceived about such an important event or issue, then you must know the full extent of it, instead of denying it wholesale. You have to open your mind, and accept all possibilities about the issue at hand, because in the mind tyrants nothing is out of the question. If it becomes necessary to kill their own people to preserve and expand their own power then tyrants will do it.
Even if all your rights are guaranteed under the law, you won't be able to effectively use them if you don't know what is going on in your government. If you are living without accurate facts at your disposal on any given government policy or public issue, especially a war, then you cannot be classified as a citizen, but as a slave, because citizens know, and slaves don't.
Under the impression that you are being told the truth, you will unknowingly perpetuate misinformation, and grand lies about any particular policy or issue that were implanted in your mind by government, corporate, and media propagandists who are advancing their own secret agenda. Without knowing it, you are living in ignorance, which is a life fit for the worst kind of slave: the kind that doesn't even know that he is a slave; the kind that cheers on his master, and ridicules any voice that criticizes him; the kind that would kill his liberator and protect his master.
It is foolish to believe that you live in a free country just because you can speak a thousands falsehoods in front of the emperor, and not experience any repercussion. Try speaking the truth; try pointing out to everyone around the emperor that the empire is governed by lies, and you will be scolded not by the emperor, because he will not even acknowledge you, but by the people worshiping at his feet. Generally, the people are more afraid of knowing the truth than the emperor is afraid of the people hearing the truth, and this is because most people are ashamed of their gullibility, while the emperor is less ashamed of his cruelty, and treachery. And you can replace "emperor" with "government" or "president of the united states."
There is little point in free political speech in a democratic and open society if citizens are deliberately misinformed and misled by their leaders about the issues that affect them, their society, and their future. You might as well say nothing, because whatever you say are media propagated lies which won't politically hurt the ruling criminal power. If it is not the full truth you speak, or at least most of it, then you can do little harm to the establishment.
I am hopeful that things will change soon because millions of people in America, England, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Netherlands, and all around the world are recognizing the dangers of government secrecy and government deception. The success of WikiLeaks in shedding light on official lies and the illegal wars that spring out of them is also encouraging.
David Wise's book is the best that I've read on the subject. Although written in 1975, the problems that he talked about have not be addressed by the American people, who are still waiting for solutions thirty seven years later, while stuck in two new wars that are also based on a big lie like Vietnam. History repeats itself, as they say. If you don't know the past, then the present is a mystery.
I'll quote some of Wise's closing statements for you to read because they are so well said and timely:
Government and deception, supported by a pervasive system of official secrecy and an enormous public relations machine, has reaped a harvest of massive public distrust. This deep distrust of government, and the word of the government, has altered traditional political relationships in America. It has shattered the bond of confidence between the government and the people. And it has diminished our confidence in ourselves and in our ability as a people to overcome the problems that confront us.
Lying is not a new phenomenon in American history or politics, but there is, after all, a question of degree and frequency, and surely nothing in our past has matched, in scale and quality, the grand deception of Vietnam. What Max Frankel has termed "the habit of regular deception in our politics and administration" is something new, and shameful. Systematic deception as an instrument of highest national policy is, God knows, hardly a cause for national pride.
What else but such a policy could result in the horror of My Lai being briefed "as one of our successful operations"? What else but such a policy could produce a General John D. Lavelle, the head of the Seventh Air Force, who commanded 400 fighter-bombers and 40,000 men, and whose pilots bombed North Vietnam at least 147 times without authorization between November of 1971 and March of 1972? Some of them filed false reports claiming they had been fired upon, for General Lavelle had made it plain to his pilots that they could not report the air strikes had taken place without enemy provocation. At one point Lavelle assigned three men, he later explained to a Congressional committee, "to try to find out how we could continue doing what we were doing but report it accurately." But the reports required so much detail that "we couldn't find a way."
The deception in Vietnam was symptomatic. The emergence of the United States as a world power during and after World War II proportionately increased the opportunities, the temptations, and the capacity of the government to lie. The expansion of American power resulted in the growth of a vast national security establishment and an often unchecked intelligence bureaucracy. Covert operations of the CIA required official lies to protect them, and the standard in such cases became not the truth, but whether the government's actions were "plausibly deniable." In other words, whether the government's lies were convincing.
