Recently accelerated actions by the Bush administration to put a stop to the American public's access to government records is shocking and scary. It can plunge America into a tyrannical abyss rivaling the worst days of Nazi Germany or of the Stalinist Soviet Union. This is not an exaggeration.As Marie Cocco wrote in "What Is Bush Hiding?" (Washington Post, 4/30/06), "This administration is not the first to select for public airing secrets that are a political help, such as its claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, while seeking retribution against those who reveal secrets that [politically] hurt. The politics of revenge can be reversed in an election. The rewriting of history cannot [be reversed]."
Tyranny's Practical Consequences
Four decades ago when I was a graduate student working on my Ph.D. in chemistry, a communist point of view in the Soviet era scientific literature shocked me like few things before or since. The Soviet scientific literature had just condemned American Nobelist Linus Pauling's fundamental theory of resonance as a "dialectical materialistic error." In chemistry, this was the equivalent of saying the earth is the flat center of the universe. That and similar Soviet science policies such as Lysenko's condemnation of evolutionary theory in agriculture would dearly cost Russia and its satellites. Now, Bush's suppression of historical information is about to do the same thing.
More than Ronald Reagan's pronouncements, more than the fiction of the Strategic Defense Initiative (remember the multi billion dollar "Star Wars"?), it was Lysenko's wrong headed communist science applied to agriculture that brought the Soviet economy to its knees. Now, an analogous Bush tyranny by suppression of scholarly efforts to get at historical government records is about to do a similar thing to America.
Tyranny isn't bad merely because it feels bad, but as shown by Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, and Joseph Stalin's Communist Soviet Union, it inevitably falls apart. Now, George W. Bush is taking America down a similar path and, like other tyrants, he is accomplishing this by making certain kinds of information forbidden. By cutting off access to previous presidents' letters and government records, Bush is preventing political scientists and historical scholars from producing vital analysis of past policy failures which must not be repeated because the cost is too high.
Recently, in California, the Bush administration has been fighting in federal court to keep University of California political science professor Larry Berman from seeing 40-year-old documents from Lyndon Johnson's presidency.
Cocco writes, "This [Bush] government's argument today is that these are the crown jewels," Berman said in an interview. The author of several books on Johnson and the Vietnam War, Berman requested briefs from 1965 and 1968. Other presidential intelligence briefs from the Johnson White House were made public in the early 1990s and are posted on the Internet. We have not, since then, been attacked by the Vietnamese. Nor have we suffered from release of two briefs relating to terrorism that were published by the 9/11 investigative commission."
But true tyranny needs no justification other than its own power.
Seeds of Tyranny
On March 23, 2001 -- a few weeks after Bush's presidential inauguration -- Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel, instructed the official United States archivist to delay release of thousands of President Ronald Reagan's papers. The papers were scheduled to be made public under a Watergate-era law that provides for the release of unclassified presidential documents.
Gonzales' directive, written six months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, had given Bush an all-purpose justification for stopping public access to government information. The directive was followed by an executive order that would vastly expand Bush's power. Now he could not only keep his own presidential papers secret, but those of presidents before him -- perhaps especially those connected with his father, George Bush Senior. Bush claims this authority even if a former president wants them made public. The order is being challenged in court by scholars and journalists.
More recently, a veteran CIA officer was fired from her job and stands accused of leaking information about the U.S. maintaining secret overseas prisons for supposed terrorists. Her lawyer says she is not responsible for the leak and did not have access to the information that wound up in the Washington Post story on the secret prisons. Now, government investigators are on the trail of whoever it was that revealed to The New York Times the probably illegal (bypassing the courts and Congress) wiretapping of Americans authorized by the president. But don't expect "loyal" Republican and toothless Democrat legislators to straighten that one out anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Bush has allowed intelligence, military, and other government agencies to remove files at the National Archives, reclassifying thousands of documents that had previously been public, dating back to the Korean War and World War II. Having considered them benign for decades, the State Department had already published many of them in official histories. Archives officials announced in April that about a quarter of the documents had been reclassified by the Bush administration in a way that was "clearly inappropriate."
Gestapo Tactics?
In the name of national security, FBI agents recently rummaged through the files of the late Jack Anderson, the muckraking columnist. His most significant political exposés had been written in the 1960s and 70s. Bush's agents visited Mark Feldstein's home and flashed their badges saying they were there to retrieve "classified" documents. "I explained the stuff we have is really dusty -- old, ancient history," says Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor writing a book about Anderson based on his aging files.
Ironically, just a few weeks earlier, the U.S. government declared victory after its long effort to get Germany to open a trove of Holocaust files. The accuracy of history itself was at stake in obtaining information from those World War II papers. But now the Bush government is emulating what Hitler's Germany had done over 60 years ago: revising history with misleading public pronouncements called talking points.
Earlier in history, such lies had simply been called propaganda. Experience shows that publicly repeating talking points/propaganda to a mass audience can effectively form reality for up to half of the U.S. citizens -- for awhile. It worked for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin -- so then why not for Bush?
What remains to be seen: will America succumb to Bush's tyranny and suffer a fate similar to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Communist Soviet Union?
Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email Fred at Fred@interventionmag.com.