By Cliff Montgomery – Feb. 20th, 2013
In The Origin of Totalitarianism, political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that “real power begins where secrecy begins.” If we accept this statement as true, then we must believe that any classification or withholding of government data is, by its nature, a reduction in a people’s ability to run their own country.
It’s a point to consider, as the Obama White House has been accused of withholding from Congress vital information on its nuclear policy.
“The administration has refused to share Presidential Policy Directive 11 [PPD 11] with the Congress,” former Senator from Indiana Richard Lugar declared last year at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. The transcript of that hearing has recently been published.
PPD 11 is an executive branch document that will help set the future structure and size of America’s nuclear arsenal.
The former Republican senator from Indiana stated that “our country is strongest and our diplomacy is most effective when nuclear policy is made by deliberate decisions in which both the legislative and executive branches fully participate.”
It should be pointed out that a number of administrations have withheld presidential directives from the American people and Congress, making it a practice that’s been going on for decades.
For instance, a General Accounting Office (GAO) study from 1992 revealed that Congress was often kept in the dark on when national security directives had been issued – and even on when or why the directives had been prepared. The report further stated that not a single one of the congressional panels charged with oversight of these directives “are regularly receiving copies.”
On the plus side, presidential directives “do not appear to be issued under statutory authority conferred by Congress and thus do not have the force and effect of law,” declared the GAO study. This makes them different than many executive orders, to offer one example.
But presidential directives indeed may be employed to establish and execute national policy, and also may be used to authorize the allocation of federal resources.
The executive branch’s secrecy thus makes it “impossible to satisfactorily determine how many NSDs [national security directives] issued make and implement U.S. policy and what those policies are,” pointed out the GAO in 1992.
That’s probably bad for us. It certainly seems bad for American democracy.
