Glenn Greenwald takes government secrecy to task

rhadamanthus · Aug 26, 2011

Well done, I'd say.

Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.

Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives." Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."
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Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain. But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers.

The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished. In a Washington Post Op-Ed today, Drake himself explains:

From 2001 through 2008, I was a senior executive at the National Security Agency. Shortly after Sept. 11, I heard more than rumblings about secret electronic eavesdropping and data mining against Americans that bypassed the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . . .
I followed all the rules for reporting such activity until it conflicted with the primacy of my oath to defend the Constitution. I then made a fateful choice to exercise my fundamental First Amendment rights and went to a journalist with unclassified information about which the public had a right to know.

Rather than address its own corruption, ineptitude and illegal actions, the government made me a target of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar federal criminal "leak" investigation as part of a vicious campaign against whistleblowers that started under President George W. Bush and is coming to full fruition under President Obama.

To the government, I was a traitor and enemy of the state. As an American, however, I could not stand by and become an accessory to the willful subversion of our Constitution and our freedoms.
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Far more often than anything else, that is the real purpose of government secrecy: to shield ineptitude, corruption, abuse of power and illegality from seeing the light of day, and -- as illustrated by the CIA's efforts to destroy Soufan's critical book while guaranteeing the predominance of Rodriguez's propaganda tract -- to ensure that the government controls what the public hears and what it does not hear.

Ironically, it is that behavior -- abusing secrecy powers to cover-up embarrassing and incriminating evidence -- that is a far more destructive and common crime than unauthorized leaks. As the Supreme Court explained in rejecting Nixon's classified-based censorship efforts of the Pentagon Papers: "The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information." Indeed, abusing secrecy powers to conceal embarrassing and incriminating information has long been illegal, and is even expressly barred by President Obama's own Executive Order governing classified information:

Abusing government secrecy powers is a vastly more frequent and damaging illegal act than unauthorized leaks, yet the President obsesses on the latter while doing virtually nothing about the former other than continuing its worst manifestations. As the Supreme Court explained, few things are more damaging to a democracy than allowing political leaders to abuse secrecy powers to cover-up wrongdoing and control the flow of information the public hears, i.e., to propagandize the citizenry.

But that's exactly what Washington's secrecy fixation is designed to achieve. And while excessive secrecy has been a problem in the U.S. for decades, the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers makes it much more odious, since now it is about not only keeping vital information from the public and stifling public debate, but also threatening whistleblowers (and investigative reporters) with prolonged imprisonment. That's why they turn what candidate Obama called these "acts of courage and patriotism" (whistleblowing) into crimes, while the real criminals -- political officials who abuse their secrecy powers for corrupted, self-interested ends -- go unpunished.

This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events. As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.
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lean · Aug 26, 2011

Well done indeed.

Invisible Fan · Aug 27, 2011

Shouldn't the 4th pillar be more irate in this regard?

wtf do we have tv news for?

pippendagimp · Aug 27, 2011

Invisible Fan said: ↑

wtf do we have tv news for?
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disinformation dissemination

BleedRocketsRed · Aug 27, 2011

LOL at first I thought it read Glen Grunwald (former Raptors GM)

Was about to suggest that this be moved to Dish.

rhadamanthus · Aug 29, 2011

Invisible Fan said: ↑

Shouldn't the 4th pillar be more irate in this regard?

wtf do we have tv news for?
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They have been totally subverted to mere propaganda and misdirection. Note the ridiculous hoopla over Irene and the dead silence on wikileaks...

glynch · Aug 29, 2011

pippendagimp said: ↑

disinformation dissemination
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that and making a buck.

remember the old now bs from the Founers about an informed electorate and democracy?

pgabriel · Aug 29, 2011

rhadamanthus said: ↑

They have been totally subverted to mere propaganda and misdirection. Note the ridiculous hoopla over Irene and the dead silence on wikileaks...
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LOL, this is ridiculous. yes, hoopla over what couldv'e been a category three hurricaine pummling an area of 25 million people.

rhadamanthus · Aug 31, 2011

Further reading:

News that the CIA has demanded "extensive cuts" from a forthcoming book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan made the front page of the New York Times last week. But Soufan's isn't the only recent memoir to earn the intelligence agency's wrath by, in part, criticizing its use of brutal interrogation techniques in the decade since 9/11. There's also "The Interrogator," by Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran who was given the task of questioning a purported al-Qaida kingpin in 2002. Carle's book was published earlier this summer with many passages -- and occasionally entire pages -- blocked out with black bars to show where the agency had insisted on redactions.

