Daily Times

Lords of Secrecy?

Author: Scott Horton;

Publisher: Nation Book; 2015;

Lords of Secrecy — The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare is a thought-provoking book penned by Scott Horton. It is a book for all generations and all democracies. Horton questions the unelected elites inside the US government who make major decisions affecting the average Americans on a daily basis. Let me clarify at the outset that this is not a conspiracy theory book, neither is it about Illuminati, Freemasons or some other secret society in America. This book speaks about the corruption, ineptitude and illegal actions of the bureaucratic elites of America and the claims of secrecy to conceal the wrongdoing committed by those elites.

The book is a wonderful compilation of chapters ranging from the understanding of democracy in Athens to the issue of drone warfare in Pakistan. The author touches upon some deeply intellectual arguments of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. He articulates that Socrates and Plato, much to the surprise of many, strived to serve the power and were very close to the Aristocratic elites of the day. The entire book makes references to the political beliefs of Max Weber to whom the answer to corruption, ineptitude and illegality committed by bureaucrats is parliamentary oversight.

In the Athenian democracy, people participated in decision-making. On questions of wars (of choice), citizens participated in discussions before reaching a conclusion. It makes sense for the people to openly debate the wisdom of waging a war before spending money and sending men in harm’s way. In the United States, government is facilitated and at times urged by the CIA to go to war. The people are not asked but convinced (by scaring them) through systematic leaking to the press. The CIA and the American press played a vital role in misleading the people before invading Iraq. The CIA, in a very questionable way, supported the dubious claims of Saddam Hussain having weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The CIA indulged in creating in politicised intelligence that resulted in war, something its charter forbids it from doing.

That brings me to another interesting fact mentioned in the book: in Athens, the people adhered to “looking backward not forward.” Leaders and generals were not evaluated based on whether or not the war was won. They were rather evaluated based on whether their actions were illegal, dangerous to the lives of soldiers and so forth. It didn’t matter if the war was won. The leader could still be punished if his policy and actions were wrong during the war. Citizens of Athens didn’t rejoice in victory; rather, they looked back and debated their leaders’ policies and actions. Had the United States been a democracy like the Athenian one, President George W Bush would have been punished today for misleading the nation before the days leading up to Iraq’s invasion.

The book revolves around the ideal of an informed citizenry. For a democracy to be functional and affective, the people must be fully informed of government’s actions and the rationale behind those actions. President Barack Obama gave the authorisation to kill American citizens in drone strikes in Yemen and elsewhere. The promise of the due process enshrined in the US constitution was ignored, and American citizens were killed based on a mere executive whim. This became possible because the legal opinion justifying such an assassination of an American citizen was written by a legal expert at the Office of the Legal Council (OLC). The legal opinion — that the president has the authority to kill an American citizen without giving the due process of law if he posed a serious and imminent threat to American national security and capturing him was not feasible — placed somewhere in a drawer in the Oval Office resulted in giving President Obama the green signal. The killings of Anwar al Awlaki and his 16-year-old son two weeks later were justified based on the same rationale. That rationale was kept secret from the American people for years.

There was no proof given regarding the existence of the WMD in Iraq by claiming secrecy. The drone warfare was not acknowledged until recently because of CIA’s need for plausible deniability (secrecy). President Obama did not disclose to the people of the United States the rationale behind killing Awalki and his son. Torture was kept secret. CIA’s operation to delay Iran’s nuclear development was kept secret until James Risen of The New York Times disclosed it. Surveillance was kept secret until Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald took brave steps. There is only one common factor: in order to hide ineptitude, illegality and corruption, claims of secrecy are made. Anything that the intelligence elites are not comfortable in disclosing, because such a disclosure will implicate them, is labelled secret.

To Weber, the answer to this problem is parliamentary oversight. However, the author argues that the actions of the American bureaucracy (intelligence community) will disappoint Weber because slowly and gradually America has drifted toward becoming a country where bureaucratic and unelected elites are not held accountable for their wrongful actions. It will take investigative and brave journalists and whistleblowers to shed light on the dirty and illegal activities of government, and hence inform the people.

Drone warfare in the tribal areas of Pakistan is an interesting issue in this regard. Drones sanitise the war. It helps the American president avoid sending American soldiers in harm’s way. Furthermore, because the CIA operates it in Pakistan, the laws of armed conflict do not apply to it since the CIA is a civilian agency. Maintaining plausible deniability, the drone war is kept out of the public domain in the United States because unlike the World War II, Vietnam War, Afghan and Iraq wars, there are no dead bodies of American soldiers arriving draped in an American flag. Drone pilots operate out of Nellis and Creech bases in Nevada. They drive home to do dinner with their families after they have operated a drone for hours in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The issue remains out of people’s attention. The innocent people who are killed in drone strikes are for most part labelled as “suspected militants”, even in the case of a two-year-old child in 2009. The covert war unleashed by the CIA remains shrouded in secrecy. The purpose of covert war is to keep it secret from the host country’s government. However, the government and the people in Pakistan very well know who operates the ‘bungana’ (the local name of the drone in FATA).

Horton asks an interesting question: who doesn’t know about the drone warfare? And then he answers it too: the people of the United States. While many innocent people die in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, a handful of defence industry corporations make a killing out of killing. Horton argues that science experienced enormous development through the decades because knowledge contributed by great scientists was available to whoever wanted to understand it. It was not kept secret. Democracy has undergone a decline because there is a regime of secrecy and people are kept out of the decision making through a system erected by largely unelected elites — the lords of secrecy.