Hello all!
Priscilla here. Today’s topic is government secrecy.
In a secrets-driven nation that spent $43.5 billion on intelligence in 2007, and spent $9.5 billion creating and maintaining classified documents and determining who had the clearances to see them, the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a timely reminder of how secrecy can be easily wielded to violate the rights of individuals.
How many of you are familiar with the fact that during Robert Oppenheimer’s security revocation hearing in 1954, his lawyer was frequently barred from the hearing room because he didn’t have the proper “security clearance” to hear the testimony being given against Oppenheimer?
A real defense of Oppenheimer was impossible to mount under those conditions, just as a real defense is impossible to mount for the inmates of Guantanamo today. Robert Oppenheimer’s security revocation hearing was a prime example of how the constitutional rights of the individual are trampled by the “requirements” of government secrecy.
Or take the example of Dr. James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a world leader on the growing dangers of global warming. He was directed to submit his lectures, papers, and postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists to the agency’s public affairs staff for prior review. The reason given was the “need for coordination.” Fortunately, Dr. Hansen, like Dr. Oppenheimer, refuses to be censored.
Read about Oppenheimer’s hearing in The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and let me know how you think it relates to today’s governmental secrecy issues.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Government Secrecy
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1 comments:
Your relevations of the hearing due process denied Dr. Oppenheimer is a revelation and important to note that such activity still occurs. Its source is the highly defective Executive Order 10450 issued by President Eisenhower and delegating to the head of each federal organizational entity the authority to be the final arbiter of continuing to grant or granting or denying a personnel security clearance. There is one technical error, however, in your book, in that the E.O.10450 does not provide a standard of review for granting or denying a clearance. That is discretionary authority left to the head of a federal entity. Also, federal contract employees are granted an adversary due process hearing before removal of their clearances, a right denied federal employees. While investigatory standards have become somewhat uniform, adjudicatory standards have not been made uniform. Also the public and historians will never know the full extent of government secrecy because SAP (Special Access Program)files are never transferred to the National Archives and eventually (hopefully) declassifed but instead retained and destroyed by the creating agency. The issue of who speaks to the press and what limitations are placed on press access to agency personnel is a different but related issue. All that is required is that anyone speaking to the press make clear the difference between his/her personal positions and the agency's official position and why to make clear to the press where the agency and where the individual agree or differ. Admittedly, this may raise the knowledge level of the press but in a democracy unless the information is appropriately classified the public has a right to know, and certainly also Congress, how tax dollars are being spent.
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