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Forty years ago, a majority of Americans were highly engaged in issues of war and peace. Whether to go to war or keep out of conflicts was a vital question at the heart of the country’s vibrant, if fractious, democracy. But American political consciousness has drifted. In the last decade, America has gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while pursuing a new kind of warfare in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Pakistan. National security issues have increasingly faded from the political agenda, due in part to the growth of government secrecy.
In lucid and chilling detail, journalist and lawyer Scott Horton shows how secrecy has changed the way America functions. Executive decisions about war and peace are increasingly made by autonomous, self-directing, and unaccountable national security elites. Secrecy is justified as part of a bargain under which the state promises to keep the people safe from its enemies, but in fact allows excesses, mistakes, and crimes to go unchecked. Bureaucracies use secrets to conceal their mistakes and advance their power in government, invariable at the expense of the rights of the people. Never before have the American people had so little information concerning the wars waged in their name, nor has Congress exercised so little oversight over the war effort. American democracy is in deep trouble.
Lords of Secrecy explores the most important national security debates of our time, including the legal and moral issues surrounding the turn to private security contractors, the sweeping surveillance methods of intelligence agencies, and the use of robotic weapons such as drones. Horton looks at the legal edifice upon which these decisions are based and discusses approaches to rolling back the flood of secrets that is engulfing America today.Whistleblowers, but also Congress, the public, and the media, play a vital role in this process.
As the ancient Greeks recognized, too much secrecy changes the nature of the state itself, transforming a democracy into something else. Horton reminds us that dealing with the country’s national security concerns is both a right and a responsibility of a free citizenry, something that has always sat at the heart of any democracy that earns the name.
- Sales Rank: #682141 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 5.75" w x 1.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Review
"[D]etails some remarkable abuses.... It is hard not to extrapolate from these tales a notion of a vast secret state beyond control. Horton does so with some finesse. The book is compelling."—Sam Jones, Financial Times
"Big Brother is watching indeed. This useful book catches him in the act and even offers some thoughts on how to poke his eyes out."—Kirkus Reviews
“A chilling but truthful account of how US national security and intelligence agencies are undermining democracy in the United States while the politicians are conceding space to them. It is virtually an indictment of the US national security elites. Every American who cares about democracy should read this book.”—Washington Book Review
"Scott Horton delivers the goods on many fronts. In covering two points of the stealth triangle upfront, he focuses his sights on how the evolution of the U.S. drone program, from spying on terrorists to targeting and killing them with surgical strikes, has run amok...Anyone in or outside the legal profession who doubts the unfettered growth of the U.S. security apparatus, with ramifications beyond NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s intel dump to the public, should read Lords of Secrecy.”—Law.com
"A clear-eyed, deeply informed analysis that reveals the full extent of the threat posed by a Surveillance State that functions in darkness and secrecy. But far from being merely descriptive, Lords of Secrecy also catalogues and assesses the tools that citizens in a democracy can use to fight back.” —Glenn Greenwald
"Scott Horton’s Lords of Secrecy is a brilliantly devastating exposé of the shadow government that runs US national security policy. No matter who wins the White House, this secretive clique retains control over America’s darkest secrets and will stop at nothing to keep them from the public. Its members' names are largely unknown and its actions unchecked. In an era of an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, and the very existence of a free press, Horton’s book provides an essential playbook for battling this undemocratic beast.”—Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars
“A government accountable to its citizens is one of the foundations of a democratic society. Horton demonstrates how secrecy corrodes democratic institutions, stifles the freedom of information, and protects the powerful from accountability. Lords of Secrecy makes the case that in order to strengthen the rule of law and keep government power in check, we must demand critical debate, civic participation, and above all, transparency.”—George Soros
