[net-gold] Secrecy News -- 03/26/12
- From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:25:03 -0400 (EDT)
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Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:26:53 -0400
From: Steven Aftergood <saftergood@xxxxxxx>
To: saftergood@xxxxxxx
Subject: Secrecy News -- 03/26/12
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SECRECY NEWS
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from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2012, Issue No. 27
March 26, 2012
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Secrecy News Blog:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
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** "POWER AND CONSTRAINT" AND MUTUAL FRUSTRATION
** MILITARY INTELLIGENCE AND THE HUMAN TERRAIN SYSTEM
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"POWER AND CONSTRAINT" AND MUTUAL FRUSTRATION
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Constitutional government in the United States is alive and well. At least,
that is the hopeful conclusion of Jack Goldsmith's stimulating new book
"Power and Constraint."
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Power-and-Constraint/
Goldsmith, a former head of the Bush Administration's Office of Legal
Counsel, disputes the widely accepted view that traditional checks and
balances have been diminished by the war on terrorism. According to the
conventional account, the post-9/11 national security bureaucracy produced
waterboarding, detention without trial, unlawful surveillance and other
anomalies, while the enforcement of existing legal norms was crippled,
oversight bodies were passive and uncommunicative, secrecy was rampant and
impunity prevailed.
This is a superficial and erroneous perspective, Goldsmith contends. If
anything, he says, the mechanisms of oversight have flourished as never
before and their ongoing impact on national security policy has been
profound though not widely recognized.
While there has been nothing like a "truth commission" or a congressional
Church Committee investigation to provide a full public account and
evaluation of the government's conduct of the war on terrorism, other types
of oversight have more than filled the void, the author argues. He cites
the investigation of the CIA detention and interrogation program by CIA
Inspector General John Helgerson, and subsequent reviews.
"No CIA program -- including the ones that underlay the Iran-Contra scandal
and the many investigated during the Church and the Pike Committee hearings
-- has ever undergone so much extended or critical scrutiny. In the process
both the CIA and the accountability system governing it changed
fundamentally."
Similarly, through the efficacy of internal and external oversight, the use
of torture has been ended, habeas corpus has been reaffirmed, military
commissions have been brought under the authority of law, and so forth.
In Goldsmith's telling, the Presidency is a massively powerful Gulliver
which is nevertheless constrained by a growing number of Lilliputian threads
that limit executive freedom of action in new and unprecedented ways.
Journalists, military and civilian lawyers, human rights activists and civil
liberties organizations are portrayed as powerful and influential forces
that have materially altered national policies. This contention has all the
more weight -- and cannot be easily dismissed as (self-)flattery or wishful
thinking -- because the author does not particularly share the agenda of
these diverse actors.
"The dizzying and often painful swirl of investigations, lawsuits, reviews,
reports, and accusations... forces the government to recalibrate its
counterterrorism policies and accountability mechanisms constantly based on
ever-changing information and ever-changing legal and political
constraints," he writes.
Yet this does not mean that all is well, or that anyone can rest easy.
"Many... remain alarmed by what they see as endless and undefined war,
excessive presidential secrecy, insufficient judicial review of the
President's actions, too much surveillance, inadequate congressional
involvement, and many other evils of the post-9/11 presidency. They
continue to push hard against the government with lawsuits, FOIA requests,
accountability campaigns, and strident charges against public officials."
And, he says, that's good. "This is all very healthy for the presidency and
for national security."
No one that Goldsmith spoke with -- from executive branch and congressional
officials to reporters, human rights organizations, and public interest
activists -- believes that political conditions are optimized to advance
their own interests. "They all believed that they are on the losing end of
the stick in trying to influence U.S. counterterrorism policies and their
associated accountability mechanisms."
But what has been achieved, in the author's view, is "a harmonious system of
mutual frustration."
"Power and Constraint" has many virtues, beginning with its respectful
presentation of multiple contrasting perspectives on the issues it explores.
Goldsmith acknowledges the fundamental and destabilizing uncertainties that
preclude a final settlement of counterterrorism policy: "We do not know
precisely how serious the Islamist terrorist threat is, or the likelihood of
an attack, or its likely location or scale, or how much investment in what
types of policies would best prevent attacks."
Moreover, "even if all of the factual and legal questions were resolved, the
assessment of proper counterterrorism policies and accountability mechanisms
would still be guided by moral intuitions that are more diverse than we like
to admit. Many find waterboarding, military commissions, and detention
without trial repulsive; many others do not."
The book includes a nuanced discussion of leaks of classified information,
and of the role of secrecy more broadly, as well as the responses it has
engendered.
"There are costs and benefits to national security from both secrecy and
disclosure," Goldsmith observes, "but we do not have great tools to measure
or compare them."
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE AND THE HUMAN TERRAIN SYSTEM
The latest issue of the Army's Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin
is devoted to the Human Terrain System (HTS), which is a U.S. Army program
to conduct social and cultural studies in support of military operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bulletin provides theoretical and practical
accounts from HTS personnel in the field.
Thus, HTS analyst John Thorne writes that U.S. counterinsurgency operations
can themselves generate a violent reaction "by causing shifts in perceptions
of relative power or well-being, or through perceived threats to identity."
The Army released the latest Bulletin in response to a Freedom of
Information Act request.
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/army/mipb/2011_04.pdf
The Human Terrain System program has been controversial among some social
scientists who believe it wrongly subordinates scientific research to U.S.
military imperatives.
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_______________________________________________
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Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation
of American Scientists.
The Secrecy News Blog is at:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
To SUBSCRIBE to Secrecy News, go to:
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OR email your request to saftergood@xxxxxxx
Secrecy News is archived at:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html
Support the FAS Project on Government Secrecy with a donation:
http://www.fas.org/member/donate_today.html
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_______________________
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Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email: saftergood@xxxxxxx
voice: (202) 454-4691
twitter: @saftergood
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