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I hate to admit it, but I almost burst out laughing over the way a number of Republicans " and not just Marjorie Taylor Greene " responded to the raid on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate with a new chant: defund the FBI. (Greene was at the head of the pack, already peddling "Defund the FBI" T-shirts!) It was, of course, a phrase picked up, though obviously without credit, from the demands of some Black Lives Matter protesters to "defund the police." Never in my life, though, would I have imagined that any congressional Republicans would push such a slogan or claim that the Bureau was "corrupt to the core." (In another universe, J. Edgar Hoover must have had a heart attack.) And yet I lived to see it.
It should remain an unforgettable moment. That's especially true because, though so many Trumpublicans went after the FBI, its agents, and the Justice Department, they seemed to have nothing to say about the top secret, heavily classified documents President Trump's aides swept up and took with them in their chaotic last moments in a White House their boss never intended to leave.
Or to put it another way, none of those Republicans " not for a second " thought about chanting "Defund the national security state." It didn't matter that, if it weren't for the urge of the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the rest of that crew to make the world their secret domain, none of this would have happened. It was, of course, in the name of the national security state, or the NSS (if you don't mind my making up an acronym), that those FBI foot soldiers entered the former president's Mar-a-Lago estate in the first place. But count on one thing: the next time the issue of the Pentagon budget comes up, most of those defunder Republicans will do as they've always done " if you doubt it, check out the recent TomDispatch piece by Pentagon experts William Hartung and Julia Gledhill " and vote to give that institution even more money than the ridiculous sums it asks for.
It is, of course, the NSS that considers so much of our world its private property, far too obviously secret to share with the rest of us. And while past presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama didn't stagger out of the White House loaded down with secret documents, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, points out so vividly today, secrecy has been the name of the only game in town (Washington) forever and a day. Tom
Donald Trump's Document Grab
Enhanced Secrecy Techniques Are the Order of the Day (and the Century, Too)
Thanks to Donald Trump, secrecy is big news these days. However, as political pundits and legal experts race to expose the layers of document-related misdeeds previously buried at his Mar-a-Lago estate, one overlooked reality looms large: despite all the coverage of the thousands of documents Trump took with him when he left the White House, there's been next to no acknowledgment that such a refusal to share information has been part and parcel of the Washington scene for far longer than the current moment.
The hiding of information by the former president, repeatedly described as "unprecedented" behavior, is actually part of a continuum of withholding that's been growing at a striking pace for decades. By the time Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the stage had long been set for removing information from the public record in an alarmingly broad fashion, a pattern that he would take to new levels.
The "Secrecy President"
As recent history's exhibit number one, this country's global war on terror, launched soon after the 9/11 attacks, was largely defined and enabled by the withholding of information " including secret memos, hidden authorizations, and the use of covert methods. During President George W. Bush's first term in office, government lawyers and officials regularly withheld information about their actions and documents related to them from public view, both at home and abroad.
Those officials, for instance, legalized the brutal interrogations of war-on-terror prisoners, while conveniently replacing the word "torture" with the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" and so surreptitiously evading a longstanding legal ban on the practice. The CIA then secretly utilized those medieval techniques at "black sites" around the world where its agents held suspected terrorists. It later destroyed the tapes made of those interrogations, erasing the evidence of what its agents had done. On the home front, in a similarly secretive fashion, unknown to members of Congress as well as the general public, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to set up an elaborate and far-reaching program of warrantless surveillance on Americans and others inside the United States.
Consider that the launching of an era of enhanced secrecy techniques. No wonder Bush earned the moniker of the "secrecy president." Only weeks after the 9/11 attacks, for instance, he put in place strict guidelines about who could brief Congress on classified matters, while instituting new, lower standards for transparency. He even issued a signing statement rebuking Congress for requiring reports "in written form" on "significant anticipated intelligence activities or significant intelligence failure." To emphasize his sense of righteousness in defying calls for information, he insisted on the "president's constitutional authority to" withhold information" in cases of foreign relations and national security. In a parallel fashion, his administration put new regulations in place limiting the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
President Obama also withheld information when it came to war-on-terror efforts. Notably, his administration shrouded in secrecy the use of armed drones to target and kill suspected terrorists (and civilians) in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Official reports omitted reliable data about who was killed, where the killings had taken place, or the number of civilian casualties. As the American Civil Liberties Union concluded, administration reporting on civilian harm fell "far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government's targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law."
And well beyond the war-on-terror context, the claim to secrecy has become a government default mechanism. Tellingly, the number of classified documents soared to unimaginable heights in those years. As the National Archives reports, in 2012, documents with classified markings " including "top secret," "secret," and "confidential" " reached a staggering 95 million. And while the overall numbers had declined by 2017, the extent of government classification then and now remains alarming.
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