The News: The Lifeblood of Democracy (May Be Unavailable in Most Democracies. Some Restrictions Apply)
Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe
Here we go again: another person convicted for revealing that the vast military enterprise designed to make the world safe for liberal democracy was illiberally killing and wounding numerous people who have nothing to do with terrorism or extremism.
I’m just sick of the cloud of rationalizations that surround the conviction of someone like Daniel Hale. Vague intimations that somehow the documents that Hale made public were useful to an enemy, largely without any precise details. “Hey, there’s two Islamist websites out there that incorporated some documents into useful hints for hiding from drone strikes”, when most of what Hale revealed is that drone strikes in Afghanistan usually were killing innocent civilians anyway. (In one five-month interval, ninety percent of the people killed weren’t the people the military meant to kill.) The basic advice, Hale suggested, was don’t be male and of military age and in Afghanistan.
The same Catch-22 comes up every time the public learns what’s being kept from them in a similar way, all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg and all the way through Edward Snowden. “They could have told the public about what they knew without taking documents.” “This isn’t the way that a democratic public should debate what’s being done in their name, there are proper channels”. I see, so what would have happened if a mid-to-low ranking intelligence analyst or military official went to the New York Times and said, “Drone strikes are mostly killing innocent people”, “The NSA is spying on Americans”, “The Pentagon is systematically lying about casualties and military successes in Vietnam”? They would have been ignored, justifiably so, unless they had proof beyond their own say-so. Self-important liars and exaggerators who want to tell the press something about secret information are not just a problem in our present political moment (e.g., Sidney Powell’s “intelligence analyst” with supposed information on the elections cited in her Kraken lawsuit who turned out to be nothing of the kind).
People like Hale are told, “If only you hadn’t stolen the documents”. If he hadn’t his truth would have not been heard or taken seriously. The mainstream press largely didn’t respond to or report CIA analyst John Stockwell’s allegations about US involvement in Angola, though he did get a slot on 60 Minutes in 1978, and what should have been a major part of the conversation about American policy had almost no weight. Stockwell didn’t have the documents: he just had himself and his writing (which got him sued by the CIA and sent into bankruptcy as they tried to block publication). So mainstream experts, journalists and politicians felt free to say “Well, he’s not credible” or simply to ignore him completely.
Time and time again, what we learn when someone does have the documents is that there was something that a democratic public absolutely needed to discuss freely that was being kept from them. The pompous, officious people sent to prosecute and harass those who reveal the secrets always concede post-facto that yes, we should have been having that debate. Obama said as much about Snowden’s revelations—but with the usual caveat: not like this, never like this.
If not like this, when? How? When were Americans going to get to talk about the fact that we were involved in a war where an allegedly surgical, precise method for killing specific known enemies was more or less a method for killing young men spotted by a camera in the sky, and maybe children or women or old people who had the bad luck to be too close to the young men? In a country that we were supposedly trying to build up as a nation and make safe and secure against insurgents? As usual, the answer is: never. We can have our debate, only it’ll have to be fifty years afterwards, when the historians start to be allowed to look at a few documents (and when we’ve destroyed many others that will be too incriminating or humiliating even then).
There are a lot of reasons why “government” is a dirty word for many humans at this end of modernity, not just in the US but all around the planet. This is one of those reasons: that we are told incessantly by people in power that there are secrets we are not allowed to see, that they have to be trusted to commit violence in our name or make tough decisions that we can’t be part of, when the fact is that the biggest (ill-kept) secret is that they can’t be trusted to commit violence in our name because what they say they’re doing and mean to do is frequently not what they actually are doing. Not because they mean to kill young men and children and bystanders out of sheer evil or hatred, but because the methods they use to accomplish an impossible task aren’t what they’re claimed to be and never could be—but that this more than anything else can’t be said or known, perhaps not even to themselves.
The Pentagon Papers showed us that: the brass weren’t just lying to the public and to politicians, they were in many cases demanding that the few people who knew the operational truths lie to the brass, to the rank-and-file, and even to themselves. When a government and its military come to believe that they have to do something, that their power derives from the perception that they’re acting effectively, they will require everyone to look away from what the documents and experiences of ordinary analysts and soldiers and mid-ranking bureaucrats almost always reveal, which is that the perception is false.
We are assured that anybody with that experience is entitled to say so (an assurance they should mistrust) as long as they can’t prove it. But it’s all of us who are entitled to know. Until we find a way to go to war and carry out policy where the debates we must have are convened honestly, forthrightly and before we as a people make decisions through and with our government, we will apparently repeat the cycle of hounding and prosecuting the few brave enough to insist that we look clearly at what we are trying not to know.
Image credit: Photo by Marko Beljan on Unsplash