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VOICES
The Short Distance Between
Secrets and Lies
BY
TED GUP
 It
was a bad week for the truth. On February 19 it was reported that
the Pentagon had set up an “Office of Strategic Influence”
whose mission included the dissemination of half-truths and lies
to foreign reporters and others in the effort to sway public opinion,
particularly in the Muslim world. Only two days later, as it happens,
authorities received a gruesome videotape of the Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl having his throat slashed. The two events
had nothing to do with each other, of course. Yet, in a sense
they are connected. Pearl lost his life in the journalistic pursuit
of truth while his own government conspired in a subversive offensive
against it.
The Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was quickly shuttered
amid a storm of controversy, but it remains an artifact worthy
of examination. The office was wrongly regarded by some as a kind
of sui generis experiment in public diplomacy rather than what
it was — a natural and incremental extension of policies
grounded in obsessive secrecy, the compulsion to control information,
and a low esteem for the public’s maturity and its right
to the facts. That policy alternately regards truth as something
to be feared or something too anemic to convince others of the
rightness of the U.S. cause. The broader record suggests that
the OSI was not just an aberrant experiment, but a calculated
action by an administration emboldened by the patriotic fervor
of the nation — and the complacency of the press.
The record is replete with attempts to control, conceal, and withhold
information whenever this administration has felt threatened.
Vice President Dick Cheney has steadfastly opposed efforts by
Congress and the General Accounting Office to make public the
details of Enron’s role in his energy task force. Attorney
General John Ashcroft has encouraged federal agencies to look
for reasons not to release materials requested under the Freedom
of Information Act, reversing a far more open policy. The president
himself has diverted his gubernatorial papers from the accessible
archives of the state he governed to the more secure redoubt of
his father’s presidential library. He has also rescinded
a provision that gave access to records twelve years after a president
has left office. And never before have reporters been so restricted
in their coverage of an American war.
Such disregard for an informed public has often been cloaked in
national security. For example, Jennifer K. Harbury, whose husband,
a rebel leader in Guatemala, was tortured to death in that country
in 1992 by people with CIA links, pleaded to the Supreme Court
for the right to sue senior U.S. officials, a campaign she began
under the Clinton administration. She argued that they had lied
to her, claiming to know nothing of her husband’s fate, and
that their deception may have cost her husband his life. In March,
U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson offered the justices
this defense: “There are lots of different situations when
the government has legitimate reasons to give out false information.”
The mindset that created the OSI showed itself early on. Only
a government that has no confidence in the public’s ability
to reject such twisted logic could have asked the U.S. networks
to censor Osama bin Laden’s videotaped messages, as if his
vitriol might persuade or unsettle the nation. (The stated argument,
that the tapes might contain coded messages, was either disingenuous
or naive.)
Then there is the shroud of secrecy that has descended over the
detainees arrested and charged with immigration violations. Who
are they, how many, and how are they treated? Such questions have
been designated security matters, moving them beyond the scrutiny
of the public.
Those who do speak the truth or break rank with the administration,
meanwhile, face retribution. In early October The Washington Post
reported that Congressmen had been told at a White House intelligence
briefing that there was a 100 percent chance that terrorists would
strike the U.S. again. President Bush was irate at the leak and
signed a memo ordering all but eight of the 535 members of Congress
barred from further such briefings. He reversed himself only when
faced with a congressional revolt. If citizens have a right to
know anything it is that they are in peril. Months later, the
administration issued its color-coded warning system whose primary
virtue, it seems, was that it was under its exclusive control.
And in an administration that equates control with consensus,
dissent and disloyalty are one and the same. That was seen in
the case of Michael Parker, the civilian head of the Army Corps
of Engineers, who was fired for daring at a Senate hearing to
publicly question the slashing of the corps’ funding.
Patient opportunists who have long viewed the press as a nuisance
and the public as malleable have embraced this war as the perfect
occasion to draw the blinds on government. “Trust me,”
this administration says to a people it does not quite trust.
It is only a half-step from such smothering of secrecy to outright
lies: excessive concealment expands into half-truths, and finally,
free of fear from contradiction, into sheer fabrication. With
the revelations about the OSI, the government inadvertently handed
its enemies a powerful weapon.
Cynics may argue that the U.S. is rarely believed even when telling
the truth, so what does it matter? It matters, perhaps not to
the hardened fanatic, but to the hundreds of millions of fence-sitters
exposed only to the toxic lies of their own repressive regimes.
And it matters to us at home. In an age of global information,
falsehoods are swept up like wind-borne radiation back to our
own shores and to those who stand with us. Propaganda is “that
branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving
your friends without quite deceiving your enemies,” noted
the British scholar, F.M. Cornford.
Nations that stoop to disinformation, hyperbole, and lies have
little regard for their own people, and the manipulation of facts
produces nothing so much as suspicion. In his denials, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld protested that he had never been briefed
on the Office of Strategic Influence’s role. But an underling
asserts that the secretary was twice briefed on it. It is fitting
that such an office should close with a half-truth (if indeed
it can be believed that it is closed). One day, the administration
may recognize that in this war, truth is the only reliable ally,
and the most potent. In so doing, it will pay its proper respects
to the memory of Daniel Pearl.
Ted Gup is the author of The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives
and Deaths of CIA Operatives and is the Shirley Wormser Proefessor
of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
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