Governments have been involved in spying on their own citizens probably since the beginning of organized leadership. Whether it was a Lord who wanted to find the crops his tenants had hidden that he wanted to tax; the King who sensed rebellion or foreign attacks; the Church that wanted to suppress alternate beliefs – or science. Those in authority have believed that they have the right to prevent facts from being widely known, or to trap the unwary that dared to question their God-given right to lead.
Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, was perhaps the first thoroughly well-documented developer of the craft of spying and the use of agents provocateur. He died poor in 1590 because he spent all his efforts – and huge amounts of his own money – in protecting Elizabeth, the realm, and the Protestant faith. He cultivated a legion of intelligencers across both England and the Continent who were able to feed him commercial, military, and political secrets. The questionable downfall and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, for example, was achieved by his agents locating and opening written messages to and from the Queen and the decoding of them, and the oncoming Spanish Armada was known to him in both its strength and timing well before the fleet attempted to enter the English Channel.
Such penetration of the mails was one of those government powers that was tough to give up and was sure to become a British habit. The General Post Office was created in 1660 by Charles II and it was not long after that huge sums of money began to be diverted (the first black ops funding?) to a department called the Secret Office. This group was responsible for opening and manually copying literally every piece of mail received from and going to international destinations. The commercial information that this office recovered must have been huge. Officially the Secret Office was dismantled by Prime Minister Palmerston in 1847; but unofficially…
Certainly mail was opened and censored during the Crimean War in 1855-56, so shortly after Charles Dickens exposed the shortcomings of government and litigation in his Bleak House. But it was not Dickens in the newspaper he founded, The Daily News, but the London Times that began a completely new era of journalism by using Special Correspondents in the Crimea. The most illustrious was William Howard Russell, who, with the magic of the telegraph, managed to avoid the censor’s scissors. His reports plus the words he copied from some of the soldiers in the field changed the conflict into what was dubbed the Peoples’ War: the first time in history that a civilian population was able to weigh in with opinions about the conduct of the War.
The art of the correspondent continued in the Boer War, although censorship actually started the day before war was declared in 1899.The censors were also very busy during The Great War (aka the war to end all wars, WW-I) with officers using black markers on soldiers’ correspondence. Deletions were supposedly made for material that could compromise operational secrecy but, in fact, hundreds of thousands of letters never reached their intended destinations at all. It was a depressing war with absolutely stupid levels of casualties on both sides and that must have been reflected in the content that was written. The only way to guarantee delivery of a letter was if it was from the censor officer himself! Censorship in the US was even heavier at that time.
In Britain, censorship of both letters and news correspondent reports continued through WW-II with news of ship losses, in particular, being absolutely forbidden topics. Newspapers were issued dreaded D-Notices which forbade the publication of material deemed to be useful to an enemy. Unfortunately, a lot of these notices, which continued being issued into the late 1950s, were more to preserve civilian morale. Even some books were denied publication: George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, could not be published in the UK until 1945 for fear of upsetting the Russians…
In the US, however, despite the best efforts of J Edgar Hoover, President Roosevelt never used the draconian powers of censorship that he was handed by Congress. Instead the system was conducted voluntarily. (See Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and The American Press and Radio in World War II, by Michael S Sweeney, University of North Carolina Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0807849149.)
The voluntary censorship worked so well that it continued after the war – not necessarily for the better – with telephone calls from the White House able to suppress most unwanted stories. That extended honeymoon ended with the publication of the Pentagon Papers which showed, among many other Government lies and cover ups, that Johnson was going to bomb the hell out of North Vietnam even though he was emphatically denying it on the campaign trail and that he fully intended to engage US troops on the Vietnam peninsula. He instead said that it was the intention of his opponent, Barry Goldwater, to do just those things.
Sweeney’s book (above) very clearly lays out that the American public requires to be kept informed about wars and that if that is denied to them (or, even worse, if they are lied to or deceived) then their support can become opposition instead. That is certainly what happened in the aftermath of the release of the Pentagon Papers and the resulting fallout from the media. There was little to no censorship in Vietnam itself but the lack of veracity from the Government ultimately killed civilian support.
The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that this simple truth about disclosure is still vital. Abuse of prisoners, deaths by “friendly fire,” the deaths of civilians and journalists: all these should have been aired as dirty laundry as soon as they happened. Just as Nixon failed, in the Supreme Court, to prevent further publication of Vietnam secrets, we are faced with a similar situation today. The publication of some documents in Wikileaks with a lot more to come is long overdue.
I in no way condone the action of bradass87, if he was the leak of this material, or anyone else involved in breaching their oaths of secrecy in their Government employ. But, one way or another, most of these truths would have come out. And the public is entitled to know, surely, among thousands of other wrongdoings, that $8.7 billion of reconstruction money has disappeared in Iraq, that civilian casualties have been covered up, that Osama bin Laden is still alive, and that the Afghanistan Chief of Police was on the payroll of the Iranian government as well.
As Daniel Ellsberg said at the time of the injunction Nixon obtained against the New York Times:
“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”
If Wikileaks wakes up the American public about Afghanistan, to the fact that it is a war that has nothing whatever to do with protecting American soil but is only to line the pockets of the few, then they will have done a major service to the world’s future. The quicker America turns against the senseless slaughter of its young, as it did with Vietnam, the better.
