{"id":39355,"date":"2013-06-05T19:36:12","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T18:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/endangering-democracy-mannings-secrets-v-over-classification-2\/39355\/"},"modified":"2013-06-05T19:36:12","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T18:36:12","slug":"endangering-democracy-mannings-secrets-v-over-classification-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/endangering-democracy-mannings-secrets-v-over-classification-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Endangering Democracy: Manning\u2019s \u2018Secrets\u2019 v. Over-classification"},"content":{"rendered":"

The U.S. government wants to lock away Pvt. Bradley Manning for life because he released hundreds of thousands of classified documents that he believes revealed\u00a0war crimes and other wrongdoing. But overlooked is how much damage over-classification does to the Republic, says Robert Parry. <\/em><\/p>\n

I thought of Pvt. Bradley Manning when I recently received a response to one of my Freedom of Information Act requests to Ronald Reagan\u2019s presidential library. I was seeking documents about President Reagan\u2019s secret strategy of aiding Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq in its\u00a0war with Iran.<\/p>\n

Reagan\u2019s tilt to Iraq in the early 1980s \u2014 while his administration\u00a0also was winking at Israeli weapons sales to Iran \u2014 was part of a clandestine U.S. approach to the region which generated huge profits for arms dealers while feeding sectarian violence and political animosities that echo to the present day. It seemed to me that it was way past time to know the full truth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

However, though many of the events in question\u00a0are now more than 30 years old \u2014 and thus are commonly thought to be readily accessible under FOIA \u2014 the reality is that the U.S. government still makes seeing such documents extremely difficult.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0letter from the Reagan library said the archivists would not even begin to process my request for \u201c128 months,\u201d that is more than 10 years, and then the process would involve time-consuming declassification reviews in which various agencies with \u201cequity\u201d interests would each have to sign off, along with whoever the sitting president is.<\/p>\n

And, were I to die or lose interest in the interim, the process would go back to square one, waiting for some other interested American citizen to put in a new request and starting the clock again. In other words, we might all be dead before these records will be open to the public.<\/p>\n

There is an old saying that \u201cjustice delayed is justice denied,\u201d but the concept also applies to historical accountability. History delayed can mean accountability denied.<\/p>\n

Plus, there\u2019s no guarantee that some hypothetical historian far into the future will fully understand what the documents mean once they are, hypothetically, released. Since the people who lived through the relevant era might have left the scene, references or details may not be understood. In other words, there\u2019s a great danger that the history will be permanently lost.<\/p>\n

Besides the loss of\u00a0history, there is also a more immediate concern: If the American people don\u2019t know what their government did \u2014 and who did it \u2014 they can be led down the same dangerous paths by the same people who created the dangers in the first place. On a geopolitical level, it\u2019s a bit like one of those suspense stories in which the young heroine fleeing a serial killer is putting her misguided trust in the villain as he poses as a protector of her safety.<\/p>\n

For instance, if the American people had been allowed a full understanding of what George H.W. Bush had done as Vice President and President, would they have been so gullible to have allowed his eldest son to elbow his way into the White House? It was their misguided trust in the elder George Bush that bought Junior the benefit of the doubt. [See Robert Parry\u2019s Secrecy & Privilege<\/a><\/em>.]<\/p>\n

Similarly, if the American people knew the complete story about the neocons who were credentialed by the Reagan administration \u2014 including their role in Central American atrocities and their clever use of propaganda \u2014 would the public have been so easily duped\u00a0into the Iraq invasion?<\/p>\n

Or, if they knew that Robert Gates was\u00a0a behind-the-scenes figure in some of the scandalous operations of the Reagan era \u2014 as much evidence suggests \u2014 would they have trusted him\u00a0as a Wise Man\u00a0brought in to counsel leaders, such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Would his \u201cwords of wisdom\u201d be fawningly transcribed by U.S. journalists? [See Parry\u2019s America\u2019s Stolen Narrative<\/a><\/em>.]<\/p>\n

Endangering Democracy<\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words, America\u2019s overly classified history, which is locked away in government vaults for decades, is itself a threat to\u00a0national security, not to mention an affront to anything close to a meaningful democracy. The hyper-secrecy also creates fertile ground for nutty conspiracy theories, further destabilizing the Republic.<\/p>\n

So, the cavalier expression that I often heard in the 1980s when news executives grew bored with Iran-Contra and related scandals \u2014 \u201coh, let\u2019s leave that for the historians!\u201d \u2014 wasn\u2019t just bad journalism; it was a threat to the nation and to the world.<\/p>\n

To this day, Americans have gotten only glimpses of Reagan\u2019s cynical policies in the Middle East. Snapshots have emerged from the Iran-Contra Affair, which exposed some of the clandestine arms shipments to Iran, and from a sworn affidavit<\/a> by Howard Teicher, a staffer on Reagan\u2019s National Security Council who disclosed some of the secret collaboration with Iraq.<\/p>\n

But nothing close to the full history has ever been revealed \u2014 and many conflicting assertions remain, such as whether the Iran side of this operation originated from treacherous Republican-Iranian contacts behind President Jimmy Carter\u2019s back before Election 1980 and whether Teicher\u2019s affidavit is entirely accurate. That is where my\u00a0FOIA request came in.<\/p>\n

Which\u00a0brings me back to Bradley Manning whose trial for leaking government secrets is set to begin on Monday, with the prosecution seeking life imprisonment for the young private who is accused of aiding the enemy. Most fair-minded people would agree that some of Manning\u2019s\u00a0information was beneficial to the public\u2019s right to know, revealing details of human rights violations and exposing corrupt government officials around the world.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0the conventional wisdom within U.S. government circles and the mainstream news media is that Manning\u2019s wholesale release of\u00a0secrets to WikiLeaks\u00a0endangered civilians who collaborated with American forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere and\u00a0impaired U.S. foreign policy by revealing\u00a0the frank opinions of American diplomats.<\/p>\n

Yet, while it may be true \u2014 although it remains unproven \u2014 that some innocents were put at risk and that U.S. diplomacy has been made more complicated, Manning\u2019s unauthorized release of hundreds of thousands of documents must be weighed against the U.S. government\u2019s hiding of hundreds of millions of documents.<\/p>\n

The simple truth is that the vast majority of those \u201csecret\u201d documents do not represent any reasonable threat\u00a0to national security. And, to the contrary, the continued over-classification represents a clear and present danger to the Republic, both because\u00a0secrecy undermines democracy and because\u00a0ignorance makes voters vulnerable to deceptive politicians who, in turn, can inflict serious harm on the real national security.<\/p>\n

So, when you hear someone condemning Bradley Manning for releasing government secrets, you might think about my attempt to go\u00a0through the proper channels to see 30-year-old documents on U.S. policy toward Iraq \u2013 and being told that I\u2019ll have to wait at least \u201c128 months.\u201d<\/p>\n

Investigative reporter Robert Parry<\/strong> broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America\u2019s Stolen Narrative, either in print here<\/a> or as an e-book (from Amazon<\/a> and barnesandnoble.com<\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. government wants to lock away Pvt. Bradley Manning for life because he released hundreds of thousands of classified documents that he believes revealed\u00a0war crimes and other wrongdoing. But overlooked is how much damage over-classification does to the Republic, says Robert Parry. I thought of Pvt. Bradley Manning when I recently received a response […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-39355","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}