LIBERTY UNDER SIEGE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403280001-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: November 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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UNI)ER SIEGE
The Reagan Administration's taste for autocracy
By Walter Karp
he Reagan Administration came to
power firm in its resolve to liberate corporate enterprise from government
regulation, to free the economy from the incubus of the welfare system,
and to reduce the government's role in the life of the country. It never said
that these far-reaching goals could not be achieved by the ordinary meth-
ods of democratic persuasion and the established procedures of congres-
sional lawmaking. The Administration never contended in public, and
perhaps not even in private, that the exercise of liberty gave its enemies an
unfair advantage, or that the traditional sources of public information kept
the electorate too well informed, or that popular government in general
was a hindrance to its aims. Only once did any ranking member of the
Administration publicly admit that the "Reagan Revolution" included-
indeed necessitated-a program of drastic political change. This occurred
in late 1981, when David Stockman, the White House budget director,
said that the new Administration's success "boils down to a political ques-
tion, not of budget policy, or economic policy, but whether we can change
the habits of the political system." After Stockman's outburst of perilous
candor, the curtain came abruptly down. It has not risen again on the po-
litical intentions of the Reagan Administration, for the habits the Admin-
istration has striven to change have been, by and large, the habits of
freedom.
"What we are witnessing," said the American Civil Liberties Union in
November 1981, "is it systematic assault on the concept of government
accountability and deterrence of illegal government conduct." Alas, "we,"
the people, were not witnessing a thing, and have not been witnessing a
thing for almost five years. In politics, what is seen is what is talked about,
and the "systematic assault" has not been talked about-not by the Ad-
ministration, not by Congress, not by the opposition party, not by the
press.
Nothing is more important, however, than what public men prefer nor
to discuss. For nearly five years now the Reagan Administration has been
engaged in an unflagging campaign to exalt the power of the presidency
and to undermine the power of the law, the courts, the Congress, and the
people. That is what our politicians have not discussed with us, and what
lies hidden behind the screen of political rhetoric and the smile of a popu-
lar President.
What follows is it chronicle of that campaign, told simply by means of
recounting the deeds that comprise it. This chronicle is not rte secret his-
tory of an alleged secret plot. Most of the events have been duly reported in
the daily newspapers. The chronicle is simply a matter of paying attention
to public deeds that have been largely ignored or made light of outside the
confines of congressional hearings. The chronicle is remorseless because
the campaign is remorseless, and it is shocking because the campaign is
shocking. When a concerted assault on the habits of freedom ceases to
shock us, there will he no further need to assault them, for they will have
been uprooted once and for all.
Walter Karp is a contributing editor of Harper's and the author of The f dirics of War
He is at work on a book about the Korean X ir, The i:nipire .ind the ~L h
he newly elected Reagan Administration promised to "hit the
ground running" and it does-like a company of commandos fanning out
in a hostile country that just happens to he its own.
What it besieges at once is the old, unsung bulwark against overweening
presidential power: the open, garrulous, decentralized executive branch it-
self. Bureaucrats practiced in rudeness and evasion are put in place of help-
ful press officers. Telephone requests for information are suddenly given
short shrift. Press briefings become so grudging, notes one veteran report-
er, that a State Department spokesman says "no comment" and "I can't
say" more than thirty times in the course of one forty-five-minute session.
Pentagon officials are warned that the polygraph test-which accuses the
guilty and the innocent alike-will be used to identify those who "leak"
classified information to the press.
In late April the President declares a moratorium on the preparation and
dissemination of government publications, and the huge, habitual outflow
of official reports, bulletins, and pamphlets is quickly brought under con-
trol. The Administration's stated goal is the "elimination of wasteful
spending on government periodicals." Dropped in the moratorium is a gov-
ernment booklet on bedbugs, which Edwin Meese Ill, counselor to the
President, brandishes for reporters with a hearty chuckle, as well as Central
Intelligence Agency reports on "U.S.-Soviet Military Dollar-Cost Com-
parisons," which disappear unbrandished. Meanwhile, the White House
musters every specious argument it can find to justify the biggest arms build-
up in history. Something considerably more important than thrift lies be-
hind this moratorium. -
Whatever can he hidden the Administration hides. "The White House
is structuring key advisory panels," reports the New York Times in July, "so
that they do not fall under the public meeting rules of the Advisory Com-
mittee Act." Under the direction of the White House the agencies of the
executive branch evade the public accountability provisions of the Admin-
istrative Procedure Act. New regulations are issued as "guidelines" so that
the public need not he notified. Existing regulations are altered by internal
memorandums.
On June 6 the Washington Post runs a story under the headline "Admin-
istration Attempting to Stem Information Flow to Trickle." This is only
the beginning, however, for the President is determined to redress the bal-
ance between, in his words, "the media's right to know and the govern-
ment's right to confidentiality."
This latter "right" is a figment of the official imagination: in America
the governed have rights, not the government. But one reason the Admin-
istration is determined to uphold it becomes clear on July 8 when a legal
analysis of the gravest importance begins circulating in the House Com-
mittee on Energy and Coinnierce. Prepared for the committee by the
Continued
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American Law Division of the Library of Congress, it describes a far-reach-
ing seizure of power carried out by the President on February 17 when he
signed Executive Order 12291. That order, says the report, "sets up it
framework for [presidential) management of the rule-making process that is
undeniably unprecedented in scope and substance," one that "does not ap-
pear to draw its authority from any specific congressional enactment." It
"provides no explicit safeguards to protect the integrity of the process or
the interest of the public against secret, undisclosed, and unreviewable
contacts . . . the Order, on its face, deprives participants of essential ele-
ments of fair treatment required by due process." Most important, the or-
der threatens to make "cost-benefit principles," imposed and manipulated
by the White House, supreme over the statutory mission given by Congress
to the executive agencies of the government-in violation of the doctrine
of separation of powers. The warning falls into the public arena as noise-
lessly as a feather.
