The Most Transparent Administration Ever

(Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)


BY GLENN GREENWALD
FRIDAY, MAR 30, 2012 11:44 AM EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME
Courtesy Of "Salon Magazine"

(updated below)

New York Times, Editorial, November 1, 2004:

[O]ne of the more worrisome domestic policy developments of the past four years [is] the Bush administration’s drastic expansion of needless government secrecy.

John Dean, Worse than Watergate, 2007:

In fact, the Bush-Cheney presidency is strikingly Nixonian, only with regard to secrecy far worse.

New York Times Editorial, June 24, 2007:

President Bush has turned the executive branch into a two-way mirror. They get to see everything Americans do: our telephone calls, e-mail, and all manner of personal information. And we get to see nothing about what they do. Everyone knows this administration has disdained openness and accountabilitysince its first days. That is about the only thing it does not hide.

Governments have to keep secrets. But this administration has grossly abused that trust, routinely using claims of national security to hide policies that are immoral and almost certainly illegal, to avoid embarrassment, and to pursue Mr. Bush’s dreams of an imperial presidency.

Dawn Johnsen, Boston University Law Review, 2008:

The privilege is especially vulnerable in the wake of a President who has abused it or operated with unwarranted secrecy, both of which describe the Bush presidency . . .President Bush’s . . .pervasive secrecy . . . It has consistently engaged in excessive secrecy about the substance of its legal interpretations . . .  an administration shrouded in secrecy.

LA Times, Editorial, January 14, 2009:

[A] last round of restrictions on access to information under the Freedom of Information Act [from the Bush administration] . . .is sadly characteristic of an administration that has insulated itself from scrutiny at every opportunity. . . . Curbs on the FOIA thus represent not just inconveniences for journalists and historians but restrictions on the rights of citizens to hold their elected leaders accountable; as such, they compromise a fundamental right of a democratic people.

Barack Obama, January 21, 2009:

A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.

Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Tuesday, detailing huge increase in U.S. drone attacks on Yemen:

The ACLU, yesterday, quoting New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal on the Obama administration’s refusal to confirm or deny even the existence of its CIA drone program in order to evade FOIA disclosure, even as it boasts about drone attacks in the media:

The Bush administration kept secrets largely for bad reasons: It covered up its torture memos, the kidnapping of innocent foreign citizens, illegal wiretapping and other misdeeds. Barack Obama promised to bring more transparency to Washington in the 2008 campaign, but he has failed to do that. In some ways, his administration is even worse than the Bush team when it comes to abusing the privilege of secrecy.

This devolution speaks for itself, but I’ll nonetheless add three brief points:

(1) Note that secrecy abuses, during the Bush years, weren’t spoken of as a mere side issue or bad policy option, but rather as a fundamental threat to democracy itself. That’s certainly how I constantly wrote of secrecy abuses during the Bush years: secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, and transparency is the paramount tool against it. As Obama himself put it the day after he was inaugurated: “A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.”

(2) It’s hard to overstate how difficult (and commendable) it is for the ACLU to endorse propositions such as “in some ways, [Obama's] administration is even worse than the Bush team when it comes to abusing the privilege of secrecy,” or for its Executive Director tosay things like: “I’m disgusted with this president.” The ACLU has long been one of the most admired organizations among liberals, progressives, Democrats, etc., and many of its donors, members, and the like do not want to hear that Obama is worse than Bush in many of these vital areas, or that his actions should provoke “disgust” (indeed, to this day — in fact, today — you still have Democratic partisans hilariously insisting with a straight face that, except for some people “of Arab descent,” there is not “a single freedom the administration has curtailed”). Not only are these remarkable statements from the ACLU a reflection of its typical organizational integrity, but they are also an obvious reflection of just how extreme and radical the Obama administration is.

(3) The harms from excessive governmental secrecy vastly outweigh the harms from excessive disclosures; they’re not even in the same universe That’s why WikiLeaks is such a vital and important movement. It’s also why I have zero respect for those who so vehemently denounced WikiLeaks’ supposed disclosure recklessness without devoting even a fraction of the same rage to the obsessive, anti-democratic, dangerous government secrecy regime being not only maintained, but vigorously increased, even a full decade after the 9/11 attacks. Such critics have little interest in issues of transparency v. secrecy; their manifest agenda (like the often-overlapping  American “terrorism expert” industry: more on them in the next couple days) is to serve the state, demonize its adversaries, and protect its interests. That’s what indiscriminate secrecy achieves, and it’s why such people are so rarely bothered by it.

 UPDATE: In a separate article today, Rosenthal, the Editorial Page Editor of the NYT, observes what was a major theme of my last book: that the U.S., in the name of Terrorism, now has “what’s essentially a separate justice system for Muslims.” That startling, extremely disturbing and historically significant fact has no impact on the 2012 election and affords nobody any partisan gain from decrying it, and therefore, it (like the increasing fixation on anti-democratic secrecy) will be largely ignored in establishment political venues.

