Government Secrecy Causes Conspiracy Theories
February 14, 2021 Consortium News
Save Due to the CIA's refusal to be transparent about the exact nature of
its involvement in Syria, people are left to fill in the knowledge gaps
with their own speculation, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
Aerial view of CIA headquarters.in Langley, Virginia. (Carol M. Highsmith,
Wikimedia Commons)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with
Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with
insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court's previous ruling in
favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.
As Sputnik's Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite
the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the Central
Intelligence Agency's activities in Syria for years, and despite a US
president having openly tweeted about those activities.
"In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is
widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to
the press for even greater scrutiny," Artyukhina writes, calling to mind the
Julian Assange quote "The overwhelming majority of information is classified
to protect political security, not national security."
Morgan Artyukhina @LavenderNRed
My latest: Despite extensive reporting by the @WSJ & CIA-vetted @nytimes
confirming it happened, a DC court has sided with the @CIA, finding that a
Trump tweet doesn't constitute proof that it funded al-Qaeda in #Syria. DC
Court Denies FOIA Documents, Ruling Trump Tweet Wasn't Admission CIA Funded
Al-Qaeda in SyriaLast fall, the US Department of Justice refused to
declassify all documents related to the Russiagate investigation, saying a
tweet by then-US President Donald Trump.sptnkne.ws
February 13th 2021
21 Retweets55 Likes
The CIA's brazen collaboration with dangerous extremist factions seeking to
topple Damascus, and its equally brazen refusal to provide the public with
any information about the extent of its involvement in Syria from the
earliest stages of the violence in that nation onwards, will necessarily
provide fodder for conspiracy theories.
It is public knowledge that the CIA was involved in the Syrian war to some
extent, it is public knowledge that the CIA has a well-documented history of
doing extremely evil things, and it is public knowledge that the US
government has long sought control over Syria. Due to the agency's refusal
to be transparent about the exact nature of its involvement in that nation,
people are left to fill in the knowledge gaps with their own speculation.
Of course they will do this. Why wouldn't they? Why would anyone give the
lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging,
warmongering, psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency the benefit of the
doubt and assume their actions in Syria have been benevolent just because
the hard facts have been hidden behind a wall of government secrecy?
Yet they will be expected to. Anyone with a sufficient degree of influence
who comes right out and says the CIA knowingly armed violent jihadists with
the goal of orchestrating regime change in Syria will be attacked as a crazy
conspiracy theorist by the narrative managers of the establishment media. If
their words are really disruptive to establishment narratives, there will be
calls to deplatform, unemploy, and ban them from social media.
And really such is the case with all the melodramatic garment rending about
the dangers of conspiracy theories today. All the fixation on the way
unregulated speech on the internet has contributed to the circulation of
conspiracy theories conveniently ignores the real cause of those theories:
government secrecy.
If the most powerful government in the world were not hiding a massive
amount of its behavior behind increasingly opaque walls of secrecy, people
would not need to fill in the gaps with theories about what's happening,
because there would be no gaps; they would simply see what's happening.
"But Caitlin!" one might object. "How could America engage in all its
military operations around the world if it didn't keep information about its
behaviors a secret?"
Exactly, my smooth-brained friend. Exactly.
Government secrecy is indeed necessary for winning wars. Government secrecy
is also necessary for starting those wars in the first place. US government
agencies have an extensive history of using false pretenses to initiate
military conflicts; if they could not hide the facts behind a veil of
government opacity, the public would never engage in them.
The American people would never have allowed their sons to go to Vietnam if
they'd known the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie. They'd never have sent
their sons and daughters to invade Iraq if they'd known weapons of mass
destruction were a lie. They would lose the support of the public, and the
international community would refuse to back them.
Image
Protecting the lives of foreign military and intelligence personnel is the
primary argument against government transparency in the United States, a
premise which takes it for granted that there need to be foreign military
and intelligence personnel at all. The only reason the lives of troops and
intelligence officers would be endangered without massive walls of
government secrecy is because those personnel are out there facilitating
imperialist acts of mass murder and tyranny. The argument is essentially
"Well we can't tell you the truth about what's happening in our government,
because it would mean we'd have to stop doing extremely evil things."
The argument that the internet needs strict censorship to eliminate
dangerous conspiracy theories takes it as a given that simply eliminating
government secrecy is impossible, which in turn takes it as a given that the
U.S. government cannot simply stop inflicting grave evils around the world.
Our ability to share information with each other online is therefore
ultimately being increasingly choked off by monopolistic Silicon Valley
megacorporations because no one in charge can fathom the idea of the United
States government ceasing to butcher human beings around the world.
That is the real underlying argument over internet censorship today. Should
people have free access to information about what their own government is
doing, or should their government be permitted to do evil things in secret
while people who form theories about what they're doing are shoved further
and further away from audibility? That's the real debate here.
The powerful should not be permitted to keep secrets from the public. They
should not be permitted to jail journalists who try to reveal those secrets
to the public, and they should not be permitted to collaborate with
monopolistic corporations to censor people who form theories about those
secrets. The amount of secrecy you are entitled to should be directly
inverse to the amount of power that you have.
The US government has powerful agencies whose literal job is to conspire.
The fact that people are punished and condemned for forming theories about
how that conspiring might take place, even while those agencies are
completely lacking in transparency, is abusive.
If the government was not doing evil things in secret, then it wouldn't need
secrecy. If the government didn't have secrecy, there would be no conspiracy
theories. Stop pointing your attacks at powerless people who are just trying
to figure out what's going on in the world amidst a sea of government
secrecy and propaganda, and point them at the power structures that are
actually responsible for the existence of conspiracy theories in the first
place.
