Inform yourself. The responsibility of every good citizen.
But how?
Way back in a time before the Rabbit Hole opened up and we all passed into that other world where up is down and in is out, it seemed simple. You bought a morning newspaper or listened to the evening news. You thought you were getting the information you needed because you believed your government, church, even the corporations urging you to buy, wanted you to be informed.
It’s been a complex and highly sophisticated road from there to here. Today we are wise to ask ourselves who owns the information necessary to our decision-making? Who controls it and in defense of what interests? What does it mean for a citizenry to be informed? And who decides what and how much information is enough?
I can still remember when our government toppled a democratically elected administration in Guatemala, and when the CIA helped defeat Salvador Allende’s beautiful Popular Unity coalition in Chile. I knew many of the victims of both those horrors. And I can remember travesties closer to home: for example when 399 black men with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama were unknowingly used as lab rats; or nuclear tests that blew into Utah and began spawning two-headed sheep and people who had no history of cancer in their family began coming down with the disease in overwhelming numbers.
In these incidents and in many others, the public and those directly affected were kept from knowing the truth. They and their families were lied to. The truth divide was opening up at an amazing speed.
I also remember more complicated historic moments, when our government was involved in a much advertised good—helping to liberate Europe from the evil of Nazi fascism, for example—but certain events reflected less gloriously on our national morality. On May 13, 1939 the SS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg. On board were 937 Jewish refugees fleeing persecution from Nazi Germany after the terror of Kristallnacht, the pogrom of shop-burning and mass arrests the previous November. The St. Louis was one of the last ships to leave Nazi Germany before Europe was engulfed in war. In accordance with ever-tightening refugee regulations, the US refused entry to those almost one thousand Jews. They were returned to Europe, most of them to their deaths.
In the context of World War II, few knew about the SS St. Louis. In the context of Chile, many on the American Left did know and denounced the CIA’s crime, but we were dubbed “conspiracy theorists” and it took twenty years for the secret US government documents that proved us right to make their way into the public domain.
As information becomes more accessible, its manipulation obeys more complex rules of political expediency. We all remember George W. Bush getting General Colin Powell to take the administration’s fall when he sat before the UN General Assembly and displayed “evidence” that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In retrospect, that “evidence” was laughable. Yet it became the justification for our going to war with Iraq, a debacle causing so much loss of life, infrastructure and culture it may never be righted. No one would now argue that Iraq had WMDs. But no one has been tried for crimes against humanity, and Bush and company still maintain they “did the right thing.”
The power structure withholds information from the public in a number of different ways. Perhaps the most popular is the substitution of misinformation. If they are able to plant the story they want us to believe solidly and with enough documentation, there will be little room for the truth. That way, if and when the truth surfaces, they can simply refer us all back to the false storyline. If this fails, there is always denial. Simply deny the truth, backed up with all the authority of high political office. And then there is the waiting game. US news coverage focuses on one glitzy story after another, moving along at a speed that goes a long way toward getting the public to forget the loose ends and/or unanswered questions. Since most of these events happen to “someone else,” they are less likely to hold our attention in any case. And once the travesty has been committed, it is all but impossible to backtrack. No revelation of what went down in Chile could have undone the coup. As for Iraq, the line is “well, we’re there now so we have to finish what we started.”
These are general guidelines. There are many scientifically orchestrated misinformation aids as well. For example, most of us don’t question medical studies underwritten by the pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs sold to combat this or that illness. If we stopped for a moment to think, we might question the fact that the company profiting from the sale of the remedy sponsored the study to find out if that remedy is effective. But it’s all packaged in such a way as to keep us from asking such questions.
The most effective way two administrations have manipulated information has been through the Patriot Act, passed with almost no discussion right after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. For twelve years now, our government has been able to tap phones and emails, influence the press, control the flow of information, and silence the public’s demand to know, simply by declaring this secrecy to be in the interest of our national security. It has become unpatriotic to ask questions.
Two incidents, four decades apart, illustrate how we have moved from a nation whose major news media believed in freedom of information to a nation whose major media is tightly controlled by the government. In 1971, a RAND Institute specialist named Daniel Ellsberg decided to go public with thousands of pages of documentation on the Vietnam War that had been kept from the public domain. He and a colleague copied the material and delivered it to a number of powerful US newspapers, among them The New York Times and Washington Post. The Nixon administration did try to pressure the papers against publishing, but their editors believed this was information the American people needed and deserved. Publication of what became known as The Pentagon Papers went a long way toward educating the US public about what was really happening in Vietnam, and helped put an end to the war. Ellsberg was tried but freed. He eventually became a hero.
In 2010 Julian Assange launched WikiLeaks, to publish sensitive documents from anonymous sources including Pentagon and State Department memos and other material clarifying what was really happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. This included footage of US military attacks against civilians and other incriminating evidence. A young US Army Private First Class named Bradley Edward Manning, deployed to Iraq and increasingly uncomfortable with what he was finding out about the war, came across the WikiLeak documents and decided to make them public. He sought counsel from an officer who turned him in. The Army portrayed Manning as an unstable young man, confused about his sexuality, and demonized him in every possible way. After his arrest, he was held naked and incommunicado for long periods of time. Lawyers have said there is no question that he has been tortured. Assange ended up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, afraid of extradition to the United States. Manning’s trial is finally beginning as I write; there is every indication he will get life imprisonment, if not death. Not many US citizens consider either Assange or Manning to be heroes.
The Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks did nothing more than release documentation showing that the “official story” about the war of the moment was not the truth. In 1971, freedom of information and of the press in the United States made it possible for the public to accept and use the real information when it was released. By 2010 we have been coerced into believing there are things we should not know, and instead of being grateful to Assange and Manning we vilify them.
Interestingly, when Daniel Ellsberg gave a press conference on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of The Pentagon Papers, he pointed out that every one of Nixon’s crimes—crimes that cost him the presidency—are legal today.
So, can we really inform ourselves?
And if so, how?
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