That secrecy is righteously and routinely justified by American foreign policy-makers as necessary to the conduct of foreign affairs should be appalling. That the justification is swallowed whole by the American public simply demonstrates the effects upon the public of forty years of foreign policy being formulated and carried out in the shadows. In the words of Adam Yarmolinsky, "There are surprisingly few operationally significant questions for the policymaker as to which any public opinion, in my view, exists at all.” (8)
Secrecy in the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy – necessary to its ends and reflecting the deep-seated anti-democratic biases of foreign policymakers – has rendered the public inert and thereby given American foreign policy great stability and a probably even greater appearance of stability. It has also done more. Secrecy has played a further critical role in the selling of particular foreign policies, enabling policymakers to describe foreign situations in ways at variance with reality in order to command support for specific, usually military, policy options. This bludgeoning function of secret foreign intelligence may be beginning to come under the scrutiny of scholars of American history. (9)
The System of Criminal Justice. Trials of persons accused of violating the criminal law are public in the United States, but the trial stage is the only part of the system of criminal justice that is public. Secrecy is justified in pretrial stages – the investigative and indictment stages – to protect police "informant systems" and to insure defendants "a fair trial." The questionable primacy of the first justification and validity of the second aside, the main result of pretrial secrecy in the system of criminal justice is the concealment of illegitimate police activities – the infiltration and harassment that comprise the initial measures of political repression. Secrecy is justified in the post-trial stage – the incarceration state – by "custodial considerations;" convicted criminals, and indicted persons who cannot post bail, lose their right to free speech. The result is capital punishment without public cognizance, the final measure of political repression.
Consequently, only a tiny fraction of the system of criminal justice is public in the United States, and only a tiny fraction of the whole is non-violent and non-abusive. And the contours of the American war on political dissidents remain effectively veiled.
The Myth of the Open Society: Secrecy and the Newspress. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Upon the newspress falls the responsibility of sustaining the myth that the United States’ political economy is fundamentally open, with pockets of secrecy, rather than fundamentally defined by information differentials, with apertures of openness. But in fact the newpress is required by law, directly or indirectly, to respect all of the political eoconomy’s major concealments. These laws enact the least cumbersome form of censorship – prior exclusion – and deny the newpress access to four areas of conflict whose exposure would drastically undermine corporate power vis-a-vis the rest of American society. These four areas, with the paramount interests said to justify the exclusion of the newspress from each, are:
· Labor processes and corporate business practices (proprietary information).
· The system of criminal justice (integrity of police procedures, fair trial and custodial considerations.
· Domestic governmental proceedings (integrity of the deliberative process).
· Foreign affairs (national security).
In addition to its legal exclusion from forbidden areas, because the newspress' profits depend on the profits of its corporate advertisers, it has a financial interest in self-censoring reportage that would lessen its advertisers' profits. Since coverage of forbidden areas would undermine corporate power and wealth, the newspress does not provide such coverage.
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