Keeping Secrets
IF you only own a hammer, observed the psychologist Abraham Maslow, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Similarly, when the government’s only chance of keeping an inconvenient truth out of the news media is to warn of a national security threat, it’s amazing how these threats pop up.
This has turned out to be a powerfully effective tool. News organizations, after all, don’t want to endanger the nation’s safety, or be accused of doing so, so editors often listen to government officials when they make their case for not publishing. And, after listening, editors occasionally consent.
But a countervailing force â€" people’s right to know what their government is doing and the news media’s responsibility to find out and tell them â€" ought to rule the day.
We saw this play out last week when The Times, in an important story from Yemen, broke its long silence on the location of a base used for American drone strikes in the region. Like other major news organizations, including The Washington Post and The Associated Press, The Times agreed well over a year ago to keep that location â€" Saudi Arabia â€" quiet. Instead, it wrote at various times of a base on the Arabian Peninsula. (Other news outlets eventually did name the country, making the secrecy almost a moot point.)
Top editors at The Times changed their minds last week for several reasons. One was that, after monitoring the matter for months, “we were not aware of any specific security threats,†said David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief. In addition, the base location was at the heart of this article, according to Dean Baquet, the managing editor, while previously it had been “a footnote.†The most pressing reason, though, was that the drone program’s architect, John O. Brennan, had been nominated to lead the Central Intelligence Agency and The Times had a responsibility to examine his record.
In short, it was time for the facts to come out.
High time, I’d say.
That’s because the bigger and more troubling issue is whether the information should have been withheld to begin with. The reason offered â€" that naming the location would upset Saudi citizens to the point that the base might have to be closed, thus hampering America’s counterterrorism efforts â€" doesn’t cut it. Keeping the government’s secrets is not the news media’s role, unless there is a clear, direct and life-threatening reason to justify it. The classic example is revealing troop movements in wartime. Such a specific threat doesn’t exist now, and from all I can glean, it didn’t exist many months ago either.
This discussion couldn’t be more important, considering the context: the darkness in which America’s drone program has been operating and quickly growing.
In what a federal judge has described as an Alice in Wonderland situation, with a little Catch-22 added for good measure, the secrecy around the drone program is self-perpetuating. The government, until very recently, had not even acknowledged its existence, even though the unmanned aircraft have killed thousands of people in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan â€" tragically including many civilians, some of them children, and even some American citizens. The government prefers to describe the dead, sometimes inaccurately, as militants or terrorists.
The Times, to its credit, is in court trying to get information on the drone program, and on the deaths of Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son, both American citizens. Also to its credit, The Times published an eye-opening drone-related article last May when the reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote about President Obama’s list of individuals to be targeted for assassination. And it has published other strong pieces on the subject, despite the obstacles.
This administration, while vowing transparency and accountability, has actually become ever more secretive and punitive: stamping “classified†on everything in sight, pursuing whistle-blowers as never before, and prosecuting journalists for publishing leaked information.
All in the name of national security, the hammer of choice.
The real threat to national security is a government operating in secret and accountable to no one, with watchdogs that are too willing to muzzle themselves.
Top Times editors say that they are deeply committed to informing the public, but that they believe it’s only responsible to listen when government officials make a request. And, they emphasize, they often say no.
Fair enough. But the bar should be set very high for agreeing to honor those requests. This one didn’t clear that bar.
What’s missing in the dark and ever-expanding world of drone warfare is a big helping of accountability, served up in the bright light of day.
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Recent topics on the Public Editor’s Journal, at nytimes.com/publiceditor, include the evolution of the Edward Koch obituary, whether book excerpts constitute conflicts of interest, and a first-day look at the subject of this column.
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A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 10, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Keeping Secrets.