WE KEEP TOO MUCH SECRET
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s conviction is really the sideshow. What deserves the spotlight is the creeping secrecy of government. Our government. The government that’s supposed to be a beacon of light and liberty.
More than 5 million government employees and contractors have security clearances. That’s a lot of secrets. A lot of secret-keepers. Too many.
The Government Accountability Office is looking at whether too many things are being classified and how the decisions are made to release information to the public.
Rep. Duncan Hunter requested the study. He told
that “classification inflation” limits public access to information that should be available.
In requesting the GAO study, Hunter pointed out another problem: “With access to classified information contingent on the issuance of security clearances, overclassification stands to dangerously expand access to material that should ordinarily be limited.”
Manning and Edward Snowden show the dangers of having too many secret-keepers.
It’s easy to find examples of overzealous classification.
One of the pieces of information Manning made public was a video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq in which U.S. airmen laugh and call the targets “dead bastards.”
That attack killed civilians, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver. A subsequent military investigation showed the happygo-lucky troops misidentified camera equipment for weapons before killing people they so callously denigrated.
The only reason for classifying that video is to protect the military from embarrassment — cover your backside.
What’s more, mixing in fake secrets with real ones increases the pressure to blow the whistle.
Manning says his motivation was to expose the military’s “bloodlust” and U.S. diplomatic deception. He dodged conviction on the most serious charge of aiding the enemy, but was convicted on 22 espionage, theft and other charges in the release of secrets to WikiLeaks.
As a soldier, he broke trust. But he did the public a favor. Whistle-blowing is a timehonored way to keep government accountable.
That’s especially true when the government is showing an adolescentlike fetish for hiding things that don’t need to be hidden.
Another example from very close to home:
The Department of Homeland Security refuses to make public what it knows about how many undocumented migrants get away, how many are caught multiple times or what percentage successfully enter the U.S. It’s classified. sought the information. Now, Republican and Democratic members of Arizona’s delegation are asking for it, too. The lack of data makes it impossible to accurately assess the effectiveness of individual DHS border strategies.
If there’s a good nationalsecurity reason to hide information on border crossings, we haven’t heard it.
Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency spying got him a one-way ticket to no man’s land. But it also put a light on the kind of government snooping that makes a lot of Americans queasy.
This nation is under threat from terrorists, and there are good reasons for keeping some information classified.
But Manning, Snowden and the DHS raise big concerns about what’s being withheld from the American people and why. That’s an issue that deserves the spotlight.