The Right To Know
By MILES
PLAYFAIR
NEARLY a decade ago, James Russell Wiggins, editor of the Washington Post, issued a powerful warning against continuing encroach- ment, in this age of permanent emergency, on the American people's right to know what govern- ment was doing in their name. A new and revised edition of Mr. Wiggins's book* is published coincidentally with a careful, restrained and very lucid accountt of executive secrecy in Britairi by David Williams, an Oxford law don.
'It seems to have been forgotten,' Mr. Williams writes, 'that in a democratic country the onus should be on those who supptirt secrecy to justify their case.' In many respects, he considers this onus to be both undischarged and undischarge- able; that British government is invested with a great deal too much power to dam, by direct or indirect means, a free flow of information to the electorate. To read Mr. Wiggins's book about the situation in America is to feel certain that Mr. Williams is rather more than right about the situation here. Ironically, it furnishes the proof. A 'mania for secrecy' manifestly makes better sense in the United States than it does in Britain: as much better sense, one may suggest, as the difference between the two countries in terms of actual or potential defensive power and respon- sibility. Yet if, as Mr. Wiggins passionately argues, the Americans have permitted freedom of communication to be too severely curtailed as a result of the cold war, we had already travelled further along that road before the Russian revolution. Since 1911, the law has provided, in effect and for example, that if a civil servant furnishes a journalist with a report of corrup- tion or malfeasance in his department, both he and the recipient, assuming that the latter pub- lishes or even retains the report, are liable to be imprisoned for two years. '
No near equivalent to this notorious and much- criticised section of the Official Secrets Acts exists in the United States. Nor is 'the public interest,' as opposed to 'national security,' tolerated in general as a pretext for either withholding in- formation or forbidding its publication. On the contrary, under federal law and, with a few exceptions, under state laws, the 'public interest' and unrestricted publicity regarding matters not
• FREEDOM OR Srearet. By James Russell Wiggins. (0.U.P.. 40s.) f Nor IN Trio PUBLIC NU:RI:ST. By David Williams. (Hutchinson of London, 35s.)
connected with defence are still regarded as synonymous.
But even in the name of national security the Americans evidently still permit less emphasis on secrecy than we allow. It is instructive to com- pare the case of the Rosenbergs, which was tried
at a time when it was intellectually fashionable in Britain to accuse the American people of `hysteria,' with that of George Blake and the Old Bailey ten years later. There were many, inside and outside the US, who loudly condemned Judge Kaufman's sentears of death on the Rosenbergs; .there were quite II itk, including some. Dr. Harold C. Urey among them, who, though above suspicion of being Communist sympathisers, publicly questioned the propriety of the jury's verdict. Whether or not the Rosenbergs were rightly convicted and executed, the issues could be freely and fully debated, because there was no doubt of the grounds upon which the verdict was reached and the sentence passed. From first to last the trial was open.
By contrast, the trial of George Blake whose crime, though allegedly grave, did not involve atomic espionage, was largely secret. Con- sequently, nobody was in a position afterwards to protest that Blake had been wrongly convicted. Nor did anyone outside the courtroom have a reliable basis upon which either to attack or de- fend the unprecedented and gargantuan sentence of forty-two years' imprisonment that was passed on him by the Lord Chief Justice and that may seem hardly more merciful than death. Mr. Justice Hilbery, speaking on behalf of the Court of Appeal, which upheld the sentence, explained that it was intended to be punitive, that it was designed and calculated to deter others, and that it was meant to be a safeguard to this country. But those observations could as well apply to a sentence of two years for espionage as forty-two. There was no reassurance in them for a dis- turbed public that might want to understand the moral justification for punishing Blake three times as severely as Fuchs, who was an atom spy, had been punished. As a clarification of a judicial decision, the remarks may be compared with the sentencing speech of Judge Kaufman, which in- cluded the assertion that the Rosenbergs had 'caused the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000.' Hyper- bolic or not, that made the rationale of the death sentence abundantly clear. Maybe security would have been genuinely and too seriously endangered, if Blake's trial had been as open as the trial of the Rosenbergs was. Maybe. But one would like to be certain. And how can one be in the light of .the asinine, frivolous, self-interested and palpably un justifiable uses to which, as Mr. Williams relates, executive powers of secrecy in Britain have from time to time been put?
All governmental secrecy is a form of l3L Brotherism—of Daddy Knows Best. Both Mr' , Williams and Mr. Wiggins concede that to some extent it is unavoidabN, but Mr. Wiggins warns that 'arguments for more secrecy' are nevertheless Tc and inevitably `arguments for less freedom.' 10 l' my mind, they are also arguments for less of the Ai responsibility for the conduct of national al affairs, which in a healthy democracy press and Sc people ought to be able and willing to bear. er So what should be done to reverse the trend? The ti trouble with politicians, to judge from the record, is that however eloquently they may attack the el Official Secrets Acts and so on when they arc ill rl opposition, they tend to become content with the' e( status quo after achieving power. This may not he simply because they find, the status quo con' st venient, but because office-holders are occup:e tionally addicted to cant. No doubt it is ego: pleasing for them to talk grandly and darkly of I 1,, 'national security' and `public interest,' even WilCI1 none is really involved; and anyone with a wille) to power would obviously rather lead a country which possessed vital secrets than a country tbal tl had no secrets worth keeping at all. s, Before any significant action is likely to be n
taken, it seems to me, the British public must show itself to be considerably less docile and easily soothed. It must start -asking more questions, through the medium of television arid so forth, and exerting greater pressure for reform
on its own behalf. That is a purpose which 10!: Williams's book directly, and Mr. Wiggins' obliquely, both admirably serve.
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