The Administration's most ambitious efforts to censor and suppress lie in
the future, but even in mid-1981 it begins to choke off various sources of
objectionable opinions.
Cuba is one such source. On July 10 the secretary of the Treasury noti-
fies 30,000 subscribers of the Communist Party weekly Granma, which was
impounded by Treasury agents in May, that "it will be necessary for you to
obtain a specific import license from this office" in order to "import" Cu-
ban periodicals in the future. The maximum penalty for subscribing with-
out a license is ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine under the Trading
With the Enemy Act of 1917; this act has never before been applied to
periodicals, owing to the longstanding national "habit" of distinguishing
printed matter from merchandise. By treating Cuban periodicals like Cu-
ban cigars the Administration claims control over a hitherto free activ-
ity-until it is stopped by a First Amendment lawsuit brought by the 11
ACLU. This is not the last time, however, that the Administration will try
to use commercial regulations to suppress non-commercial activity.
Political refugees from friendly tyrannies are another source of objec-
tionable opinions: they know too much about the regimes they fled. After
seeing its February white paper on El Salvador, which presented "evi-
dence" that the Salvadoran guerrillas were being heavily armed by Cuba
and the Soviet Union, exposed as a pack of lies, the Administration begins
to deport Salvadorans en masse. In August, the tortured corpse of one de-
portee turns up by a Salvadoran roadside.
To the Administration, however, the most dangerous source of objec-
tionable opinions are its own documents. On October 15 the White House
submits legislation to Congress that would keep these documents out of the
public's hands by "reforming" the Freedom of Information Act into obliv-
ion. Politically, this is the Administration's first truly perilous moment, for
the act is no ordinary piece of legislation. It has behind it the entire weight
and authority of the democratic tradition in America: the sovereignty of
the people, the accountability of government, the old republican distrust
of official secrecy and bureaucratic caprice. "The Freedom of Information
Act is a blessing for those who value a check on Government snooping,"
William Safire, the conservative columnist for the Times, wrote in May
when the White House, testing the waters, first indicated its hostility to
the law. "Individuals can now find out what the FBI file says about them.
Even better, individuals can force the Federal bureaucracy to disgorge rul-
ings made without public scrutiny, and documents more politically embar-
rassing than secret."
Yet one "improvement" in the Administration's Freedom of Informa-
,ion Improvement Act of 1981 would put out of the public's reach precisely
those documents that give the governed their "check on government
Snooping." Another "improvement" would make it difficult to discover
how the agencies of the executive branch are enforcing the health, safety,
ind environmental laws that the White House is bent on subjecting ti
cost-benefit analysis. A third improvement would make it dauntingly ex-
pensive for the act to be used by those who inform the public-scholars,
writers, newspaper reporters, public-interest organizations-the very users
that, under the unimproved act, pay little or nothing.
"Freedom of information is not cost-free. It is not an abe25lute good,"
Jonathan C. Rose, an assistant attorney general in charge orabridging the
freedom of information, would say a year later. But the Administration's
cant about thrift rings false. "If the Freedom of Information Act is rescind-
ed or crippled," says Kurt Vonnegut at a symposium on the FOIA, "the
American people will have been treated as spies for a foreign enemy." An
Administration which prates about getting the government off the backs of
the people has revealed its real ambition: to get the people off the hack of
the government.
On October 14 that ambition could scarcely he plainer, as the President
invokes "executive privilege" to withhold from Congress thirty-one docu-
ments, many of them unsigned memorandums, prepared by junior officials
in the Department of Interior. In the most sweeping assertion of executive
secrecy in our history, the President declares that all information that is
"part of the executive branch deliberative process" lies beyond the over-
sight of Congress. President Reagan, who invents his own constitution as
he goes along, has expanded the confidentiality of the Oval Office to cloak
the entire executive branch. In the space of twenty-four hours he has pro-
posed to cut off the government not only from the people, but from their
elected representatives as well.
By October 15 Congress has every reason to ask-and loudly-on what
meat doth this our Caesar feed. But Congress asks nothing. The opposition
leaders are silent; "liberals" are as mute as "conservatives." The elected
representatives of the people apparently prefer to deal privately with the
White House rather than awaken the sleeping electorate. Quietly, Con-
gress will preserve the Freedom of Information Act, and quietly it will chal-
lenge "executive privilege"; but the Administration's assault on account-
ability it will not make known to the people.'
