Things are getting serious. Things have taken a turn for the worse. We may need a kind of Rosetta Stone that can translate current English into Orwell’s Newspeak and then maybe we can infer the original meaning of the long forgotten Oldspeak (Olde English) that was used in 20th century government documents. Perhaps, we can just take Orwell’s 1984, and in the best tradition of its protagonist and Ministry of Truth employee, Winston Smith, we can substitute some names, change some dates, and make some sense out of the world.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Usama bin-Laden, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. bin-Laden was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the anti-Soviet forces, almost on a level with Ronald Reagan himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from month to month, but there was none in which bin-Laden was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler. All subsequent crimes, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even — so it was occasionally rumoured — in some hiding-place in the Hindu Kush.
The U.S. Government has been reclassifying publicly available documents (linked via Raw Story) in an apparent attempt not to rewrite history but to erase it.
In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.
…more below…
Bill Clinton wanted a more open government and in 1995 he issued Executive Order 12958, which “require[ed] that U.S. government agencies declassify all of their historical records that were 25 years old or older by the end of 1999, except for those documents that fell within certain specified exempt categories of records, such as documents relating to intelligence sources and methods, cryptology, or war plans still in effect.”
But soon after his more lax declassifcation standards were established the intelligence community complained. They thought too much history was being released. Clinton relented, and a program was set up to scrub public records. Once Bush came into office,it looks like the program went a little overboard:
Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.
Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers “silly,” including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China’s nuclear weapons program.
Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.
One reclassified document in Mr. Aid’s files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.’s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was “not probable in 1950.” Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.
But pretty soon we will learn that we did not fight in Korea at all, we fought in Eastasia, and China was our not our enemy, but a key ally against Eurasia; and Korea was defeated decisively; and George W. Bush invented the aeroplane.
More Rosetta Stone:
At this moment, for example, in 2006 (if it was 2006), America was at war with the mujahideen and in alliance with Iraq. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since America had been at war with Iraq and not long before that, in alliance with the mujahideen. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. America was at war with the mujahideen: therefore America had always been at war with the mujahideen. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
More and more it appears that:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
doublethink – Reality Control. The power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.- Source: Newspeak Dictionary
What is the following but ‘doublethink:
The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.
The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped “declassified,” freely given to researchers and even published, he said.
Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.
Winston Smith pondered the meaning of history when history is constantly being rewritten:
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) — the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.
And, that description from 1984 is too close to what we are seeing with this reclassification program. The government is scrubbing its mistakes in exactly the same manner as Winston Smith scrubbed the mistakes of Big Brother, changing the public record of his speeches to show Big Brother was never wrong:
Many of the documents that have been withdrawn by the screeners
since October 2001 fall somewhere between mundane and banal on the
security classification sensitivity scale. See for example Document
No. 5 concerning the State Department’s map and foreign periodicals
procurement programs on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community;
or Document No. 8, which pertains to the State
Department’s open source intelligence research efforts abroad in
1948. (Note 16)Moreover, many of the recently withdrawn documents contain information
which could easily be construed as embarrassing to the U.S. intelligence
community. "Embarrassment", however, is not a subject
matter covered under the various exemptions to E.O. 12958. Perhaps
the reclassifiers need to be reminded that Section 1.7 (a) (2) of
Executive Order 12958, even in the version revised by President
Bush, stipulates that "no … information shall be classified
in order to …. prevent embarrassment to a person, organization,
or agency." For example, Document No. 6
contains a complaint from the Director of Central Intelligence to
the State Department about the bad publicity the CIA was receiving
after its failure to predict anti-American riots in Bogota, Colombia
in 1948. Document No. 7 deals with an early
unsanctioned CIA psychological warfare program to drop propaganda
leaflets into Eastern Europe by hot air balloon that did not go
particularly well and was cancelled after the State Department objected
to the program. Document No. 9 reveals that
as of the spring of 1949, the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge
of Soviet nuclear weapons research and development activities was
poor, at best. As a result, the American and British intelligence
communities were completely surprised when the Russians exploded
their first atomic bomb six months later in September 1949. Document
No. 10 paints a portrait of the state of affairs inside the
CIA which is not particularly flattering. Document
No. 13 reveals that the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence
community badly botched their estimates as to whether or not Communist
China would intervene in the Korean War in the fall of 1950. Please
note from the withdrawal sheet attached to Document No. 13 that
the CIA and DIA security screeners virtually gutted the entire 1951
MacArthur Dismissal file from the Lot 58D776 INR Subjects File 1945-1956,
despite the fact that the intelligence failures during the Korean
War have been extensively written about over the past 50 years.
The only difference between this reclassification program and the world of Oceania and Big Brother is that Bush’s program is inefficient and won’t work. History cannot be scrubbed in the digital age. At least, it cannot be scrubbed completely. Perhaps the internet is the only thing standing between Bushworld and the world of Winston Smith:
The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?