Lies and secrets

In September, 2006, America Wants to Know wrote that Bill Clinton's history of finger-wagging performances made it likely he was lying during an interview on Fox News, when he furiously contended that he had authorized the CIA to try to kill Osama bin Laden. (See "Down memory lane with Bill Clinton.")

Now an unexpectedly declassified 2005 report by the CIA's inspector general confirms our suspicion. Here's an excerpt from the August 21 story by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball:

The report also criticized intelligence problems when Bill Clinton was president, detailing political and legal “constraints” agency officials felt in the late 1990s. In September 2006, during a famous encounter with Fox News anchor Wallace, Clinton erupted in anger and waived his finger when asked about whether his administration had done enough to get bin Laden. “What did I do? What did I do?” Clinton said at one point. “I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.”

Clinton appeared to have been referring to a December 1999 Memorandum of Notification (MON) he signed that authorized the CIA to use lethal force to capture, not kill, bin Laden. But the inspector general’s report made it clear that the agency never viewed the order as a license to “kill” bin Laden—one reason it never mounted more effective operations against him. “The restrictions in the authorities given the CIA with respect to bin Laden, while arguably, although ambiguously, relaxed for a period of time in late 1998 and early 1999, limited the range of permissible operations,” the report stated. ([Former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Michael] Scheuer agreed with the inspector general’s findings on this issue, but said if anything the report was overly diplomatic. “There was never any ambiguity,” he said. “None of those authorities ever allowed us to kill anyone. At least that’s what the CIA lawyers told us.” A spokesman for the former president had no immediate comment.)

We call this to your attention not because it's news that Bill Clinton is a liar, but to illustrate that secrecy in government is corrosive to democracy. Politicians, including current office holders, make statements that cannot be verified by the press or by the voters because everything that backs up those statements is classified. We have U.S. troops suffering in Iraq because the public was forced to accept the word of the president that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and an active nuclear program.

Even now, when congressional committees try to find out how that mistake was made, the Bush administration hides its failures behind a wall of secrecy. It is simply too dangerous, the administration insists, to make any information public.

But it is dangerous not to make information public. The secrecy that protects sources and methods also protects liars and errors.

The passion for secrecy isn't limited to national security or even to current White House occupants. The Clinton presidential library is refusing to open the records of Hillary Clinton's work on health care reform back in 1994. The archivists claim they don't have the manpower to vet every document for privileged presidential communications, or some such excuse.

We can guess what's in the documents. The Clinton campaign (then and now) probably accepted enormous contributions from companies that make, let's say, software for computerizing the medical records of patients, or companies that wanted to take over Medicare billing and payments, or companies that wanted to "manage" benefits after the government mandated that everyone's benefits must be "managed." We can guess that the documents include schedules of meetings with donors followed shortly by memos recommending policies and mandates that would benefit the donors at the expense of everyone else.

It would take Michael Isikoff fifteen minutes to put it together and post it on Newsweek's Web site.

The Clinton library says the papers won't be available until 2009.

Hillary Clinton is running for president of the United States and she intends to press for health care reform. She would like you to cast your vote without seeing any of the records of her work on this issue when she was first lady.

She would just like to tell you that she has "worked" on this issue for years.

President Bush would like you to support the endless deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq and the warrantless wiretapping of people inside the United States. He does not want you to ask for hard evidence that either of these policies were necessary, or that they are achieving their aims, or that they are worth all that they are costing.

He would just like to tell you that he loves freedom.

In both cases, it's simply not good enough. Democracy cannot function if politicians lie without consequence, hide critically important information from the voters, and then win political office. When that happens, millions of people regard the result of the election as illegitimate. Contempt and resentment flood the political system. Debate and compromise are displaced by mistrust and apathy.

The solution is a sharp knife to cut away all government secrecy except in the narrowest classification of national security. And even there, the relevant committees of Congress and the Senate should have access to everything the executive branch sees.

The dangers of disclosure must be weighed against the dangers of secrecy. It's easier to rebuild a skyscraper than a free country.

Copyright 2007

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