WASHINGTON • When President Obama departs for
Saudi Arabia, an incubator of the 9/11 attacks, he will leave behind a
dispute about government secrecy. The suppression of 28 pages, first
from a public congressional inquiry and then from the 2004 report by the
national 9/11 Commission, has spared the Saudis embarrassment, which
would be mild punishment for complicity in 2,977 murders. When Obama
returns, he should keep his promise to release the pages. Then he should
further curtail senseless secrecy by countermanding the CIA's refusal
to release its official history of the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle.
The nature of the 28 pages pertaining to
9/11 can be inferred from this carefully worded sentence in the
commission's report: "We have found no evidence that the Saudi
government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually
funded [al-Qaeda]." Loopholes large enough to fly a hijacked airliner
through.
Before John Lehman was a member of the
9/11 Commission — which unanimously supported release of its report
uncensored — he was a member of Henry Kissinger's National Security
Council staff during the Nixon administration and was secretary of the
Navy during the Reagan administration. Lehman understands the serious
and the spurious arguments connecting secrecy to security. He says the
28 pages contain no "smoking gun," but he believes that senior Saudi
officials knew that Saudis were assisting al-Qaeda. And he believes that
because Saudi Arabia spends enormous sums worldwide funding schools
that teach the virulent variant of Islam called Wahhabism, it is
unsurprising that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.
Now, about the Bay of Pigs invasion of
April 17, 1961, a feckless use of American power that radiated
disasters: President Kennedy promptly deepened U.S. involvement in
Vietnam; Nikita Khrushchev, unimpressed, built the Berlin Wall and
installed missiles in Cuba. Why should the CIA history remain secret 55
years after the invasion?
A federal appeals court has ruled, 2-1,
against a Freedom of Information Act request for the release of the
history. Citing a FOIA exemption that protects secrecy deemed essential
to preserving government agencies' deliberative processes, the court
held that even after more than half a century the history is "still a
draft" — never mind that its author retired in 1984 and died in 1997 —
and hence is "still predecisional and deliberative." So, documents can
be kept forever secret by government agencies declaring them "drafts" or
otherwise "deliberative."
Nations need secrecy to protect
deliberative processes and to conceal from adversaries the sources,
methods and fruits of intelligence gathering. However, as Daniel Patrick
Moynihan argued in his book on the subject, secrecy is government
regulation, but unlike most regulations, which restrict what people can
do, secrecy restricts what they can know. Secrets are property, and
covetous, acquisitive government bureaucracies hoard them from rival
bureaucracies, thereby making government even more foolish than it
naturally tends to be because it has no competitors. For example, the
U.S. military kept from President Harry Truman its proof, derived from
what are known as the Venona intercepts of Soviet communications, that
Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were spies.
On "Fox News Sunday" April 10, Obama was
asked if he could say that Hillary Clinton's handling of classified
information on her private email server "did not jeopardize America's
secrets." After waffling — saying Clinton would never "intentionally"
jeopardize America — he intimated that many documents that are
classified are not all that important to national security. He should
apply this insight to documents pertaining to the disaster a decade and a
half ago and to the debacle 40 years before it.
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