On December 4 the President signs an executive order authorizing the
CIA for the first titre to collect "foreign intelligence" in the United 5rares
by surreptitiously questioning the citizenry. It also authorizes the CIA to
employ the entire local police force of the country in this undercover ques-
tioning, which can take place in a barroom, a barbershop, or the aisle of a
K -Mart-as if the U. S. government needed to monitor the unguarded con-
versations of private citizens to keep itself informed about foreign coun-
tries. Getting the government off the backs of the people is the very last
thing this Administration wants.
n January 7, at the annual meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science in Washington, the Administration
opens an assault on the old, slack habits of scientific freedom. The "hemor-
rhage of the country's technology" overseas is so severe, says Admiral Bob-
by Inman, deputy director of central intelligence, that the government
must step in to "control" the public dissemination of private research. If
the nation's scientists do not submit voluntarily to such censorship, Admi-
ral Inman warns the assembled audience, a "tidal wave" of public outrage
"could well cause the federal government to overreact" against the liberties
of science. Anger and indignation sweep the meeting. What the govern-
ment wants "is clearly more compatible with a dictatorship than a democ-
'The Administration's FOIA bill never came to a vote. Other legislation incorporating
many of the Administration's proposals pulsed in the Senate, but stalled in the House. In
late 1981, the House Committee on Enerw and Commerce cited Interior Secretary James
Watt for contempt: the Jononer ms at issue were suhsequenth turned (over.
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racy," says Peter Denning, a computer scientist from Purdue University, in
a sharp rebuttal to Inman. The Administration mistakes the very source of
the "hemorrhage," reports the March issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Sci-
entists. Commerce is what transfers technology abroad, according to a 1979
study made by the Pentagon itself, and commerce is what the 1979 Export
Administration Act was designed to control.
To all arguments against censorship, however, the Administration is
deaf. As Lawrence J. Brady, an assistant secretary of commerce, tells the
press in March, the government is determined to combat "a strong belief in
the academic community that they have an inherent right . . . to conduct
research . . . free of government review and oversight." Accordingly, the
Commerce Department informs universities across the country that any
faculty member who lectures on advanced technology to even a single for-
eign student may be considered a "U.S. exporter" under the 1979 law and
fined $100,000 for exporting technical data without a government license.
At a scientific conference in August, 100 optical engineers are forced to
withdraw their research papers at the last minute when government agents
warn them that they may violate export control regulations. Once again,
an Administration which regards the lawful regulation of commerce as un-
warranted oppression uses commercial regulations to suppress non-com-
mercial activity. Yet about the transfer of technology overseas the
Administration evidently cares little. Due to its slack enforcement of the
real export control laws, California's Silicon Valley, in the words of an FBI
official, is "as leaky as a sieve."
The pretexts are shifted around like the three shells in the shell game-
efficiency, thrift, and national security-but the aim is always the same: to
give the White House the power to withhold from the American people
whatever the President thinks it best for the people not to know.
On February 4 the President shows Congress the final draft of an execu-
tive Oder on "c assitied in rmation r e or er trays an tip elite for
secret so wanton that the White House declines to send a representative
to defend it at a congressional hearing. Under the
which already withholds from the public about 16 million documents each
year is instructed to resolve a doubts about secrecy in vor of public igno-
rance. The order creates a new category of technical data ("vulnerabilities
or capabilities of systems, installations, projects, or plans relating to the
national security") so vast and so vague that it enables the government for
the first time to classify private technical research-thereby giving the
order an editor to start shredding a manuscript about high-tech Army
weapons systems "immediately."
The White House in 1982 is steadily consolidating its new legislative
powers. Under Executive Order 12291, which elevates cost-benefit princi-
ples over acts of Congress, a new mode of lawmaking is being set up before
our unseeing eyes. Under this new system, Congress continues to enact
legislation after years of study and deliberation. And it continues to dele-
gate to the appropriate agency the authority to issue regulations carrying
out the aims of each law. But after that, a few dozen clerks in the White
House budget office virtually dictate the promulgation of any new regula-
tions, thereby nullifying acts of Congress that the President considers too
costly. "The result is a return, to some extent, to autocratic government,"
says Kenneth Culp Davis, one of the country's leading experts on adminis-
trative law, writing in the April issue of the Tulane Law Review.
And what is the purpose of inserting autocracy into the American re-
public? To "reduce the burdens of existing and future regulations," says the
White House, but that is all it dares say in public. Like the arms buildup,
like domestic snooping, this "good," too, thrives best out of sight of the
electorate. Under the direction of the budget office the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission in June suspends some of its most important safety regulations
without the knowledge of the millions of people who live near nuclear
power plants. Under the control of the White House the Environmental
Protection Agency turns into a massive conspiracy against the environ-
mental protection laws. The Times, reporting on the 1983 congressional
testimony of John E. Daniel, the second-ranking official at the EPA, notes
that the budget office "tried to dictate regulations to the agency, threat-
ened reprisals, urged that cost factors be built into health rules when the
law prohibited them and showed proposed rules changes to officials of the
industries being regulated before the changes were available to the public."
With the White House acting as influence-peddler-exactly what the
American Law Division's report on Executive Order 12291 had warned of
a year earlier-a field report on dioxin contamination is altered to delete
a sentence reading: "Dow's discharge represents the major source, if not
the only source, of TCDD contamination" in Saginaw Bay, Michigan.
EPA field officials are ordered not to submit a new report until Dow "en-
dorsed" it.
These are public benefactions so desperately in need of public inatten-
tion that when a congressional subcommittee subpoenas EPA documents
White House another way to clamp down on the campus and the laborato- on October 21, the President is compelled once again to invoke his perso n-
rv and the Freedom of Information Act. The new category has the adds- al constitution. On November 30 he declares that "the Constitutional
tional advantage of greatly thickening the wall of secrecy surrounding the doctrine of separation of powers" obliges him to withhold from Congress
Administration's wasteful, fraud-ridden military buildup. the documentary evidence of the agency's efforts to give America "cost-
The new secrecy order treats history itself as a menace to national securi-
ty. The systematic declassification of documents, begun by President Ei-
senhower in 1953, is brought to a virtual halt, and its unprecedented
antithesis-reclassification-is introduced in its place. Under the new or-
der government officials can reach into the public domain and re-conceal
what is already public. After high-ranking officials use classified informa-
tion to present their version of events, the government can now deny that
information to others. "We are encouraging the distortion of history," says
Anna K. Nelson, representing the American Historical Association at the
March 10 hearings. "The knowledge that documents and records are
equally available to all has kept many a participant an honest observer.