“This book will resonate widely, a searing indictment of the national security state that undermines the very values it purports to protect. Scott Horton is a consistent, powerful voice against the abuses of power, an apostle for reason and liberty under the law.” —Philippe Sands, professor of law at the University of London and author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
“From drone wars to Middle East fiascos to the war on whistleblowers, Scott Horton brilliantly blends original reporting with a reasoned defense of democratic ideals going back to ancient Athens. Lucid, learned, judicious, and hard-hitting, Lords of Secrecy is an indispensable book for any reader interested in public affairs.” —David Luban, professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown University
“Scott Horton has revealed the real secret at the heart of all the exposes about the NSA, torture, the Iraq War, the CIA spying on the Congress: it's the secrecy. And by understanding the secret of secrecy, Horton discloses just how the mysticism surrounding it has created a momentum that threatens what Hannah Arendt once called ‘a crisis of the republic.’”—Sidney Blumenthal
"Lords of Secrecy is one of the most important contributions to the vital debate about democracy in the post-Cold War era yet published. Scott Horton diligently peels away layers of hypocritical rhetoric designed to obscure what has been happening. This is a call to arms: American democracy is under threat and the power of increasingly unaccountable agencies must be brought under control." —Misha Glenny, author of McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
“In his theoretically sophisticated and eye-opening book, Scott Horton brilliantly traces the many documented follies of the American national security establishment and examines the unjustifiable use of government secrecy. The lethal challenge to the survival of the country’s democratic principles has never been more chillingly diagnosed." —Stephen Holmes, professor of law at New York University and author of The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror
"Scott Horton has written a lucid and captivating opus magnum, spanning a wide range of topics from constitutional law, to espionage, to drone warfare, and from Pericles to Ed Snowden. It is a must-read for the scholars and practitioners of national security. It is permeated with a real love of our country and a burning concern for the future of our democracy. Horton recognizes secrecy as a necessity, but brilliantly delimits it and exposes its abuses and failures, as lords of secrecy failed to adequately assess the Soviet Union, predict its collapse, warn about 9/11, and forecast the recent Arab Uprisings. A gem of a book."—Ariel Cohen, Visiting Fellow, The Heritage Foundation
About the Author
Scott Horton is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for reporting for his writing on law and national security issues. Horton lectures at Columbia Law School and continues to practice law in the emerging markets area. A lifelong human rights advocate, Horton served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union.
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
The Chapter Epigraphs Alone Are Worth the Price of Admission
By Barry Eisler
A superb examination of the ever-ratcheting regime of official secrecy that is inexorably strangling democracy in America. The chapter epigraphs alone are worth the price of admission. I had to resist the urge to live blog my reactions because there’s so much I loved about this book.
At times depicting a bureaucratic world worthy of Joseph Heller or Kafka, the book is a clear and compelling call for citizens to recognize secrecy for what it is: a weakness, not a strength; an addiction, not a choice; a disease of democracy and ultimately democracy’s death. For anyone who wants to arrest the domestic growth of the same kind of sclerosis that enfeebled and ultimately ended the Soviet Union, The Lords of Secrecy is an excellent place to start.
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
The Fix
By Keith A. Comess
It's a bit difficult to conceive of a book on US government transgressions that can remain both interesting and current in the context of the ongoing Snowden revelations, but "Lords of Secrecy" accomplishes both goals. Not only that, it does so in a compelling, objective, direct and cogent manner. It succeeds by avoiding the taint of more polemical expositions (see, for example, Glenn Greenwald's book) and sticking to the facts as they are known.
Scott Horton is a lawyer by training and practice. To provide necessary context, he carefully yet succinctly summarizes relevant legal proceedings and describes how these have been consistently and practically transgressed by a succession of US Executive Branch office holders. In short, the bureaucratic compulsion to divorce government from the citizenry has not only been a cumulative process, it has obvious underpinnings in the composition of agencies constructed by the governing elites.
