Khaled El-Masri was a Lebanese man working in Germany and sending money home to his family. While on a bus trip in the Balkans, he was seized by CIA agents acting under the broad agenda of Bush’s war on terror. He was stripped, drugged, chained and flown to a “black site” in Afghanistan. The secret prison was intended to be beyond the law and the prying eyes of outsiders, but somehow, professional investigative reporters (not citizen journalists or blow-hard bloggers) caught sight of the story. Turns out: Masri was the victim of mistaken identity.
The El-Masri incident is one of the cases presented in Secrecy, the visually intriguing and thought-provoking documentary by Peter Galison and Robb Moss (out Sept. 29 on DVD). Another is the Bush administration’s claim that weapons of mass destruction were the main reason for invading Iraq. The top-secret seal has often been used to cover official misdeeds and mistakes, to undermine informed decision making and public discourse. But Secrecy isn’t simply a polemic against the corrosive effect of the classified stamp on democracy. It also presents arguments by former NSA and CIA officials that keeping enemies in the dark can sometimes be legitimate, and that the long nose of the press has occasionally resulted in American deaths.
Most of the speakers interviewed take a nuanced view on the subject, positioning themselves somewhere between the polar extremes of secrecy uber alles and transparency at all cost. The question often asked in Secrecy is how to curb the bureaucratic inclination toward cover-ups and to exercise oversight of cover operations in the public interest.