This provision has no place in a representative democracy."
The one-day hearing makes no public stir. But the White House is still
anxious to preserve its "conservative" reputation. At a meeting of the
National Newspaper Association on March 14, Ed Meese blames the
draft order on "overzealous bureaucrats"; but the President signs it just the
same. On April 1, armed with their new authority to suppress private re-
search, Pentagon officials telephone the technical journal Spectrum and
effective" toxic waste dumps. The "dissemination of such documents out-
side the Executive Branch," says the President, "would impair my solemn
responsibility to enforce the law."
Under White House control the Department of Labor nullifies the occu-
pational safety laws by cutting down on inspections, reducing fines, weak-
ening the old rules, and delaying the enactment of needed new ones. The
department also quietly undermines a law ensuring fair employment oppor-
tunities for Vietnam veterans by suspending key regulations without public
notice or comment. According to the department it is "unnecessary and
contrary to the public interest" to let the American people know how their
President treats the veterans of a war he is trying to glorify.
In June the Department of Health and Human Services proposes that all
changes in rules affecting the aged, the poor, the young, and the disabled
henceforth be promulgated without public notice or comment. A cost-
benefit analysis has persuaded the department that the "delay" caused by
public participation in the rule-making process "outweighlsl the benefits of
receiving public commnment." Alas for democracy, it cannot make the poor
run on time.
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A few weeks before making its secrecy proposal the department had di-
rect experience of the utter incompatibility of democracy and cost-benefit
analysis. In May it tried unsuccessfully to save nearly $1 billion by gutting a
program that provides preventive medical checkups to 2 million poor chil-
dren. When this came to public notice, the shysters of "cost.effectiveness"
had a hard time explaining why an ounce of prevention was no longer
worth a pound of cure, this being the well-known result of a cost-benefit
analysis made by humanity at large and not readily rescinded except in the
dark. What an enemy of the "good" is common humanity!
As long as a free people can bring the executive to court, however, presi-
dential power is under constraint, for the courts do not yet recognize the
new legislative system. In July, Federal District Judge Harold Greene stops
the Department of Labor from nullifying two laws it considers too costly
to enforce. "It is not for the Secretary of Labor or his subordinates to
make that judgment," wrote judge Greene. "Under our constitutional
system, policy decisions are not made by Government administrators;
they are made by the Congress." What an enemy of the "good" is the
old Constitution!
To free arbitrary power from the constraints of the courts, the Admin-
istration tries to cut off the courts from the people. To prevent the citizenry
from enforcing the civil rights laws themselves, the Administration will try
in 1983 (in vain) to amend those provisions that allow people to sue the
government in order to compel it to enforce those laws. To make it finan-
cially difficult for the public-spirited to uphold the law against lawless bu-
reaucracy the Administration will also try in 1983, again in vain, to curtail
government payment of fees to lawyers who vindicate the law. To weaken
the "habit" of judicial review the Administration rails at the federal courts
for what Attorney General William French Smith calls "constitutionally
dubious and unwise intrusions into the legislative domain"-the domain
which the White House itself has lawlessly invaded. To put the old, the
young, the poor, and the disabled beyond the protection of the courts the
Department of Health and Human Services announces in June that in the
future the internal rules it issues to administer its programs will not create
any rights or benefits that are "enforceable" in court. '
To deprive the poor of their legal rights, the White House asks Congress
in November to abolish the Legal Services Corporation, which provides
the poor with counsel to help them protect their rights in court. When
Congress refuses, the White House installs its own agents at the corpora-
tion. In late November they unfurl their handiwork: pettifogging rules
(later dropped) that make it almost impossible for Legal Services lawyers to
sue on behalf of large groups of people, the single most efficient weapon in
vindicating the legal rights of the poor. And what is the "cost-effective.
ness" of compelling the victims of official injustice to sue for their rights
one at a time? The inestimable "benefit" of liberating lawless power from
the constraints of the law.
n January 24 the budget office proposes a change in its Circular
A-122-"Cost Principles for Nonprofit Organizations." What is proposed
are new accounting rules for the thousands of private organizations that
receive federal grants to carry out government functions in lieu of an ex-
tended bureaucracy. The new rules say, in effect, that all such organiza-
tions-from the Girl Scouts and the lzaak Walton League to the
Association for Retarded Citizens-must forfeit federal funds ifthey speak
out on public affairs.
'Although a final regulation was never published, this proposal, as well as the one stipulat-
ing that the department's rules he promulgated in eeret, remains on the agenda
The new rules "would inhibit the free flow of information between these
parties and all levels of government," says an angry Chamber of Com-
merce. "Operated in tandem, the scope and inherent vagueness of the
terms'political advocacy' and'unallowable costs' can easily become a giant
pincers for the stifling of the free and unfettered exercise of First Amend-
ment rights," says the National Association of Manufacturers, which finds
itself puzzled at the spectacle of the White House discouraging "citizen in-
volvement in the political process." Representatives of both organizations
testify on March 1 before the one forum left in Washington for a republi-
can opposition to arbitrary power: the House Government Operations
Committee, under the chairmanship of Jack Brooks of Texas.
