Keeping Secrets

In the current NY Review of Books, Garry Wills asserts that the fundamental legal case, U.S. v. Reynolds, which is used as the basis of many security claims by our government is, in fact, based on a lie by our government. In the four years, 1977-2001, the government cited this case sixty-two times as justification for withholding evidence from the courts. Yet, no less a legal scholar and Solicitor General than the late Erwin Griswold wrote, "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification, and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another."

The Reynolds case concerned a crash of an Air Force Plane in 1948 in which nine died, five soldiers and four civilians. The widows of three of the civilians sued the Air Force and, as one would expect, their lawyer asked for a copy of the Air Force report on the accident. The request was never granted as the Air Force argued all the way to the Supreme Court that the report contained classified information. Rather than proceed when the Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court, the Air Force settled with the widows for almost as much as the widows were asking; there was an important proviso that the widows would release all claims against the government.

Although the case continued to be cited as precedent, the report was never released to the public until in 1996 the Clinton administration decided to declassify documents determined originally to be restricted, as the Reynolds report was. Enter two people and the Internet.

Michael Stowe established a web site, Accident-Report.com, which, for a fee, offered copies of the reports recently declassified. At about the same time, the daughter of one of the civilians who had been killed in the crash, Judy Loether, was trying to find out information about her father whom she had never met. Stowe and Loether connected and the report became public.

And, as Griswold wrote, the accident report was covered up because it demonstrated incompetence on the part of the Air Force. There were no heat shields for the engines, thus the engines overheated and this was the primary cause of the accident. Also, escape routes were blocked or very difficult to use.

Yet, the Reynolds case is still used to deny us the right to know just what our government is doing to protect its arse.