The Elephant in the Room of Democracy

On November 1, 1964, just as he was gaining real traction, Reverend Martin Luther King received a vicious blackmail letter. The anonymous writer threatened to destroy him personally and professionally, and suggested he just take his own life and save somebody a bullet.

Most now believe the letter was written by deputy FBI director William Sullivan, on the orders of J. Edgar Hoover. But no one saw that letter, or even knew it existed. The government’s secret campaign to kneecap the civil-rights movement by taking out its leader only came to light after The New York Times unearthed the letter in 2014. Want to know more? You can’t. All materials surrounding the case have been ordered sealed until 2027.

One of the biggest flaws at the heart of American democracy isn’t the lack of a third political party that will do things differently, it isn’t the apathy that keeps folks from voting, or fear of arrest that keeps them from protesting.

It’s the secrecy.

We’ve let openness as a pillar of democracy fall away. From the highest levels of public life on down, an all-pervasive culture of concealment prevails. Every corner of government, from international trade pact negotiations to grand-jury deliberations, to the daily goings-on at the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA is flat-out infested with an ethic of secrecy. Secrecy has become so commonplace that what should have been jaw-dropping geopolitical developments have passed by us, unnoticed.

In 2019 an American F-15 attack jet dropped a quarter-ton bomb on a crowd of people huddled on a riverbank in Baghuz, Syria. As survivors scrambled away, the jet dropped two one-ton bombs, finishing them all off. Seventy women and children were killed. Over the next two years the U.S. military, delayed, sanitized and classified every attempt to bring this war crime into the open. It only came to light two years later after a New York Times investigative team spent months piecing together leaked documents.

After the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, the Washington Post revealed that high-level government officials knew eighteen years ago that this war was becoming another hopeless, unwinnable quagmire, but they stayed the course and kept the messaging rosy.

This is nothing unusual. Most of the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries were hatched in secret.

The Vietnam war was triggered by a 1964 attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened. There were no enemy torpedoes, as announced — only an overzealous sonar operator chasing ghosts. But that soldier’s erroneous report was the excuse President Johnson needed to persuade Congress to authorize the war. He knew the truth. Defense secretary Robert S. McNamara knew the truth. The only ones who didn’t know the truth were the American people. And they would have no clue until Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers seven years and a couple of million needless deaths later. After that a new verb entered the world. To be “McNamara’d” meant to be fooled.

Many of the dictators and strongmen of the past century were quietly propped up by the Pentagon and the CIA, and almost all the government-afflicted atrocities in Central and South America were carried out in the dark.

If World War III erupts, secrecy will almost certainly be the accelerant that ignites it.

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How did we let this happen? Wholesale secrecy was never the plan for the United States. Just the opposite.

The framers knew secrecy has always been the irresistible tool of anyone in power, from kings and emperors and tribal leaders to corrupt schemers and petty rogues. So in drafting the constitution they made sure that checks on abuse of power were baked into the document.

One of the first things they did was enshrine protection for whistleblowers. “We, the people” would have an ear to the door. And for a century and a half any governmental attempts to draw the blinds always met fierce pushback.

But come World War II, when “national security” concerns trumped all else, a culture of concealment crept in. The newly minted adjective “classified” meant: “designated as officially secret: accessible only to authorized people.” What kind of things were “classified”? Vital intelligence matters, military plans, weapons technology, the names of informants overseas.

But then the definition began to broaden. Routine bureaucratic business began to be classified. Even humdrum exchanges started being given one of the four labels that Truman created by executive order as the Cold War bit in: “Top Secret.” “Secret,” “Confidential” and “Restricted.” There was always a reason to use one of those stamps, just to be safe. Government claimed the right to hold sensitive meetings in camera — and everything was arguably sensitive.

Even after the Cold War was over, secrecy remained a habit. The blinds stayed down.

And they’re still down. Today, more than five million people in the US have the authority to “classify” information. Since the Nixon era it’s become a reflex to classify anything remotely controversial.