Amnesia As A Way Of Life

WikiLeaks Amid The ‘Careless People’

By Phil Rockstroh
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 3, 2010, 00:22
Courtesy Of "The Online Journal"

As many wags have noted, the disclosures of Wikileaks have subjected the US Empire and its operatives to a full-body scan. Turnaround is fair play, because, until now, in the US, the powerless masses are subject to arbitrary pat-downs and body scans, while the powerful and connected are massaged by privilege and ensconced in immunity.

In hindsight, one realizes, when the Obama administration promised transparency and accountability in government, National Security State enabler that Barack Obama has proven himself to be, that his administration’s definition of transparency would entail the countenancing of said body scans at the nation’s airports, revealing the private bits of the hoi polloi, as, all the while, his administration was engaged in stonewalling the hidden agendas and felonies of the corporate and governing elite. Recent events should remove any doubt regarding who stands exposed and who will remain cloaked by official aegis.

Unlike Julian Assange at Wikileaks, when the Democratic Congress had the opportunity to create an atmosphere of openness and transparency, they demurred. Once granted positions of authority, the Democrats didn’t exercise their constitutionally granted powers to initiate investigations, hold hearings, nor issue subpoenas. This failure of will and integrity amounts to complicity by omission. Withal, Democrats gave their tacit support and approval to the last administration’s (as well as to the present one’s continuation of more of the same) constitution-shredding, morally repugnant policies.

On most occasions, existing within the tacit repression and the benumbing, virtual reality carnival of the corporate/National Security State leaves an individual with a sense of being stranded in anonymity . . . cast into circumstances wherein one feels the necessity to follow the unspoken dictates of a nebulous form of authority that remains hidden, both by physical distance and organizational insularity. In contrast, when one is introduced to the apparatus of the National Security State, by means of a full body search, this unnerving intrusion upon the body can bring clarity to the mind as to how the elite and apparatchik of the US government regard that mass annoyance known as its citizenry and any quaint notions those wretches clutch pertaining to their constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties.

These present outrages will flair up and spiral through the news cycle. Yet, the practices will remain in place, and, after a time, become normalized. This has proven to be the case with other previously revealed excesses of the so-called War on Terror and the attendant assaults against civil liberties and breaches of international law incurred in the name of this ongoing, seemingly endless, national psychotic episode, e.g., the existence of the “detention camp” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the illegal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and those operations concomitant litany of war crimes and affronts to human dignity, such as the acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison -- as well as -- the whole blood-sodden laundry list of outrages and excesses of present day US imperium.

If there is any hope for the US to ever function as a democratic republic, the revelations, unearthed by Wikileaks, should constitute the beginning of a long, painful process of grim discovery.

First, one must ask: Why is it the corporate media is so deeply invested in promulgating distracting and miss-the-point narratives, hyper-adrenaline arguments of narrowed context and little consequence -- and, in general, trafficking in piffle packaged as news and public debate -- rather than showing even a passing interest, much less an avidity, for the pursuit of stories that confront power and might present a challenge to the present order?

As with any criminal enterprise, the essential question to ask is: who benefits from the crime (and the subsequent cover-up) and who gets the payoff? Although most of human existence is constituted by ambiguity, this situation is not. The evidence of war crimes and fiscal malfeasance committed by the nation’s political and financial elite are so pervasive that it cannot be missed, and that is precisely the reason the corporate media, as well as a large percentage of the general public, works so hard to ignore the situation.

Lord Northcliffe’s aphorism provides a clue: “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.”

Accordingly, at present, there arrives a paucity of news, but, hour after hour, comes a drowning deluge of advertising. Enveloped in this commercially dominated hologram, on a cultural basis, it has proven difficult to arrive at a common lexicon to tell the tale of truths buried and freedoms imperiled.

The weightless, insubstantial quality of the consumer age engenders a state of mind wherein consequences cannot be grasped then processed. As a result, a sense of drift prevails. Yet below the surface churns a nebulous dread -- a feeling of being propelled towards a time of unbearable reckoning.

But such enervating thoughts must be banished from the mind; hence, amnesia, as a way of life, becomes the prevailing mindset of psyches minted in the media age hologram, i.e., a manner of perceiving the world in which official accountability becomes as evanescent as last season’s advertising campaign roll-out.

Voting for “change” becomes as meaningless and inconsequential as the introduction of Coke “Classic” and “Be all you can be.” The US might as well have election campaigns in which the Michelin Man runs against the Energizer Bunny.

By means of its inherently self-narrowing context, the lingua franca of the media hologram reduces complex and conflicted human aspirations into consumer choices -- and the vastness of life to retail experience, as, simultaneously, its proliferate narratives envelop, saturate and bind to the architecture of our psyches becoming the quanta of our thoughts and the shared lexicon of our utterances.

