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Secrecy is anathema to democracy, to effectiveness, to honesty, and to ethical behavior.
Secrecy is an inherently flawed process that by its very definition does not allow for the correction for errors. Indeed, secrecy is an "open loop" that does not even admit the possibility of error. How can errors be corrected if it cannot first be admitted that such errors can occur?
Those who value obsessive secrecy above open and accountable government do so because they value their own absolute belief in the correctness and completeness of what they think they know far above the collective wisdom of hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens in a government supposedly based on what Lincoln called "the proposition that all men are created equal."
They view themselves as at once both infallible and superior to those who they were elected or appointed to serve. They mistakenly view open and accountable government as a burden rather than an asset. They even use secrecy to subvert empirical reality in order to serve their own ideological mythology.
Their attitude is one of superiority. It is pride. It is vanity. It is hubris.
It is the Seventh Deadly Sin.
Indeed such pride has historically had deadly consequence when practiced by powerful men in government resulting in war, death, famine, and pestilence.
Good government, like any good organization, cannot rely solely upon having benevolent and competent leaders at the helm. It must also have honesty, humility, transparency and accountability to the owners of that organization as a matter of principle, practice, and process. Indeed these are the true hallmarks of virtue in a leader and the organization he or she leads. In their absence the organization will ultimately fail catastrophically in its mission.
Indeed it is a truism that "pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18). Over and over again under the last six years of the Bush administration we have seen such catastrophic failures - 9/11, the hunt for bin Laden, the War in Iraq, Abu Gharab, the torture of prisoners generally, the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia, Hurricane Katrina, and now the Walter Reed scandal. These are but a few such examples within our government where a culture of secrecy and hubris has replaced transparency and humility resulting in an utter failure in the mission of the organization.
In the case at hand We the People are the owners of that organization. Those leaders in Washington who make decisions on our behalf can only legitimately do so with our informed consent. Ultimately, We the People are "the deciders" - not the elected leaders of our "organization".
We the People must know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth if we are to be able to give our informed consent to their actions. Our consent is not given to their actions just one day out of every two, four or six years. Are we to be a democracy but one election day out of seven hundred and thirty and a dictatorship the other seven hundred and twenty nine?
No it cannot be so - Our informed democratic consent is an ongoing and continuous process and must remain so if this is to remain a truly representative government.
When our leaders take steps to make sure that we are not informed, that we are selectively informed, or that we are misinformed, then they are defrauding not just the government but also its owners - We the People.
President Kennedy famously once said in his apology to the nation regarding the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco that: "an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
Secrecy, then, also leads directly to incompetence and ineffectiveness in an organization because it hides errors rather than immediately correcting them.
Even small errors tend to cascade into catastrophic failure as the are repeatedly hidden from view rather than being corrected.
As the saying goes, "for the want of a nail, a shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe, a horse was lost, for want of a horse, a rider lost, for want of a rider, the battle was lost." This is at once both a very ancient and a very modern idea. Clausewitz described it as "the fog of war". It has also been called the "law of unintended consequences" - i.e. that every action has both intended and unanticipated consequences.
Today this notion has been generalized under what is known in mathematical circles as "chaos theory" to recognize that we live in a "non-linear" world where seemingly insignficant actions can often have dramatic and unanticipated non-linear future effects. It has become known thereafter in popular culture as "the Butterfly Effect".
The best way to avoid these unintended consequences and to minimize and correct errors is through a parallel decision making process relying upon the collective and informed wisdom of all the people. For such a parallel decision making process to work, it is a prerequisite that everyone must have complete and accurate information.
Our Founding Fathers understood first hand the inherent flaws of a monarchy or an aristocracy where such decision making power and information was reserved to the one or the few - that such a system had very little redundancy and little or no ability to correctively feedback for errors and little or no interest in serving the will of the people it governed.
Moreover, the smaller the decision making pool becomes, the easier it is for "group think" to subvert the decision making process. A small group of like minded people are much less open to a counterveiling point of view than a larger more diverse group. This makes it easy for a group of "yes men" (or "yes women") to act as an echo chamber for their leaders' point of view rather than providing wise counsel in opposition to a leader's mistaken point of view.
Our Founders, understanding this, intended that our government be an open and accountable process "of, by, and for the people" that pitted many factions of society against each other in an adversarial process using a variety of checks and balances that would hopefully produce wise decisions after careful deliberation. They understood that such an adversarial process served both to keep the leaders of the organization honest and responsive to the will of its owners - the People.
Inevitably, throughout our history, whenever such checks and balances have been short circuited by our leaders, the process of decision making has failed to be either careful or wise as the will of the one or of the few is substituted for the informed collective wisdom of the many.
Secrecy then leads to dishonesty as a necessary means to hide the subsequent mistakes and failures that result rather than openly confronting them and being held accountable for them. Once we give in to "the dark side" of secrecy then it becomes all too easy to hide material facts or lie about them to those who would hold us accountable. Ultimately, when democracy ceases to be accountable it ceases being a democracy.
After dishonesty, secrecy then leads to unethical, and sometimes even illegal behaviors to cover up the lies which hide the mistakes. Often times these are in the form of illegal activities and/or retribution for whistle blowers who seek to speak truth to power. This is indeed what brought down Richard Nixon and his Watergate co-conspirators - the illegal coverup of the illegal Watergate break-in and the illegal activities of retribution against Daniel Ellsberg and other dissidents.
It is indeed a slippery slope from secrecy, to mistakes, to dishonesty, to unethical behaviors and finally to illegal and vindictive behaviors within any organization. Such a culture of behavior once it becomes the organizational norm, results in ever lower standards of behavior to protect against the revealing of the previous unethical activities by the organization or its leaders.
From the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam, to Watergate and G. Gordon Liddy, to Iran-Contra and Oliver North, to "WMD-gate" and I. Lewis Libby's multiple convictions yesterday - it's always the coverup that finally brings down the house of cards built upon obsessive secrecy and overweening hubris.
Now that these four convictions have been returned by a jury against Mr. Libby in Federal Court, it is time for the Democratically led 110th Congress to turn the searchlight of "truth, justice, and the American Way" upon the rest of the Bush Administration and demand some serious answers - not just another whitewash as was done under previously Republican led 109th Congress.
We the People deserve to know the truth - what exactly did President George Walker Bush know and when exactly did he know it? What did exactly Vice President Cheney know and when exactly did he know it?
Were the Intelligence Identities Protection and Espionage Acts willfuly violated by members of the Administration in order to achieve retribution against whistleblower Ambassador Richard Clarke and/or to intimidate future whistle blowers?
Did the President, the Vice President, the members of the Cabinet or of the Executive Branch or Departments intentionally lie, or otherwise intentionally act to deceive or defraud the Congress or the People through a selective or distorted presentation of the facts regarding the case for invading Iraq in violation of Federal Fraud laws under US Code Title 18 Section 371?
Finally, can any of the afforementioned cases of catastrophic mission failures (9/11, Iraq, bin Laden, WMD, Abu Gharab, Columbia, Katrina, Walter Reed, et.al.) be shown to meet the standards for criminal negligence as the result of an inappropriate culture of secrecy in the White House or the Executive Branch?
All of these acts (or failures to act), if proven, are serious felonies that fall well within the meaning of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" impeachment clause of Article II Section 4 of the United States Constitution; and with Libby's conviction, probable cause now exists for the Congress to institute a serious investigation utilizing its constitutionally sanctioned powers of subpoena and to consider possible impeachment actions resulting from these investigations.
The secrecy must end. We the People want answers. It is time to make the government open, accountable, and ours again.
Douglas J. De Clue
Orlando, FL
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