As a concomitant of expanded American global power, the government has increasingly gained control over channels of information about military, diplomatic, and intelligence events. Frequently the press and public, unable to check the events independently, can only await the appearance of the President on the television screen to announce the official version of reality, be it the Bay of Pigs, Tonkin Gulf, or Laos, or Cambodia, or Vietnam.
Because of official secrecy on a scale unprecedented in our history, the government's capacity to distort information in order to preserve its own political power is almost limitless. Although General Lavelle could not find a way to convert lies into truth, the government has been more successful. Increasingly in recent years it has used the alchemy of power to brew synthetic truths and to shape our perception of events to fit predetermined policies.
If information is power, the ability to distort and control information will be used more often than not to preserve and perpetuate that power. But the national security policy makers, the crisis managers of the nuclear age, are frequently men of considerable intellectual abilities who have gone to the right schools. They pride themselves not only on their social graces, but on their rationality and morality. For such men, the preservation of partisan political power would not be a seemly rationale for official deception (although it might be entirely efficient for the President whom they serve). National security provides the acceptable alternative, the end that justifies all means, the end that permits men who pondered the good, the true, and the beautiful as undergraduates at Harvard and Princeton to sit in air-conditioned rooms in Washington twenty years later and make decisions that result in blood and agony half a world away. It is the rationale that permits decent men to make indecent decisions.
The excuse for secrecy and deception most frequently given by those in power is that the American people must sometimes be misled in order to mislead the enemy. This justification is unacceptable on moral and philosophic grounds, and often it simply isn't true. Frequently the "enemy" knows what is going on, but the American public does not.
For example, for several years, until details were publicized by a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the United States government waged a secret war in Laos. Secret, that is, from the American public, because presumably the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese were under no delusions about the American role. Apparently, it was thought necessary, in this case, to mislead the American public in order to reveal the truth to the enemy.
When Lyndon Johnson issued his National Security Action Memorandum of April 6, 1965, which ordered that the commitment of American combat troops in Vietnam be kept secret, his actions were patently not designed to fool Hanoi or the Viet Cong, who would find out quickly enough who was shooting at them; it was designed to conceal the facts from the American electorate. The memorandum ordered that the troops be deployed "in ways that should minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy," a concern that was clearly tailored more to domestic audiences than to public opinion in Hanoi, where there are very few American voters. Again and again the government has taken actions designed to mislead not an enemy, but the American public--just the opposite of the stated rationale for deception.
The elitists who make national security policy have combined "the arrogance of power" as Hannah Arendt has noted, with "the arrogance of mind." They have increasingly come to feel that they alone possess the necessary information and competence to deal with foreign policy crises and problems. Leslie H. Gelb, director of the task force that produced the Pentagon Papers, has written that "most of our elected and appointed leaders in the national security establishment felt they had the right--and beyond that the obligation--to manipulate the American public in the national interest as they defined it."
The elite policy makers have thus found an easy justification for both deception and secrecy. They are the only ones who "read the cables" and the intelligence reports and "have the information." Ordinary citizens, they believe, cannot understand complex foreign policy problems; ergo the policy makers have the right, so they think, to mislead the public for its own good.
In its baldest terms, this philosophy has been stated as "the right to lie." Even if officials feel compelled to mislead the public--and it is unlikely that total virtue will ever find its way into the councils of government--to proclaim that right is to place an official imprimatur on a policy of deception and distrust.
"It is sophistry to pretend that in a free country a man has some sort of inalienable or constitutional right to deceive his fellow men," Walter Lippmann has noted. "There is no more right to deceive than there is a right to swindle, to cheat, or to pick pockets." (pg. 342 - 345).
Wise touches on so many points in these remarks, but the sentence that struck me the most was this one: "Increasingly in recent years it has used the alchemy of power to brew synthetic truths and to shape our perception of events to fit predetermined policies." Understanding how government deception influences public perception is essential to recovering our democracies in the West. Clarity and liberty go together. If we don't know exactly how Liberty was destroyed by our elite-controlled governments, then how can we reclaim it for the future generations born in this century, and the next?