Soufan has called many of the CIA's excisions from his own book "ridiculous," pointing out that some of the "classified" information is a matter of public record and appears in the 9/11 report and even in a memoir by former CIA director George Tenet. Carle had a similar experience; "The Interrogator" is laced with caustic footnotes explaining that redacted passages revealed the agency's incompetence, rather than sensitive information.

When I reviewed Carle's book in July, I made a few guesses about facts the author was obliged to leave out of "The Interrogator." Less than a day had passed before I learned that most of my guesses were wrong. Readers sent me helpful emails with links to articles supplying all the missing details, including the identity of the detainee Carle interrogated, a man he eventually came to believe was innocent.

If the CIA is trying to prevent information in Soufan's and Carle's manuscripts from reaching the public, they've obviously already failed. If anything, the agency's efforts to censor these and other books only seem likely to inflame interest in the forbidden material, which will surface anyway. Does the CIA's power to vet the writings of former government employees have any teeth in the Internet age? I decided to call up Carle to ask about his experience with the agency's censors.

Carle explained that an author negotiates the approval of his or her book with the CIA's Publications Review Board, a handful of staffers who coordinate input submitted by several agency departments. "My goal was not to piss them off to the extent that I couldn't get anything that I wanted," he said. "Their goal was to intimidate me. That was quite clear."

Because Carle knew and even respected some individuals on the board, he felt that its members were exceptionally (and perhaps recklessly) candid with him. At one point, a man standing next to him at a urinal remarked, "Don't you realize that people could go to jail for this?" referring to passages in "The Interrogator" where Carle alludes to detention and interrogation practices he regards as illegal.

The two things a former CIA officer is instructed to keep secret, Carle says, are "sources and methods." However, like Soufan, he soon discovered that the PRB had no intention of stopping there. "They told me, 'We will not allow you to take the reader into the interrogation room. We will not allow you to make the prisoner a human being. To the extent that we can, we will take out anything that gives him a personality.' I couldn't say I saw fear in his eyes, or that he was a middle-aged man. They had no right to take that out. But they did."

Like Soufan, Carle complained when the PRB insisted on cutting information from his book that was already common knowledge. Two reasons are offered for such demands. One is the "mosaic theory of classification," characterized by Carle as "one of the most harmful consequences of eight years of the Bush administration. And that is not a partisan statement." According to Carle, "The White House freaked out after Michael Scheuer's book ["Imperial Hubris" (2004), originally published anonymously] came out. They thought the CIA was out to get them. Bush said, 'I don't want anything to come out of the agency. Shut this down.'"

The mosaic theory alleges that pieces of information that may seem innocuous enough on their own -- including material that has already been cleared by the CIA -- can, when combined with similar pieces of information, present a potential threat that might be of use to the enemy. "By that rationale," Carle observed, "you should take every chemistry textbook out of every high school in America."

To get around the PRB's objections, Carle had to resort to some unusual tactics. When forbidden to describe in much detail the bombed-out wasteland surrounding one overseas prison where he worked (because this would reveal the location to be Afghanistan, a fact obvious to any informed reader), he ended up quoting T.S. Eliot. "They forced me to be more pretentious than I actually am," Carle joked.

The other justification the agency commonly offers for redacting material is that some facts, although widely known, have not been officially acknowledged by the agency or the U.S. government. If the CIA were to approve a book stating those facts, it would supposedly amount to an acknowledgment. For this reason, Carle is not allowed to write that he was posted to a position at the United Nations for over four years, although, due to the highly visible nature of that position, "every country in the world knows it." He can't refer directly to his work there "because if I do the CIA will have to acknowledged that a CIA employee was assigned to the U.N."

I asked Carle if he thought these objections were legitimate or just cover stories used to interfere with books that the agency finds objectionable for other, more self-serving reasons.

"It's absolutely both," he said. "Those are real dynamics. And they were also pretexts to harass me and injure the publication of my book. Every day that I didn't publish was a victory for them."
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