63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read - Jesse Ventura [1]
Everything in this book is in the public domain and, for the most part, downloadable from the Internet. I’m not breaking any laws by putting these documents in book form, although some of them were classified “secret” until WikiLeaks published them. I’ll get to my view on WikiLeaks in a moment, but let me begin by saying how concerned I am that we’re moving rapidly in the direction President Kennedy tried to warn us about.
According to a recent article in the Washington Post, there are now 854,000 American citizens with top secret clearances. The number of new secrets rose 75 percent between 1996 and 2009, and the number of documents using those secrets went from 5.6 million in 1996 to 54.6 million last year. There are an astounding 16 million documents being classified top secret by our government every year! Today, pretty much everything the government does is presumed secret. Isn’t it time we asked ourselves whether this is really necessary for the conduct of foreign affairs or the internal operation of governments? Doesn’t secrecy actually protect the favored classes and allow them to continue to help themselves at the expense of the rest of us? Isn’t this a cancer growing on democracy?
After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, I was heartened to see him issue an Open Government Initiative on his first full day in office. “I firmly believe what Justice Louis Brandeis once said, that sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Obama said, “and I know that restoring transparency is not only the surest way to achieve results, but also to earn back the trust in government without which we cannot deliver changes the American people sent us here to make.” After eight years of Bush and Cheney’s secretive and deceitful ways, that sounded like a welcome relief. Obama ordered all federal agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor” of FOIA requests and so laid the groundwork to eventually release reams of previously withheld government information on the Internet.
Well, so far it hasn’t turned out the way Obama set forth. An audit released in March 2010 by the nonprofit National Security Archive found that less than one-third of ninety federal agencies that process FOIA requests had changed their practices in any significant way. A few departments—Agriculture, Justice, Office of Management and Budget, and the Small Business Administration—got high marks for progress. But the State Department, Treasury, Transportation, and NASA had fulfilled fewer requests and denied more in the same time period. “Most agencies had yet to walk the walk,” said the Archive’s director Tom Blanton.
Things went downhill from there. In June 2010, the New York Times carried a page-one story detailing how Obama’s administration was even more aggressive than Bush’s in looking to punish people who leaked information to the media. In the course of his first seventeen months as president, Obama had already surpassed every previous president in going after prosecutions of leakers. Thomas A. Drake, a National Security Agency employee who’d gone to the Baltimore Sun as a last resort because he knew that government eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on failed programs, is today facing years in prison on ten felony charges including mishandling of classified information. An FBI translator received a twenty-month sentence for turning