Both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney all but accused the New York Times of treason last month when the Times and two other papers published an account of a secret government program to track bank transfers that might involve terrorist groups. Was their ire justified?
At the height of the Cold War, I was a member of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), a top secret organization you never heard of that planned for nuclear war in Europe. I had a security clearance so high I couldn’t even tell anyone I had it. If I’d leaked information from the NPG, I would and should have been jailed, because such information might have aided Soviet war planners then targeting American cities.
So I understand the need for government secrecy in national security. Especially in wartime, there should be clear limits on what the press can release without jeopardizing national security, and there must be enough of a dialogue between government and the press so that those limits are respected.
But the bar—the standard for what information, if leaked, would endanger the nation —is high. In the past it has focused on whether or not lives were at stake (for example, revealing the names and locations of secret operatives) or situations in which the leaked information (such as NATO war plans) would give a clear, significant advantage to an enemy or potential enemy.
A major reason that bar is high is because of the necessary balance between secrecy and oversight. The more secrets the Executive Branch is allowed to keep to itself, the less subject it is to legitimate oversight by the other branches of government, by the press, and ultimately by the people. The less oversight, the more likely that the party in power will abuse that power and the nation will suffer for it.
The situation is made worse by this Administration, which has relentlessly pushed for broad expansions of executive power, expansions granted by a compliant Congress. The new powers have been justified to the electorate by Administration statements that have successfully focused the nation, post-9/11, on real or contrived threats that demand “strong leadership” from the Oval Office—and a willingness on the part of fearful citizens to accept a false tradeoff between security and freedom.
It’s dangerous enough when a presidency conflates the national interest with its own partisan interests. It’s doubly dangerous when thatpresidency consistently gets away with using “national security” as a curtain to hide mistakes and excesses that would never otherwise stand the light of day. America is becoming Oz, the place where unaccountable power rules by fear from behind a curtain, emitting smoke and noise.
The few tepid Congressional hearings held this year on national security issues only underscore the failure of this Congress to even try to balance the powers given a wartime President against its own duty to oversee those powers. That failure has led to unparalleled assaults on civil liberties, a dangerous erosion of Constitutional checks-and-balances and a near absence—certainly in the majority party—of any serious efforts to question the wisdom of policies developed by small, closed coteries in the Executive Branch. Examples are the unauthorized wiretaps program, an energy “policy” guided in secret by oil execs, the “national security letters” that allow the FBI to pry into personal information such as what books you read, the tortures conducted in your name at Guantanamo or secret “rendition” centers overseas—and the war in Iraq.
With Congress on leave from its Constitutional responsibilities, the only oversight left comes from the press, which has finally begun to wake from its own long and unprincipled sleep. (continue)