Frank Horton of New York, the senior Republican on the committee,
cannot hide his anger or his shame. "We are talking about what a citizen
can do with his own money on time not paid for by the Government... .
]The revision] says that if he receives any money through an award based
on cost, he cannot express an opinion on public matters and still be com-
pensated. Mr. Chairman, this is positively outrageous. I cannot believe
that this could possibly be the intent of the Administration, and yet the
language is painfully clear."
Two weeks after issuing its proposed revision of A-122 (which will be
only slightly modified before being adopted in April 1984), the President
signs an executive order banning "any organization that seeks to influence
... the determination of public policy" from participating in the feder-
al government's lucrative on-the-job charity drives. A month later, the
White House calls for the elimination of postal subsidies for the blind, li-
braries, schools, and other nonprofit organizations.
Why does the White House wish to silence so many thousands of public-
spirited people who have firsthand knowledge of the effects of its policies?
The question answers itself: so that the American people cannot judge for
themselves the costs and benefits of those policies, and so cannot hold the
Administration accountable. That is why the Administration stops fund-
ing the publication of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which
assesses the effects of its welfare policies; stops publishing the Annual Sur-
vey of Child Nutrition and the Annual Housing Survey; stops publishing
several bulletins on occupational health hazards; stops issuing warnings
about newly discovered toxics; withholds health care data from local
officials; and eliminates or reduces "at least 50 major statistical programs,"
the Government Operations Committee reports, on such matters as nurs-
ing homes, medical care expenditures, monthly department store sales,
and labor turnover.
According to Administration spokesmen, the "free market" will attend
to these things, so the government need not inform the electorate about
them. But how can the American people judge the merits of the "free mar-
ket" if they are kept in ignorance of its effects? This question, too, answers
itself. The market is not for the American people to judge. Although it is
the highest good of all, the market, too, apparently thrives best in darkness.
On a radio program devoted to "Defunding Anti-Family Organizations,"
Michael Horowitz, general counsel of the budget office and mastermind of
the A-122 revision, describes the kind of Americans the White House fa-
vors: "Americans who live in real-world communities, have real-world
jobs, real-world concerns, who are not political in character."
Under Justice Department guidelines issued on March 7, Americans
who are "political in character" are put within easy reach of police surveil-
lance. In addition to permitting FBI agents to infiltrate political organiza-
tions in the cause of "domestic security," the new guidelines allow the
Bureau to collect "publicly available information" on any American it
chooses to monitor for any reason whatever. Thanks to an Administration
which pretends to oppose official oppression, any citizen who emerges from
"real-world" obscurity now falls within the purview of, and possibly into
the files of, the federal police power.
Contrnued
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On March I I the White House attempts to do for national security af-
fairs what A-122 was meant to do for domestic affairs: stop up the mouths
of those who know too much. Under the President's National Security De-
cision Directive 84, all government employees with access to "sensitive
compartmentalized information" must sign contracts which,ytrbject them
to an extraordinary system of official censorship. If they wisifto publish a
book, an article, or even submit a letter to the editor containing "any in-
formation" related to "intelligence"-a category vast enough to take in
most of the domain of national security-they must first show it to the
government for review, and, if need be, alteration, not only while in office
but for the rest of their lives'
The White House does not give a clear-cut justification for this system of
lifetime censorship, possibly because there is none. The Administration's
statement accompanying the directive describes it as both a harmless effort
to give government policy "a greater consistency" and an urgent effort to
prevent the unauthorized disclosure of important state secrets. The press
briefing at the justice Department borders on the theater of the absurd.
"How many employees are you talking about here?" a reporter asks an
official.
"SCI access is given out only to a handful of employees."
"Hundreds, thousands?"
"It would probably be classified."
"Can you provide one or two examples of concrete damage to national
security" from unauthorized disclosures?
No, he cannot: "When we officially confirm information that has been
disclosed in this manner, it compounds the damage."
The truth comes out later and the truth is devastating. The "handful" is
128,000 officials. And, according to the State Department, the total num-
ber of damaging "leaks" conveyed through the writings of government offi-
cials during the preceding five years is none, not one.
"Well, I just can't believe it," says Lucas A. Powe Jr., a professor of law
at the University of Texas, in testimony before a Government Operations
subcommittee. "It is as if in coming up with the proposal the Administra-
tion weighed censorship in the balance as a positive good instead of a pre-
sumptively unconstitutional evil."
That their highest officials might be the enemies of their freedom
Americans find hard to believe, but such is the case. On a pretext so false
its falsity cries out to heaven, the White House is determined to censor
the writings of the only class of citizens who can effectively challenge a
president in affairs of state-all those retired State and Defense De-
partment officials whose character and patriotism cannot be impugned
and whose judgments command attention even when they run counter to a
president's. The Administration is apparently bent on turning the White
House into the unopposable voice of Authority.
On February 24 a prizewinning Canadian film about the horrors of nu-
clear war is labeled "political propaganda" by the justice Department and
placed under the restrictions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of
1938. The name of every organization and individual to whom the film is
distributed must be filed with the government. On March 3 the State De-
partment denies a visa to Salvador Allende's widow, who had been invited
to address church groups in San Francisco. It is "prejudicial to United
States interests," says the department, to let a few Americans hear, per-
haps, that the present Chilean regime is a tyranny.