Horton pushes on an open door when he notes that bureaucracies tend to be simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-sustaining: information is classified (to a great extent) to cover-up errors, waste, incompetence and cronyism: it's a recognizable pattern that evidently has both social and structural underpinnings and may be unavoidable. To maintain equilibrium (or control, depending on your perspective), steps taken by one administration are rarely undone by its successor and pressure from all sides conspires to perpetuate the status quo and also to enhance it. In other words, "the fix" is in.
The author details the perfidious and insidious pattern, progression and methods the "lords" employ to accomplish these goals. These include reliance on "experts" who are not only versed in arcana but also beholden to special interests as well as their own careerist goals. Abolition of the military draft further divorced citizens from the consequences of executive actions overseas: otherwise stated, if your own life isn't on the line, who cares? Contrast the current situation with the "at risk" draft-age population of the Vietnam era and reactions then and now.
Most tellingly, Horton is able to elucidate all of this in a calm, balanced and fair fashion. Despite the conspiratorial echoes of the book's title, the author never resorts to this convenient and inane dodge to make his case. The book is as balanced and expert a presentation of these thought-provoking and contentious issues as could be most optimistically expected and optimism for a democratic resolution of these matters, one that would be recognizable to Athenian-era participatory democracy is, in Horton's opinion, not too likely an outcome...and it's likely to get a whole lot worse given the fear of the average voter and the rewards garnered by the elites.
21 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing
By SK
This was extremely disappointing. What is worse is that Horton advocates for an informed citizenry that is given unmanipulated information. Yet, he manipulates his reader with poor logic, unsupported assertions, and false footnotes.
As a couple quick examples:
Page 98-99 he talks about the rise of the national security state with the National Security Act of 1947. After quoting the Act in regards to the definition of covert action, the need for a written finding, and the Congressional oversight, he asserts: "The national security state that came into existence in 1947 thus reflected deep concern about the unchecked spread of secrecy and a need to reconcile the pervasive secrecy that had existed during World War II with the needs of a democratic society." Except that it doesn't reflect any concern because he is using the amended Act for his quotations. The Sections 501 and 503 didn't exist in 1947.
On page 129 he writes about WikiLeaks (2010) and Snowden (2013). In the paragraph on Snowden he concludes: "The US government first argued that these leaks dangerously undermined national security and placed American service personnel and those supporting them at risk. Under challenge, however, US government officials were forced to step back from many of these claims." But his footnote does not refer to government officials in 2013/2014 but instead to an article by Elisabeth Bummiller, "Gates on Leaks, Wiki and Otherwise," from November 2010. At that time, Gates could not have been responding to the 2013 Snowden leak.
Some other random lines Horton throws in:
He distills the debate around the US use of nuclear weapons against Japan to simply using them in "anger." (Page 110)
On the next page he writes that because drones are armed and in the air they "logically would fall under the primary jurisdiction and control of the Air Force." Though every branch of the military has airborne weapons. So the logic that it is in the air and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Air Force doesn't make sense.
In several places he refers to how other countries' media report on all these issues. But Americans don't get to hear about them because we're shrouded from the truth due to secrecy. Yet, we have access to the news as reported in other countries if we want it.
On page 170 he calls out Congress for failing to have a mature debate on America's decisions to use force in Syria. Then on the following page, simplifies the matter to the use of force being controlled by the secret national security elite and Congress has no power over that.
Horton creates an argument that secrecy has been used to disenfranchise the American people from the decision making of its national security policy. But, almost every example he uses to support his case ends with someone making a "political" decision in one of the three branches of government. Unfortunately, Horton de-legitimizes a legitimate issue by employing similar manipulation of information for which he condemns the unidentified and undefined "national security elites" and "lords of secrecy." He wants you to accept and believe his argument at face value; just like our government asks us to believe in necessary secrets.
Let's have a real conversation on excessive secrecy. We should probably start with Congress having a public debate and maybe we should figure out why secrecy is used to protect the "political" appointees. We do still elect the politicians that make those appointments, right?
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