Russell Dick - 63 Documents the Government Doesnt Want You to Read

There is little value in insuring the survival
of our nation if our traditions do not survive
with it. And there is very grave danger that an
announced need for increased security
will be seized upon by those anxious to expand
its meaning to the very limits of official
censorship and concealment.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

This book is titled 63 Documents the Government Doesnt Want You to Read , lest we forget that 1963 was the year that claimed the life of our 35th president. The conspiracy that killed JFK, and the cover-up that followed, is the forerunner for a lot of what youre going to read about in these pages. In fact, the idea behind this book came out of writing my last one, American Conspiracies . There I presented a close look at whether or not our historical record reflects what really went on, based on facts that most of the media have chosen to ignorefrom the Kennedy assassination through the tragedy of September 11th and the debacle on Wall Street. In poring through numerous documents, many of them available through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I came to realize the importance of the publics right to know. And I decided to see what new picture might be revealed if you laid out certain documents that the powers that be would just as soon stay buried.

Everything in this book is in the public domain and, for the most part, downloadable from the Internet. Im not breaking any laws by putting these documents in book form, although some of them were classified secret until WikiLeaks published them. Ill get to my view on WikiLeaks in a moment, but let me begin by saying how concerned I am that were moving rapidly in the direction President Kennedy tried to warn us about.

According to a recent article in the Washington Post , there are now 854,000 American citizens with top secret clearances. The number of new secrets rose 75 percent between 1996 and 2009, and the number of documents using those secrets went from 5.6 million in 1996 to 54.6 million last year. There are an astounding 16 million documents being classified top secret by our government every year! Today, pretty much everything the government does is presumed secret. Isnt it time we asked ourselves whether this is really necessary for the conduct of foreign affairs or the internal operation of governments? Doesnt secrecy actually protect the favored classes and allow them to continue to help themselves at the expense of the rest of us? Isnt this a cancer growing on democracy?

After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, I was heartened to see him issue an Open Government Initiative on his first full day in office. I firmly believe what Justice Louis Brandeis once said, that sunlight is the best disinfectant, Obama said, and I know that restoring transparency is not only the surest way to achieve results, but also to earn back the trust in government without which we cannot deliver changes the American people sent us here to make. After eight years of Bush and Cheneys secretive and deceitful ways, that sounded like a welcome relief. Obama ordered all federal agencies to adopt a presumption in favor of FOIA requests and so laid the groundwork to eventually release reams of previously withheld government information on the Internet.

Well, so far it hasnt turned out the way Obama set forth. An audit released in March 2010 by the nonprofit National Security Archive found that less than one-third of ninety federal agencies that process FOIA requests had changed their practices in any significant way. A few departmentsAgriculture, Justice, Office of Management and Budget, and the Small Business Administrationgot high marks for progress. But the State Department, Treasury, Transportation, and NASA had fulfilled fewer requests and denied more in the same time period. Most agencies had yet to walk the walk, said the Archives director Tom Blanton.

Things went downhill from there. In June 2010, the New York Times carried a page-one story detailing how Obamas administration was even more aggressive than Bushs in looking to punish people who leaked information to the media. In the course of his first seventeen months as president, Obama had already surpassed every previous president in going after prosecutions of leakers. Thomas A. Drake, a National Security Agency employee whod gone to the Baltimore Sun as a last resort because he knew that government eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on failed programs, is today facing years in prison on ten felony charges including mishandling of classified information. An FBI translator received a twenty-month sentence for turning over some classified documents to a blogger. A former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, has been indicted for unauthorized disclosure of national defense information. And the Pentagon arrested Bradley Manning, the twenty-two-year-old Army intelligence analyst, who for openers had passed along to WikiLeaks the shocking video footage of a U.S. military chopper gunning down Baghdad civilians.

In September 2010, the Obama Justice Department cited the so-called state secrets doctrine in successfully getting a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit on extraordinary rendition (a phrase that really means we send suspected terrorists to other countries to get held and tortured). In fact, Attorney General Eric Holder was hell-bent on upholding the Bush administrations claims in two major cases involving illegal detention and torture.

Also in September, the Pentagon spent $47,300 of taxpayer dollars to buy up and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of Operation Dark Heart , a memoir about Afghanistan by ex-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Anthony A. Shaffer. We first interviewed Lt. Colonel Shaffer for American Conspiracies because his outfit (Able Danger) had identified Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat long before he became the supposed lead hijacker on 9/11.