On April 1 the Department of Energy introduces a new kind of official
secret. According to the department's proposed regulations, which were
later modified, a vast mass of published books, articles, and reports must
nuclear information" fall into unauthorized hands could be fined up to
$100,000 for failing to help the government achieve what Stanford Uni-
versity, in a stinging rejoinder, calls "the futile and repugnant object of
making known and unclassified information secret."'
On May 25 the President fires three members of the six-person Civil
Rights Commission-something no other president has ever done-for
daring to monitor the Administration's non-enforcement of the civil rights
laws. At a single stroke the commission's statutory independence is de-
stroyed, but the White House has little patience for contrary voices.
Americans have a right to speak out about their "concerns," says the Presi-
dent at a press conference in mid-June, "but let us always remember, with
that privilege goes a responsibility to be right."
On September 12 the White House takes another step toward centraliz-
ing control of government information. The budget office proposes that all
government agencies must consider that "information is not a free good
but a resource of substantial economic value and should he treated as
such." In light of this, they must submit to the White House clear proof
that any information they make public passes the supreme test of "cost-
benefit analysis."" Half in shock, half in anguish, the American Library
Association asks how such an analysis can properly be made. "What is the
dollar benefit of an informed citizenry?"
"You can't let your people know" what the government is doing, the
President explains at an October 19 press conference, "without letting the
wrong people know-those who are in opposition to what you're doing."
(On October 20 the Senate votes 56 to 34 against lifetime censorship for
government officials.) Reporters are so inured to the President's artless
press conference remarks that nobody asks him why the people's right to
know chiefly benefits "the wrong people."
The meaning of the President's remarks becomes clear on October 25,
when U.S. forces invade the island of Grenada and the American press is
barred from the scene at gunpoint, forced to huddle on a nearby island, and
compelled to transmit to the public only official lies and evasions. This
wanton act of government censorship reveals "a certain mind-set" among
the nation's leaders, Time angrily observes: "the notion that events can be
shaped by their presentation, that truth should be a controlled substance."
Indeed so, but this flaunting of censorship reveals something more than a
"mind-set": it reveals a determination to habituate a free people to official
news and to regarding a free press as the national enemy. "It seems as
though the reporters are always against us. They're always seeking to report
something that's going to screw things up," says Secretary of State George
Shultz, "pandering," writes Safire on December 18, "to the most danger-
ous I-Am-the-State instincts of his boss."
And who is "us," Secretary Shultz is asked. "Our side militarily-in oth-
er words, all of America."
IV. January-October 1984
n early January the Administration makes its first crude attempt to
revive seditious libel-the ancient crime of speaking ill of the govern-
ment. On January 3 Justice Department officials obtain a court order bar-
ring a publisher from printing a legal opinion of a Colorado judge because
the department thinks it is "slanderous" to three of its lawyers. Three
weeks later the sear of notoriety forces the U.S. Court of Appeals in Den-
ver to recollect what country it is in, but America has had its first inkling of
henceforth be concealed from the public if they could possibly contribute 'The final regulations, passed in April 1985, allow the DOE to restrict access to such
to "nuclear terrorism." Any library that lets such "unclassified controlled information only if it is contained in material acquired by a library after that date.
On February 17, 19`34, the President orders the t ensorship provisions:lof NSUD-n4 "Although formal guidelines were never issued, this has become the Administration's
"held in abeyance. " hut dux s not revoke them. de facto policy.
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a future in which the executive may punish with prior restraint the sin of
slandering the state.
In January, too, the Administration experiments with new ways to deter
government officials from disclosing classified information to the public.
"Leaks are consensual crimes," says Acting Assistant AtttSmey General
Richard Willard. Willard shows Senate aides the draft of unprecedented
legislation that would authorize the federal government to punish with
crushing financial penalties any person with access to classified informa-
tion-more than 4 million people-who divulges the most trivial fact
concealed within the bloated empire of national security.'
The Administration takes a parallel step against leaks in late January,
when two Air Force investigators approach Professor Jeffrey Richelson of
American University an hour before he is to deliver a technical paper on
arms control verification to an academic audience in Los Angeles. They
warn Richelson that if he delivers his paper, he could be prosecuted under
the 1917 Espionage Act." On February 3 the Washington Post reports that
FBI agents have warned two former National Security Agency officials that
their research into the downing of the Korean Air Lines jet "technically
violated" the Espionage Act.
The word "technically" betrays the Administration's intention. It seeks
to turn a law aimed at the transfer of vital secrets to a foreign power with
the intent to harm the country into an instrument for prosecuting those
who transfer information to the public with the intent to help the country.
The great advantage of this law over other methods of stopping leaks, notes
a confidential White House memorandum circulated in 1982, is that it
"could also be used to prosecute a journalist who knowingly receives and
publishes classified documents or information."
Behind the President's "leakomania," as Safire calls it, lies the force of a
very practical necessity. Ordinary means of concealment can no longer
hide the scandalous truth about the Administration's trillion-dollar mili-
tary buildup; it is a colossal squandering of the public wealth. The estab-
lished secrecy rules are good enough to silence time-servers, but they
cannot prevent men of honor from supplying Congress, the press, and the
public with the sordid evidence of wanton waste-the evidence that "the
vast majority of money we put into major weapons systems is pure waste
and inefficiency," according to Senator Charles E. Grassley, a conserva-
tive Iowa Republican; the evidence that "we are not buying airplanes, we
are buying the contractors' costs," according to A. Ernest Fitzgerald, the
Air Force official who gave "whistle-blowing" a good name; the evidence
that the entire weapons buildup "had nothing to do with a strategy, noth-
ing to do with a program of what we needed for defense," according to
Richard A. Stubbing, who served in the budget office as deputy chief of
national security during the first years of the buildup.