A few excerpts:
Secrecy gives those in government exclusive control over certain areas of knowledge, and thereby increases their power, making it more difficult for even a free press to check that power. In short, a free press is necessary for a democratic society to work effectively, but without access to information, its ability to perform its central role is eviscerated.Stiglitz's call for transparency and openness eleven years ago were not heard. Shortly after, of course, 9/11 happened, which gave the United States limitless leverage to lie to the world and abuse its power. And the press repeated the government lies, but, thankfully, the Internet has given a new independent press free access to information, allowing a sizable amount of the global public to be informed about false-flag terrorism, the criminal activity of private banks on Wall Street, and other issues that most affect us. Without this resource, there would not be a global political awakening, and any hope for positive change.
The consequences of secrecy can be grave. Consider one example that loomed over much of this century. In his recent book, Senator Moynihan has argued powerfully that the Cold War and many of its manifestations, such as the arms race, were greatly exacerbated by the secrecy imposed by the military establishment. A more open discussion of the evidence would have shown what is now all too apparent— Russia was not the formidable opponent, the industrial giant, which it was depicted as for almost half a century.
In this lecture, I want to set forth the case for greater openness and transparency in government. It may seem ironic that I, an American, should be delivering this lecture here, in the United Kingdom: after all, the United States and the United Kingdom are two of the most open and transparent societies in the world. And indeed, they set an example for much of the rest of the world. Yet we should not take comfort in that relative virtue: our countries are still bedeviled by far too much secrecy, far too little transparency. If we are truly to set an example for the rest of the world, we must confront our own issues of transparency and openness head on.
Stiglitz:
Greater openness can be justified on instrumental grounds, as means to ends—ends like reducing the likelihood of the abuse of power. Greater openness is an essential part of good governance. A powerful case has been made that greater openness might have avoided the extremes of the Cold War. I believe that better decisions would have been made than emerged from the reliance on the secret wisdom of the cognoscenti. The end of the Cold War has laid both laid bare the failures of the culture of secrecy and undermined the necessity of continuing it further. Perhaps the greatest irony of the Cold War is that in the attempt to preserve democracy and democratic values, we adopted policies that undermined democratic processes. The culture of secrecy was a like a virus, spreading from one part of the government to another, until it invaded areas where national security played no role at all.In the second paragraph Stiglitz makes the same point that Walter Lippmann made, as quoted by above Wise, that public officials who withhold or manipulate public information for private ends are committing theft. At that point, they cease to be the public's representatives, and become the public's enemies.
But I also believe that greater openness has an intrinsic value. Citizens have a basic right to know. I have tried to express this basic right in a number of different ways: the public has paid for the information; for a government official to appropriate the information that comes to his or her disposal in his role as a public official for private gain (if only for the non-monetary return of good newspaper coverage) is as much a theft of public property as the stealing of any other public property. While we all recognize the necessity of collective action, and the consequences of collective actions for individual freedoms, we have a basic right to know how the powers that have been surrendered to the Collective are being used. This seems to me to be a basic part of the implicit compact between the governed and those that they have selected to temporarily govern them.
Once more, Stiglitz:
We are at an exciting time. The end of the Cold War has provided us the opportunity— I would say, has made it necessary for us— to re-examine the role of secrecy and openness. At the same time, new technologies have provided mechanisms through which information can be more effectively shared between government and those governed. We can now have a more informed electorate than in any time in history. Further, advances in education, of a kind unthinkable a century ago, have put more and more citizens in a position to evaluate and assess the information that can so readily be made available.
We need but one step more: a commitment by government to greater openness, to promote dialogue and open discussion, to eschew secrecy in all of its myriad of forms. While I have outlined concrete legislation to which all governments might subscribe, I have recognized the limitation of such legislation. The incentives of secrecy are simply too great, and the scope for discretionary actions is too wide. I have therefore stressed the importance of creating a culture of openness–a task where organizations like Amnesty International have an essential role to play. Such openness may not guarantee that wise decisions will always be made. But it would be a major step forward in the on-going evolution of democratic processes, a true empowerment of individuals to participate meaningfully in the decisions concerning the collective actions that have such profound effects on their lives and livelihoods.
You should read Stiglitz's entire lecture. And keep in mind that while Western democracies demand our greatest attention, we are in a struggle for transparency and openness in governments on all continents. Only if we are united as global citizens can we shine a collective light on the dirty work that governments are hiding from the people like sponsoring terrorism, and provoking unnecessary conflicts. There is absolutely no good reason that we have to suffer through the darkness of collective ignorance.
