This week Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hirsch published, in the London Review of Books, a story casting substantial doubts on the Obama administration's various (and changing) stories about how Osama bin Laden came to be killed by Navy Seal Team Six. The administration and some media outlets denounced Hirsch and denied the accuracy of his story. But other parts of the media, including the New York Times, corroborated significant parts, but not all, of Hirsch's reporting.
Who to believe? Of one thing we can be sure. We the voters and taxpayers are not permitted to know the underlying facts. That's all secret, and only available to a few selected Mandarins within the government.
That the actual voters can't be trusted with the facts necessary to evaluate the actions of our government is a pattern. Join me below to discuss.
Also this week, the Senate voted on fast-track treatment for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. The key issue in dispute: does the TPP allow foreign governments to bring private arbitrations to overrule key US environmental, health, safety and other regulatory provisions. Just this week, the Canadian foreign minister announced that, in his view, similar arbitration provisions in NAFTA made it a violation for the US to apply the Volcker Rule to Canadian banks, several of which (the Canadian banking industry is highly concentrated) have large and systemically important US operations.
Does the TPP have arbitration provisions that would allow foreign governments to override US regulatory requirements? We're not allowed to know. The terms of the TPP are secret.
A significant debate over the Dodd-Frank Act is beginning in the US Congress, as Republicans introduce bills to overturn or limit key provisions of that Act. Did the Dodd-Frank Act go too far in restricting major US banks? Or did it not go far enough, are those banks still vulnerable to failure in the event of the next financial crisis, and as a result, should those banks be broken up? The Federal Reserve Board and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency actually have a pretty good idea of the answer to this question: they examine the banks and give them what are known as CAMEL ratings on their financial and managerial strength.
Are we the voters and taxpayers allowed to see the CAMEL ratings of the major banks? Of course not. They're secret.
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai bitterly protested that the Pakistani government (and its ISS security service) host, protect, fund and arm the leadership of the Afghan Taliban. As a result, he said, US military service members and their Afghan allies could never get to the root of the Taliban insurgency. In the meantime, of course the US government funds and arms the Pakistani government. Have we in effect been funding the very people killing our own troops? Surely the US government has a pretty good idea whether Karzai is correct. Are we the voters allowed to know? Of course not. What the US knows about where the Taliban leadership is and who supports them and how is secret.
Nor are we allowed to know the details of the NSA surveillance programs. Senators Udall and Merkley say the NSA programs are far more intrusive than we understand. Others, like former Attorney General Mukasey say the NSA programs are necessary and effective. Press reports suggest that perhaps the programs are much less effective than advertised. But the bottom line is we can't know - the details of the NSA programs and their effectiveness are all secret. We can make some credibility judgments, but we're not allowed to know - even as Congress votes, between now and June 1, on whether to continue those programs.
I have a particular professional interest in the Securities and Exchange Commission. I think it would be interesting to know how successful is the SEC's Dodd-Frank Act whistleblower program. The SEC says it gets more than 3200 whistleblower tips a year. So far, in the six years since the Dodd-Frank Act, they've only given out 15 whistleblower awards. And the recipients of those awards are all secret - we don't know who they are or what information they provided. The SEC treats all the whistleblower information as secret. Is the whistleblower program working? The SEC says it is. But we're not allowed any of the information necessary to assess that claim. This week the SEC's Enforcement Director gave a speech about the Commission's five year-old enforcement cooperation program. He says that in that period of time, the SEC has signed over 80 cooperation agreements. How are they working? He gave several examples of cases that had resulted, at least in part, from the cooperation agreements. But the cooperation agreements themselves (including who they are with and what companies they concern) are all secret. The Division Director says the program is working just fine. But of course he would say that, and we just have to take his word for it. How about the SEC's exam program of registered broker-dealers and investment advisers? Can we have any level of confidence that the SEC staff is consistent in how they interpret or apply their laws and rules in SEC examinations? Of course not. The results of each exam are secret, shared only with that specific financial institution. How about the Lehman bankruptcy? Why did the SEC decide not to bring any charges against anyone in connection with the largest failure of a broker-dealer in the history of the SEC, notwithstanding the bankruptcy trustee's report that the bankruptcy resulted from deliberate misconduct by senior officials at the firm? We don't know. There have been some press articles leaked about the subject. But the enforcement decision itself, and reasons for it, are secret. We're not allowed to know. We're only the voters and taxpayers.
I would like to suggest that this pervasive culture of secrecy is very damaging to our democracy. Some of these issues move elections. Obama won in 2008 in part because of the perception that the Republicans had been insufficiently diligent in trying to find bin Laden. Obama's reelection was materially aided by the fact that on his watch, we did kill bin Laden. But maybe those facts aren't what we think they are - we are not allowed to know. Congress is voting now on TPP. Would a pro-trade vote encourage economic growth, or are there anti-regulatory provisions that would harm US consumers and workers? We're not allowed to know; we can't express informed opinions to our representatives in Congress. What are the NSA programs, how intrusive are they, and to what extent have they even worked? We're not allowed to know, even as our representatives vote on whether to extend those programs. Should we send more troops back into Afghanistan, as many Republicans advocate, or is that a fool's errand because the Taliban leadership is all safe and secure in Pakistan. We don't know; we're not allowed to know. Has Dodd-Frank worked to make the major banks safer, or not? Again, we're not allowed the facts necessary to make that judgment.
The culture of government secrecy has proceeded by degrees. Some of our worst government decisions (for example instigating the 1953 coup in Iran, trying to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr., the Bay of Pigs invasion, to choose from a very long list) were done in the mistaken belief that they could be kept secret forever. But in real time, we are not being given enough information to make informed decisions about many of the major decisions facing our government. This, I believe, is the great undiscussed issue of our time. In every instance discussed above, the government argues that it can't be as effective if it allows the people to know what it is really doing. But we don't know how effective these programs really are, because we aren't allowed to know the underlying facts. If the people aren't allowed the information necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of our government, then we can't make the informed decisions (and informed votes) necessary to make a democracy work. And that leaves us with a government of unaccountable Mandarins, whose incentives are as much to retain their own budgets and power as they are to work in the public interest. Ultimately democracy can't work with the current level of government secrecy and unaccountability.