To help it conceal this hideous engine of waste from the American peo-
ple, Congress has quietly handed the Department of Defense extensive
new secrecy powers. Slipped into the voluminous folds of the Omnibus
Defense Authorization Act of 1984 is a provision that gives the Pentagon
statutory authority "to withhold from public disclosure any technical data
with military or space application" that could not be released to a foreigner
without obtaining an export license. After all, why should Americans have
a right to know any more than foreigners? We are a thousand times more
dangerous than foreigners. This congressional assault on accountable gov-
ernment gives the executive the authority to conceal the entire domain of
national defense from the American people. But the Pentagon waits until
'The White House never formally proposed this legislation, in large part because the de-
tails of Willard's draft were reported in the press, generating widespread public opposition.
"Richelson delivered his paper anyway. He later provided the Justice Department with
evidence that it was based on published information, and a decision was made not to
prosecute.
after the election to exercise its new powers.
6
Secrecy rules are one thing; enforcing them is another. Hence the im-
portance the Administration places on expanding the Espionage Act.
On October 1 the Administration takes the next step toward the act's
expansion when it arrests a civilian Navy official for selling three classified
satellite photographs of a Soviet aircraft carrier under construction to a
venerable British military magazine. There is no question of disclosing in-
formation damaging to our national security. The Defense Department
releases satellite photographs whenever it suits the Administration's pur-
poees. Nor is there anything surreptitious about the sale: the arrested offi-
cial, Samuel Loring Morison, is an editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, and the
photographs were duly published in August. The only question is whether
the Administration can find a judge willing to rule that the Espionage Act
is in fact an official secrets act under which no one has been convicted in
sixty-seven years.
V. November 1984-November 1985
he President's great popular victory in November does not recon-
cile the Administration to the habits of freedom and popular government.
It merely gives the President and his faction greater power to besiege and
subvert them.
On November 20 the Defense Department exercises its new statutory
power to conceal itself from the country. It issues a directive stating that
every Pentagon official must henceforth withhold from the public all
"technical data," including any pertaining to "contractor performance
evaluation"-fraud-and "results of test and evaluation of... military
hardware"-waste-if such data "are likely to be disseminated outside the
Department of Defense." In other words, if the American people want to
know about something, then, for that very reason, it must be kept from
their knowledge. That is the plain English of the regulations. The maxi-
mum penalty for enlightening the country is ten years' imprisonment and a
$100,000 fine for violating the export control laws, now distorted beyond
recognition.
The great Administration engine for squandering the public wealth, the
machine which generates crushing budget deficits, which in turn serve as a
permanent force for reducing "social spending," has at last become what it
so desperately needs to be: a single, all-embracing secret of state. Wanton
waste, under heavy concealment, will enforce needless sacrifice, and the
sovereignty of a free people will be crushed under a fabricated necessity.
Social programs will be abolished, public benefits reduced, social services
left to decay; and a blinded electorate will no more understand why their
country has grown so impoverished than a savage can understand why the
sun rolls around in the heavens.
Also in the aftermath of the election the Administration reveals what
the President means by "the responsibility to he right." It will try to make
falsehood a federal crime. A writer named Antoni Gronowicz has pub-
lished a book about Pope John Paul II, God's Broker, containing extensive
interviews with the pontiff which the Vatican says are fictitious. This is
gross falsehood-the pope says so-and this the White House is deter-
mined to punish. An Administration which thinks it is oppressive to pre-
vent corporations from poisoning the air thinks it is the government's duty
to prevent an author from misleading a few readers. The Justice Depart-
ment seeks a grand jury investigation in Philadelphia, hoping to have
Gronowicz indicted, not precisely for publishing a book containing false-
hoods but for violating the mail fraud statutes.'
In late November the Administration finds a still more potent waN to
'A grand jury was convened, and ordered Gronowicz to turn over his notes. He refused,
and has asked the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings nrdenng that he do 111.
fmb1111Qd
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/7,
curtail the freedom of the press in America The CIA files a complaint
with the Federal Communications Commission against the American
Broadcasting Company that could r snlr in the Inc of its hrn.tr~,r I . v.
for airing a false charge, later retracted, against the agency. Since the
CIA's unprecedented suit has the backing of the White H t se tile FCC:
proves obliging. Even though it eventually rules against the CIA, the FCC
declares that any agency of the government henceforth has the right to file
such a complaint against a broadcaster (under the Fairness Doc tine) if it_
feels it has been unfairly abused on the airwaves. Thus has the FCC rein-
vented seditious libel. By bureaucratic fiat it is now an offense punishable
by the threat of extinction for any broadcaster to treat the executive
branch unfairly-in the judgment of r e executive branch.
As long as Americans still cherish a free press, however, the Adminis-
tration cannot successfully subjugate the news media. Accordingly, the
Administration renews its effort to rum the people against their own news-
papers. Another flaunted drama of censorship provides the instrument. On
December 17 the Defense Department calls in the press to announce that
the scheduled January 23 flight of the space shuttle Discovery will be treat-
ed as a military secret of the gravest kind. The public learns that Secretary
of Defense Caspar Weinberger has personally asked the Associated Press,
NBC News, and Aviation Week & Space Technology to suppress their stories
about the shuttle mission in the interests of "national security"-and that
the three organizations have dutifully complied. The public learns, text,
that even "speculation" about the purpose of the flight is forbidden and
will be punished by a full-out investigation of the offender-a truly ex-
traordinary threat.
