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By Peter Dale Scott In times of war, as the saying goes, truth is the first casualty. In the crisis since September 11, our access to truth has been curtailed in many ways. Accepting guidance from the White House, the national U.S. press has failed to pick up important news stories from abroad, such as the London Guardian’s extraordinary report that a CIA agent met Osama bin Laden last July in Dubai. Among other stories ignored or long delayed by our major newspapers: a Green Party official was prevented by armed personnel from taking a flight to a party meeting in Chicago, and a university president denounced one of his professors for publishing an op-ed against U.S. actions in the Middle East. Even before the September attacks, the Bush administration had taken steps to restrict the public’s access to truths about our government. A startling example is last summer’s failed effort at illegal censorship by the State Department and the CIA. In an unprecedented move, the two agencies attempted to call back a book that had already been published and distributed to libraries around the country, including our Doe Library. It was Volume XXVI of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 1964–1968, and it contained U.S. documents about the huge massacre of leftists in Indonesia in 1965, prior to the overthrow of President Sukarno. For example, the volume mentions a “covert action program” in late 1964 (p. 183) to provide assistance to those prepared to act against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). This program sounds a lot like the vehicle for the covert U.S. aid that undoubtedly flowed to the Indonesian Army in the next few months for its murderous anti-PKI campaign. Various authors, including myself, have written about the marginal role in these events of UC Berkeley, under the aegis of the Ford Foundation. Both here and in Jakarta, our university offered economics training to civilians who advised the army before and during the overthrow and who then, as the so-called Berkeley Mafia, helped the generals run the country. In defending the recall, State and CIA claimed that the volume was politically sensitive at a moment when Sukarno’s daughter Megawati was assuming the Indonesian presidency. They were presumably referring to the documented aid supplied by the U.S. to the Indonesian Army’s Special Forces (now called Kopassus) as they went around the country organizing the massacre of civilians. Yet the audience they wanted to shield from this gruesome information could hardly have been the new President Megawati. It was more likely the U.S. Congress, which in 1999 voted to end training and other support for the Indonesian Army, in light of similar atrocities organized by Kopassus in East Timor. It has been a priority of the Bush administration to restore the aid. In justifying the recall of the volume, State and CIA did not mention that they were breaking the law. A statute requires the release of such records thirty years after the events in question, which in this case would have been 1998. The law is often broken because of delays in securing declassifications. But in the case of the Indonesia volume, and of another volume pertaining to Greece, the volumes had already been published. In the case of the disputed FRUS volume, a private research group, the National Security Archive (NSA), was able to purchase a copy before it was recalled, and posted it on their Web site. The government was faced with a situation where, as NSA director Tom Blanton wrote, “the toothpaste was out of the tube”; soon it wisely rescinded the recall. FRUS Volume XXVI can now safely be read in Doe Library. There is an ongoing struggle in this country between those who wish for a more closed and hierarchical society, and those who work for a more open and democratic one. In the last decade, under two presidents, the United States took unprecedented steps to open old government files to scrutiny by historians and the general public. One statute, signed by George Bush senior, mandated that future volumes of the State Department’s official records, the Foreign Relations of the United States, should include records of CIA covert operations. On the other side, there are many who wish to close off public access to government activities. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has used the events of September 11 to bolster the dubious case for criminalizing the disclosure of any classified information. It is clear that public pressure was responsible for the change in policy. Now, even the volume on Greece (which the CIA found so embarrassing it pressed to have the entire printing destroyed) is scheduled to be released this month. Once again, as so often, the American people have proven themselves to be wiser and more humane than those who govern them. Peter Dale Scott is a professor of English at Berkeley and a former Canadian diplomat. His latest book is the long poem Minding the Darkness. His Web site is http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/. |
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