When the Moynihan Commission into Government Secrecy looked into this in 1994, it found epidemic government overreach. More than 1.5 billion records, dating back 25 years, remained inaccessible. And if you get your hands on a classified document through the Freedom of Information Act, chances are it’ll look like a blackout poem — heavily redacted, with entire paragraphs and pages smoked out.

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In 2019, attorney general William Barr McNamara’d the American people by using secrecy, redaction and carefully orchestrated strategic delays in releasing Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The result was that most Americans thought that Trump had somehow been totally exonerated.

Imagine if Mueller’s report had been released immediately in full for all to see (and why the fuck not?), then Trump’s, election, impeachment and his presidency may all have unfolded very differently.

Imagine if transparency, rather than secrecy, had been America’s operating system from the get-go. If we’d stuck by the framers’ guns and been bold enough to let the people know everything.

How might the progress of civil rights have been hastened had the government not been able to hide its tracks? How might America’s political trajectory have changed had the government’s covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) — which targeted such dangerous subversives as feminists, peaceniks and the Black Power Movement — not been allowed to rumble undetected and unimpeded for a quarter century?

No Vietnam war.
No Iraq war.
No twenty years in Afghanistan.
Maybe no 9/11?
Maybe no WWIII?

Legitimate, high-level secrets — things like nuclear codes, the names of undercover agents, the details of hostage negotiations — are a tiny percentage of the material the government believes is too hot for us to handle. The bulk of it is mundane stuff that does not need to be concealed. We hear that Grand Jury deliberations have to be secret to shield the unjustly accused. Trade Deals have to be secret to keep their delicate socio-political engineering from being blown apart. Corruption investigations have to be secret to keep the targets from finding out they’re in the crosshairs.

These are mostly red herrings.

The real reason so many public and corporate proceedings are classified isn’t for safety or national security interests. It’s to shield the actors and institutions from embarrassment and accountability. Secrecy is now mostly a way for people in power to cover their butts. To hide their dirty laundry and to push their agendas through with minimal resistance. It’s the rotten smell that pervades our entire commercial, diplomatic and information systems.

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I still remember the day, in 2010, when Julian Assange leaked those US army intelligence documents on Wikileaks. Thousands of pages of hot government secrets. And then, proving he was not to be cowed by cease-and-desist threats, he posted more incriminating documents, including Baghdad and Afghanistan war logs and videos.

Wikileaks suddenly introduced the possibility of meaningful accountability.

I thought: Now we’re getting somewhere. Now our political system will be shaken to its core.

But it wasn’t.

Three years later, Edward Snowden, a contractor working for the National Security Agency, encountered what he believed to be unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens, and he too went public.

This is why the framers inserted whistleblower protection into the constitution. The whistleblower is the foot soldier of democracy. It’s only through the work of inside informants that we come to know what we need to know.

But our system cannot tolerate that. When whistleblowers stick their necks out, they are vehemently hunted down. There’s every chance you get chased to Russia, never to be seen again, a la Snowden — or crucified, like Assange.

Every authoritarian leader’s currency is secrecy and information control. They all try to stay in power by controlling the way information flows.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would have been unthinkable without his total control of the media. People believe his version of what’s going on because that’s the only version allowed on television and most social media.

The Chinese government is the most secretive of them all. It systematically blocks any online discussion that threatens its dominance. When a Politburo leader is accused of misconduct, all mention of it is immediately scrubbed out of view. When an artist, intellectual or activist asks for more freedom and democracy, they are swiftly removed and persecuted.

In America the populace is divided into info-tribes. Most people live inside their own confirmation bias. Few know what the truth is. Who could have imagined that tens of millions of Americans could be persuaded that climate change is a hoax, vaccines don’t matter, and that Israel is only "defending itself" in Gaza. And with a new reign of Trump in America, the worst may be yet to come.

Secrecy like this is the elephant in the room of democracy. It undermines everything — and make no mistake, whether the Epstein list exists or not, that’s exactly what Trump is doing.