Keeping Secrets

Over the weekend, WikiLeaks released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan. Go read them now. I'll wait.

Good. I actually only read a handful of them myself. I'm mostly relying on the MSM exegesis to tell me that insurgents are using heat-seeking missiles, our coalition forces are killing a lot of civilians, Pakistan has some dirty ties to the Afghan Taliban, the Taliban is resurgent, and war is a terrible thing.

Apparently it is debatable whether these facts are top secret or nothing new.

However, on the topic of government leaks in general, I think I learned plenty from Secrets: a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon papers by Daniel Ellsberg:

It is a commonplace that "you can't keep secrets in Washington" or "in a democracy," that "no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in the New York Times." These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget shares, lead to leaks. Moreover, to a certain extent the ability to keep a secret for a given amount of time diminishes the number of people who know it. As secret keepers like to say, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead." But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.

Maybe this is why it's good that these documents were leaked -- somebody was trying to keep them hidden from us. And the more the "experts" keep saying that these documents are too complicated for civilians to comprehend, the more determined I am to keep on reading them.

By the way, if anybody comes across the memo explaining what the hell we're doing in Afghanistan in the first place, please send me a tweet.

From Vietnam to Afghanistan

Not to be a real downer or anything, but it's about time our country started talking about Afghanistan again. But who to listen to?

I'm not going to listen to that totally discredited war criminal Dick Cheney. He says President Obama is "dithering," but Bush and Cheney dithered around for years before asking the tough questions seven years after invading Afghanistan! And then, of course, they invaded Iraq, and the entire world wished the Bush administration had dithered before entering two simultaneous quagmires.

But there are more credible people than Cheney. We could listen to the former Marine Corps captain who recently resigned over the Afghan war saying, "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

But I have the most respect for the man once called The Most Dangerous Man in America, Daniel Ellsberg. He has seen all of this -- just different names and places -- forty years ago when he was working as a military analyst and leaked a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War. Now he has a lot to say about Afghanistan:


(YouTube video)

At about 14:45 into the video, Ellsberg says about the Afghan army, "no doubt you could put more money into them, but where would it go? Switzerland?" I suppose that's where a lot of drug money ends up, and with the latest news that the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade is also on the CIA payroll, Ellsberg's comment is forthright.

And his conclusion is sobering. If Obama does send more troops, if he does prolong this bloody stalemate, he will do so only to appease his political opponents who will accuse him of being weak, unmanly, and abandoning a "winnable war." We've seen it all before.

Counterculture Time Machine

I bought myself a cool little present this week: Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years ($32 on Amazon.com). It's 4 DVD ROMs containing issues 1 through 1006 of Rolling Stone Magazine. The archive consists of full image scans, so you get every cover, every photo, every advertisement, and of course every article.

I'm certainly no classic-rock music buff, but I have a fascination with the political articles. Reading the stories on Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam, G. Gordon Liddy, and Patty Hearst is better than any history lesson, because reading opinions on events as they were happening, without the benefit of hindsight, erases the distance between then and now.

This little time machine also reminds me that corruption and lies have always been a malignant part of politics. But... and maybe my view is skewed because I'm only studying one magazine archive... it seems the reporting was so much better back then. Consider that when Dan Ellsberg and recently deceased Anthony J. Russo leaked Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, their actions actually sparked controversy and hastened the downfall of a president. Now, despite the various Senate committees, blogs and books pointing to corruption, lies and forgeries of the current administration, we still can't get rid of Bush!

Anyway, if you like perusing this kind of counterculture material, but don't want to invest in the RS collection, you might want to check out The Realist Archive Project. It's another unexpurgated slice of history.