Photo, above: Secret Nuclear Bunker by flickr.com user Tim Ellis, CC-licensed
In its Top Secret America feature the Washington Post told a story:
“…not about criminal conspiracies or rogue elements or corruption in the usual sense. No one’s dedication to the cause of protecting America is questioned. The tale has no villains… It is an exposé about a secret world, but it exposes no secrets… Virtually all the data that the paper collected in the two years it took to prepare the series was already in the public record.
“And the bulk of the public record is no longer to be found in library stacks, dusty courthouse files, and microfilm rolls. Just as its subject is a new kind of bureaucratic enterprise, ‘Top Secret America‘ is a new kind of journalistic enterprise, pairing expert reporting of the traditional shoe-leather variety with the information-gathering power of the Internet.”
Read more of Hendrik Hertzberg’s article in The New Yorker.
Blogging at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald predicted that Top Secret America would be met with a notable lack of reaction. Distracted by the trivial and nonsensical melodrama that constitutes political reporting, he said, we would:
“…continue to fixate on the trappings and theater of government while The Real Government churns blissfully in the dark — bombing and detaining and abducting and spying and even assassinating — without much bother from anyone.”
Five days later Greenwald observed:
“After a one-day spate of television appearances for Dana Priest and William Arkin — most of which predictably focused on the bureaucratic waste they raised along with whether the Post had Endangered the Nation by writing about all of this — the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again…”
The reason, Greenwald suggested, was that the current national security environment:
“…provides not only the ability to exercise vast power with no accountability, but also enables the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the private national security and surveillance corporations which own the Government. Very few people with political power have the incentive to do anything about that.”
If that cynicism seems to be a product of the 21st century’s particular angst, think again. William Boyd has been re-reading John Le Carre’s classic novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. He describes it as a “superb, tough, highly sophisticated novel” that says something profound about the nature of humanity.
The action of the novel takes place 50 years ago, in a world entirely different from the one we know today. Nevertheless, Boyd argues the book’s unrelenting cynicism is completely modern:
“One forgets just how unsparing the book is, how the picture it paints of human motivations, human duplicities, human frailty seems presciently aware of all that we have learned and unlearned in the intervening decades.”
