Reporting such secrets is akin to the Necessity Defense. (The CIA’s secret wars in Latin America became so egregious that activists eventually found a legal weapon to expose them: the necessity defense, a legal doctrine that allows defendants to argue they broke the law to prevent a greater harm. In the 1980s, Abbie Hoffman successfully used this defense in his trial as an anti-CIA activist on the campus of UMass-Amherst, transforming the courtroom into a forum where evidence of CIA atrocities in Latin America was presented to the jury, effectively putting the Agency itself on trial for its crimes against democracy.)
This formulation is crucial. The point of a classification violation is accountability. Hersh operates according to a higher law than the state’s obsession with secrecy. He identifies what he calls “self-censorship by the press” the greater threat: “I think what you have in America is not so much censorship but self-censorship by the press.” It is the internalization of the state’s priorities by journalists themselves that makes stenography so effective.
Realpolitik and the 40 Committee
The meat of the film concerns the “Kissinger Doctrine.” Poitras uses archival snippets to bring us into the heart of the 40 Committee, the secret body that oversaw the subversion of foreign democracies. Here, we discover the soul of American Realpolitik: Kissinger’s infamous 1970 proclamation regarding the election of Salvador Allende (and its wider implication about democracy, in general):
“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”This doctrine remains the definitive modus operandi of modern foreign policy. (One can see how it functions today in the destabilization of the Venezuelan government and the subsequent kidnapping of its leadership). It is the “Abyss” that Senator Frank Church warned of in 1975—a surveillance apparatus so powerful that it creates a tyranny from which there is “nowhere to hide.”