This sudden, officious announcement stuns the Washington press corps.
There is simply no warrant for such elaborate secrecy. The military purpose
of the shuttle flight has been publicly available information for months. To
kill a news story merely because the government orders it would set a "dan-
gerous precedent," warns John Chancellor on the NBC Nightly News. True
enough, but the Administration evidently wants something more than
that servile precedent. Its insolent warning against "speculation" is a goad
to defiance, "an enticement for people to go after what the mission was
about and then to publish what they found out," as former Defense Secre-
tary James R. Schlesinger tells the press.
Taking up the gauntlet, the Washington Post refuses to keep secret what
is not a secret and publishes a story about the shuttle flight based on infor-
mation from available sources. Secretary Weinberger denounces the paper
for daring to "violate requests" from the Pentagon. Disobedience to a gov-
ernment decree, he says, "can only give aid and comfort to the enemy."
This is more than mere calumny; it is the precise wording of the constitu-
tional definition of treason, and it suggests a motive for the shuttle affair.
What the Administration has done is stage a little morality play before the
eyes of the country, a corrupting drama in which the servility of the press
appears in the bright garb of patriotism and the freedom of the press in the
black hues of treason.
Some weeks later the Administration stages a second act of the vicious
play when the Times publishes a secondhand story by Leslie Gelb against
the wishes of the State Department. The department's Bureau of Politico-
Military Affairs orders Gelb ostracized and ostentatiously denounces him
for "willingly, willfully, and knowingly" publishing information "harmful
and damaging to the country." That the information has been previously
published is irrelevant, the department explains. "The Secretary of De.
fense and Secretary of Stare and National Security Adviser were against
printing it," and this alone makes it treasonable conduct in the new tyran-
nized republic. As Flovvd Abrams, the famed constitutional lawyer, ob-
serves, the Administration is "attacking the legitimacy of the press, not it,
performance."
Under the Administration', n, ,werful assault the pr,,,. .'n iws timid. The
Morison case passes through various preliminary stages but the public hears
almost nothing about it. Tyranny is not "news." That is the new rule of
American journalism. The truth is, the press is too frightened to write
about what frightens it. It cowers in dread of being called "too powerful."
For the myth of media power, which the media never contested in their
salad days, is now being used by the enemies of liberty to incite the people
against a free press.
On January 4, without the slightest public notice, the White House is-
sues an executive order that concentrates still greater legislative power in
the hands of its budget office. Under Executive Order 12498 the White
House gives itself the formal power not only to impose cost-benefit analysis
but to review, control, approve, or suppress any agency activity "that may
influence, anticipate, or could lead to the commencement of rule-making
proceedings at a later date." Regardless of the laws they are supposed to
implement, the executive agencies of government can now do virtually
nothing the White House disapproves of. For the first time in American
history a president has the formal power to turn acts of Congress into mere
husks for secret White House legislation. Under the new executive order
the president also has the unprecedented power to bar any executive agen-
cy from even studying anything the White House prefers to leave unstud-
ied. No official information that might allow the American people to
question the wisdom of a president may be collected without that presi-
dent's permission-which will be given or withheld in secret. Under this
new dispensation the old, decentralized executive branch stands on the
verge of extinction. The traditional bulwark against presidential despotism
has been reduced to silence and servility.
On March 12 a federal judge in Baltimore, deciding a motion in the
Morison case, rules that the Espionage Act applies to unauthorized disclo.
sures of classified information to the press. According to judge Joseph H.
Young, "the danger to the United States is just as great when this informa-
tion is released to the press as when it is released to an agent of a foreign
government." For decades it was plain to Congress and the courts that the
vital secrets of 1917 hear little resemblance to the half-billion "classified"
documents concealed by the modem security establishment. For decades it
was evident to everybody that informing the American people is different
from informing a foreign government, that the wish to enlighten the coun-
try is different from the intent to harm it. But this Administration believes
that an enlightened citizenry is a menace to the state. Thanks to judge
Young's ruling,, patriotic officials may no longer menace the great engine of
Pentagon waste. Morison himself faces up to forty years in
prison for putting three harmless photographs into a well-
known magazine.
magine a faction that would throw honorable men into prison so that
it could impoverish the public treasury with impunity and bend a sovereign
people to its will, not just this year and the next, but long after it has fallen
from power. Imagine a venerable republic, the hope of the world, where
the habits of freedom are besieged, where self-government is assailed,
where the vigilant are blinded, the well informed gagged, the press hound-
ed, the courts weakened, the government exalted, the electorate degraded,
the Constitution mocked, and laws reduced to a sham so that, in the full-
ness of time, corporate enterprise may regain the paltry commercial free-
dom to endanger the well-being of the populace. Imagine a base-hearted
political establishment, "liberal" as well as "conservative;' Democratic as
well as Republican, watching with silent, protective approval this lunatic
assault on popular government. Imagine a soft-spoken demagogue, faithful
to nothing except his own fiction, being given a free hand to turn Anieri-
cans into the enemies of their own ancient liberties. Imagine this and it
becomes apparent at last how a once-great republic can be despoiled
in broad daylight before tl? mnseeing eves of its friends. a
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