Living in this milieu, that is as manic as it is mind-grinding, decisions must be made rapidly, with little time allowed for reflection (decision-making carrying no more depth and lasting meaning than a text message vote by cell phone involving some contrived Reality TV competition) because the proliferation of empty, non-choices just keeps being proffered and the rate of arrival keeps accelerating.

Tragically, in this environment, the recent Wikileaks revelations will be marginalized in the electronic image-crowded air and quickly dissipate like any other media age phantom.

Yet the US consumer state’s infantilized inhabitants will never transfigure the raging Furies of truth-deferred into cooing Teletubbies of endless, imagined innocence (albeit, as terrifying as those homunculi of hell-bound cuteness are). The childishness of US Uberculture seems the voice of Orwellian Newspeak as it might have been composed by Dr. Seuss, in a fever delirium, dreaming he is Glenn Beck.

Often, it is not the content of what a cartoonish demagogue, such as Beck, is saying; rather, it is the way they say it -- the emotional tonality of the line reading that resonates with their audience. Apropos, the US is a depressing place nowadays. Viewed in the context of emotional catharsis, Glenn Beck’s crying jags and feigned emotional disclosures resonate with his audience because there is much reason to weep regarding the degraded state of their lives.

In an era where policies of official secrecy and corporatist predation meet little resistance, dread and feelings of dislocation will be present just below the surface. If one listens to the subliminal criteria playing out beneath Beck’s bathos, one can hear inadvertent arias intimating the end of empire -- a cheese-bag death-swoon -- operatic in scale.

What is lamentable is -- the emotional and intellectually dishonest, demagogic displacements he attributes to the cause of his audience’s discontent and the sleight of hand employed to create the illusion of truths revealed.

“Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.” --Eric Hoffer

This is the price paid when one affords scant deference to self-awareness, but, in contrast, possesses an unflagging fealty to the pursuit of shallow diversions and self-limiting delusion . . . All maintained by the crackpot casuistry, elevated to an art form, if not holy writ, in the US, that willful ignorance is a form of freedom of choice, that normalcy is maintained by official cover-ups and personal denial.

The system is rigged, from top to bottom; it is only through an astonishing (almost credulity-defying) degree of self-deception on the part of the general public of the US, in collaboration with the mendacity of its political and economic elite, this dim, brutal, unwieldy and wounded system continues to stagger onward.

Lamentably, the US Empire, as was the case with any imperium throughout history, has grown into a bloated abomination kept provisionally alive by self-deluded apparatchik and ignorant killers. What can one do about the situation, other than try to get out of the way of this wounded giant and stand clear upon its inevitable collapse? Unfortunately, damn little.

The structure of the revolving door dynamic of the governmental/corporate exploiter class has allowed the elite therein to escape any sense of accountability. In addition, their vastly inflated salaries, with attendant perks and privileges, have separated them even further from the general population; hence, providing them with immunity from consequences, as well as, insularity from commonplace experience; thus, allowing them to embrace the most airless of aspirations -- that greed, grotesquely out of proportion privilege, and unchecked power run riot constitutes a viable means to move in the world and establish a social order.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made [ . . . ]” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Pg. 180-181)

Among the political elite of both major parties come few calls for the kind of disclosure and official accountability that could stem the decline of the nation. Facing the fact that, in the US, there is not a true opposition party causes many people in the general population to become understandably angry, anxious, and depressed, thereby primed for pronouncements of demagogues and the diversions of commercial media palliatives.

“What WikiLeaks is doing is to short-circuit this entire democratic process -- claiming for itself the exclusive, unilateral, and unchecked power to decide what should and shouldn’t be made public. This is therefore not only an attack on our national security, but an offense against our democracy and the principle of transparency.” --Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee

If one could cut through the thicket of false premises, logical fallacies, false dichotomies, arrays of strawmen, general flutter-headed palaver, and out and out paranoid fantasy marshaled by the caretakers and apologists of the present system, I would ask this question: Why is it you are driven with such vehemence to defend and attempt to preserve the current order? As it is, it seems the nation is being held together with hydrogenated fat, wheat gluten, payday loans, Tyvek®, particleboard, and the provisional binding of homespun bigotry and official duplicity.

And what remains? How does one rise to meet the day confronted by such diminished prospects and prevailing degradations? Is there solace to be found in the following?

“It does not take a majority to prevail . . . but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” -- Samuel Adams

Sadly, in the provinces beyond the Washington/New York government/corporate state nexus, it may well be impossible to start an authentic populist brushfire when the political landscape is covered in flame-retardant, corporate-laid AstroTurf.

Still, it would be entertaining, in the very least, to rock the foundation of the US House of Empire with the repeated force of numerous Wikileaks type revelations, until its closet doors are flung open wide, causing the skeletons within to dance.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website philrockstroh.com/ And atFaceBook. 

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