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On the borderlands of the Fourth Estate II

I’m a bit of a conspiracy theory aficionado, and I’ve whiled away many hours listening to conspiracy documentaries. These days, most of these revolve around 9/11 and the Iraq War, or some combination thereof. It’s surprising how good some of them are, including 9/11: Press For Truth, about the 9/11 “Jersey Widows,” Why We Fight, which delves into the legacy of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, and The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror , about the relationship between oil supply and the Bush administration’s war on terror.

But then there are the other conspiracy films, the ones that make you cringe a bit even as you’re fascinated by them; stuff that would’ve made it onto an X-Files episode. Among these are topics that range from UFOs and aliens to JFK assassination plots to New World Orders and, also, 9/11 and the Iraq War scenarios. These are fun to watch but are not generally considered credible.

As interesting as conspiracy theories are, so also are the sociological and psychological explainers of them. There’s debate over the impact of conspiracism on the progression of history, and much talk of projection, epistemology, psychology and sociology. In all of this, it is almost singularly assumed that all of these conspiracies are the result of some kind of ephemeral symbolism, a Joseph Campbell-esque manifestation of mythology in the modern era. To me, the explainers seem to be ignoring a very obvious query: What if the world really is full of conspiracies?

A documentary by Harvard professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss, Secrecy, premiered at the Sundance film festival in January. On the documentary’s website, Galison republished a September 2004 article from Volume 31, Issue 1 of the University of Chicago’s Critical Inquiry journal. Entitled Removing Knowledge, the article was illuminating. Galison compares the amount of information classified by the US Federal government in one year – an estimated 250 million pages – to the amount of information added to the system of Harvard libraries – about 60 million pages. Harvard’s acquisition rate, says Galison, is about the same as the British Museum, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, respectively.

“Whether one figures by acquisition rate, by holding size, or by contributors, the classified universe is, as best I can estimate, on the order of five to ten times larger than the open literature that finds its way to our libraries.”

This is an astounding amount of information, and hardly excusable even if the whole of this sprawling inner-state were purely sensitive weapons programs and troop movements, which it is not. History has handed us many examples of duplicity in the form of leaked classified information and declassified information that would be today’s conspiracy theories had not conscientious members of the intelligence community and journalists brought them to light.

For example, it was revealed in 2005 that faulty intelligence led the US Congress to authorize its President to invade a country that posed no immediate threat to the United States. That nation was Vietnam, and the information concerned the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that empowered Lyndon Johnson to pursue a war that cost, including civilian deaths, almost six million lives. That’s a death tally on par with Jewish dead during the Holocaust, and yet there was barely a blink in the public conscience when declassified documents were released by the American National Security Agency (NSA) showing an NSA historian had found the Tonkin incident was faked to cover up intelligence errors. Think about that: six million dead in the aftermath of intelligence errors.

Perhaps more famous were the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret report released by former State Department official Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times in 1971, which revealed an expansion of the Vietnam War despite public statements to the contrary and insinuations that the government doubted the war could be won. Upon the Pentagon Paper’s publication in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Ellsberg surrendered to a US Attorney and fully expected a prolonged jail-sentence, which was avoided by the outbreak of the Watergate scandal. In the court battles that ensured, the New York Times even had to go up against the United States government before the US Supreme Court, a case the NYT won.

And listen up conspiracists, because this is where the line between history and conspiracy begins to blur: Mr. Ellsburg has, in recent years, become a political activist. He warned of a Tonkin Gulf scenario in regards to Bush administration efforts to generate support prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He signed the 9/11 Truth Statement, a “…call for immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur,” and in a 2006 article for Harpers, in regards to the possible American invasion of Iran, called on government officials “…accepting sacrifice of clearance and career, and risk of prison—to disclose comprehensive files that convey, irrefutably, official, secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers of the military plans being considered.”

More recently, leaks to the press have exposed the NSA domestic surveillance program and the monitoring of international banking records. There’s also the somewhat curious practice the Bush administration has employed of classifying information that was already public, as with US Justice Department testimony regarding translator Sibel Edmonds, who accused the FBI of missing vital intelligence that might have prevented the September 11 attacks.

And in case, dear European readers, you feel left out, a few reminders, in the form of CIA extraordinary rendition flights through European airports and the alleged existence of CIA “black sights” in former Soviet satellite countries that are now part of the European Union. That story exploded into the public forum in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest, who frequently sited “U.S. and foreign officials,” “current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents,” “[CIA] intelligence officials” both “former and current” and many more mentions of “government officials.” That seems not so much an intelligence leak as a flood. Would it have been anything but a conspiracy theory otherwise?

While the extent to which governments should be allowed to keep secrets may be debateable, there never seems to be any tangible benefit to the public from it. One wonders if presumably legitimate secret information – troop movements and weapons programs and terrorism investigations – isn’t kept secret out of necessity so much as a symptom of the military conflicts engendered by secret programs of espionage, subterfuge, interrogation, torture, assassination and misinformation that have been alleged to have taken place during and since the Cold War, all thoroughly illegal and anathema to what we claim are the values of modern, Western society.

If the United States is any example, classified information more often than not serves merely to confound the democratic process and leave the citizenry confused and disenfranchised, open to speculative conspiracy theories, at least until some government insider slips a journalist a classified document which proves there was really a conspiracy all along.

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