If a CIA agent with a conscience knows where these prisons are located, if she knows the CIA operatives who run those prisons, if she knows the conditions of those prisons and the names of the people in the prisons, if she then reports on the activities of the CIA wardens and their hirelings who run these prisons, and if this person of conscience exposes all of the above, I would celebrate such a person. In my mind, such a person should be considered a courageous fighter for democratic openness. The law that would put such a person in jail should be repealed. All secret security agencies should be exposed to the light of day.
This is not a mere hypothetical. Think of Dana Priest's article exposing the CIA secret prisons. She wrote it without naming names. But she must have sources somewhere in order to write the article in the first place and those sources must know names. The names of the people running those secret CIA prisons are engaging in crimes against humanity and the names of the CIA prison wardens and their accomplices should be exposed to democratic sunlight. Perhaps one reason that they are not so exposed is the threat of jail under Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
According to the BBC, "The US Central Intelligence Agency has taken the first step toward a criminal inquiry into who told the media that it runs secret jails abroad, reports say."
Who are these prisons secret from in the first place? They are not secret from the people in the prisons or their families. They are assumed to exist by most people in countries that fear U.S. imperialism. The U.S. government of course can brush such speculations away as a conspiracy theory and "anti-Americanism" - because, as we know, the people who are under threat by the U.S. government's terror tactics are prone to such conspiracy theories. The truth is that these secret prisons are not meant to be secret from the purveyors of retail terrorism through-out the world. The U.S. government, the main purveyor of wholesale terror in the world today, means to keep these prisons secret from the domestic population of the U.S. and the populations of every country where these prisons are kept. Why? Because if such facts were widely known they would provoke outrage - not the outrage of terrorism, but the outrage of democratic protest.
These secret prisons were never so secret. More than a year ago I read about them. Here is one of the articles I read in June 2004 - Secret world of US jails: Jason Burke charts the worldwide hidden network of prisons where more than 3,000 al-Qaeda suspects have been held without trial - and many subjected to torture - since 9/11.
The people who leaked the information of these secret prisons to the Washington Post may have been playing their own bureaucratic games, but they have done a service to all of us who value the semblance of democracy that remains to us. Democracy is murdered in secret. The bare minimum of a conservative republican form of government, a government of due process and the rule of law, cannot be maintained when the government is maintained by secret organizations of political spies. The fact that our government runs secret prisons is only an end product of the permanent government of secrecy that has existed in the United States since it became a world empire.
As I said in my previous entry, "The demand for the rule of law is a conservative demand in normal times but quickly turns into a radical call in times of 'emergency.'" We live in a time of emergency in the United States. The emergency is for the wounds that are debilitating the republic.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 November 2005
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