Liars and Scoundrels, ALL

In an interview yesterday Senator Jay Rockefeller discussed one of the great untold truths of the last six years. The Bush Administration has blocked Congressional oversight of its intelligence operations through a series of lies, tricks and misrepresentations. But its principal tool has been simple: it withholds information. As Rockefeller said:


Don't you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I'm chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All of it. All of the time. I only get and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.

What Rockefeller is describing is a matter of tremendous moment—the blinding of Congress. It has some important historical precedents, the contemplation of which can only lead to still greater concern about the Bush Administration's attitudes towards secrecy.


In one of his most important works in the years immediately following the Great War, Max Weber took a close look at state secrets and the role they play in a democratic society—first in a series of speeches, then in the chapter “Bureaucracy” in one of his principal works, Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft). Weber articulated a number of indisputable truths, starting with the fact that by classifying information as “secret,” it is immunized from public discussion and verification. “Secret” information is for precisely this reason prone to be false, or at least less likely to be correct than data that is tested in the public environment. Indeed, there is a consistent practice over many societies and epochs of using security classifications to shield information which has been consciously fabricated—precisely to protect its falsity (this is one of the possible readings of Franz Kafka's great parable “Before the Law”—the ultimate irony of a secret law—written at the same time that Weber was addressing the subject, and certainly propelled by some of the same historical developments). But the most important of the many observations that Weber made had to do with the role that security classifications play in the allocation of power within democratic societies. Weber noticed that secrecy was used to empower a bureaucratic elite and to disenfranchise elected democratic representatives. Those with access to classified information could claim superior, inside knowledge. They had to be trusted and followed, and it was not possible to engage them in any debate or discourse. Indeed, debate could be dodged by citing to the classified information.

It doesn't take much analysis to understand what Weber was referring to in his essay. Though he uses polite and scientific language, he was outraged over what had transpired in the last years of the Great War. The General Staff and the war administration had wielded security classifications to silence the parliament and exercise increasingly thorough control over the levers of government, until at the end, and certainly by early 1917, Germany was a thinly veiled military dictatorship—its nascent democratic institutions had been strangled.


Weber's observations could, with just a bit of tailoring, have been written about the Bush Administration. It quickly seized upon a cloak of warfare to corrupt the intelligence gathering process and to realize the full anti-democratic potential of security classifications. But its manipulation of security classifications as tools in a war against the constitutional order is if anything far more clever and more pernicious than anything that was attempted by the German General Staff and the aligned Beamtentum.

A key aspect of that operation has been the abusive wielding of national security classifications—they have been used to:


-cloak deceit and misinformation from public scrutiny, as in claims that the Administration possessed highly classified information supporting the conclusion that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, when this was false and known to be false when uttered;
hide or obscure important policy decisions which are at odds with prior established policy and with law by insuring that the policies themselves are secret;

-hide criminal conduct—as in the introduction of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading conduct producing the most disturbing serial and programmatic war crimes against detainees in the nation's history, the felonious program of extraordinary renditions, a program of unlawful surveillance, and a routine pattern of felonious violations of the Posse Comitatus Act by agencies of the Department of Defense;


-protect political figures from embarrassment—usually by concealing the fact that they have knowingly made false statements for purposes of misleading the public;
launch false or misleading attacks on political opponents—as was revealed in United States v. Libby, in which we learned that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush conspired to declassify top secret information on a piecemeal basis so it could be used to smear a political adversary; and

-frustrate Congressional oversight and decision-making and erode Congress' ability to exercise independent judgment to hold the executive in check.

These practices are not uncommon in the world. They are characteristic of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes everywhere. These practices, collectively, constitute a dagger pointed at the throat of American democracy—and indeed, they have been used by the Bush-Cheney government as part of a scheme to subvert the democratic order envisioned in the Constitution.

It's hard to say which of these offenses is the gravest.


But the aspect that probably requires the most immediate action is the conscious subversion of Congressional oversight. For the last four years, the administration has illegally evaded oversight of its intelligence programs, and particularly of its extensive palette of extra-legal activities, by Congressional committees. It has done so openly, and its actions went shamefully unchallenged by the last Congress—probably the most corrupt in the nation's history.

Vice President Cheney was the ringmaster of this project, and he has attempted a public justification of it on several occasions—usually citing leaks which seem suspiciously close to his office or to congressional figures close to him. In the current administration, Cheney has been the leaker-in-chief, regularly disclosing classified information of even the highest sensitivity when he felt it would meet his political interests to do so.

The most striking example of this came with the outing of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, as an act of political retaliation.

The Libby trial afforded a deep insight into how Cheney's mind works in this regard. He spent a period of at least three weeks completely obsessed with the project of leaking, scheming with staffers and aides as to how to carry it out, and ultimately even involving President Bush. His intent was criminal and reflected actual malice. As several jurors noted when they emerged following the Libby conviction, they could not understand why they were deprived of the opportunity of passing on Cheney's criminality. Indeed, there's not much question what the verdict would have been.


There is no more urgent agenda before Congress today than reasserting its oversight function, and using all the tools at its disposal—including subpoenas, hearings and the power of the purse—to regain a check on a regime of secrecy which is reeling dangerously in the direction of a police state.

It could yet make a difference.


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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.