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by Catherine Austin
Fitts
May 26,
2018
from
SolariReport Website
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"The very
word 'secrecy'
is repugnant in
a free and open society;
and we are as a
people inherently
and historically
opposed to secret societies,
to secret oaths,
and to secret proceedings."
John F. Kennedy
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Amy Benjamin's landmark analysis "The Many Faces of Secrecy"
was published in the William & Mary Policy Review in October 2017.
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It addresses the
"systemic secrecy crisis" in
the United States.
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Benjamin is a
lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and is a former
attorney at the US Department of Justice.
Her published abstract describes her analysis as follows:
"Political secrecy in
the United States has never been more studied - and less
understood - than it is today.
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This irony is due in large part
to the slippery nature of the phenomenon:
Secrecy presents
in different guises depending on the area of governmental
activity under consideration.
In the classified
world of the U.S. 'national security' state, secrecy results from
affirmative governmental acts designed to enforce a sharp
distinction between official and public knowledge.
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In the outsourced and
technocratic worlds of governmental contracting and economic
management, secrecy results from quiet acts of exemption of
whole areas of decision-making from the normal processes of
public scrutiny.
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Scholars have
underestimated the magnitude of the political secrecy that
besets American society, and misconceived prescriptions meant to
manage it, because they have failed to recognize that they are
dealing with the same challenge in different form across
multiple disciplines.
This Article attempts to effect, for the very first time, the
kind of comparing-of-notes that is needed for a proper
assessment of the scope of political secrecy.
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It introduces a
simple yet indispensable typology - direct versus indirect
secrecy - that enables us to recognize the many different faces
of secrecy.
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Once we do so we are
in a position to realize that we are confronting a systemic
secrecy crisis.
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For various reasons
and under cover of conflicting rationales, large swaths of
policy-making have been placed beyond the review-and-reaction
authority of the American people, to the detriment of even the
most humble conceptions of transparency and democracy."
Amy Benjamin
The Many Faces of Secrecy
September 18, 2017
While I was in Auckland,
I had the opportunity to interview Amy for the Solari Report.
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We discussed her concepts
of direct and indirect secrecy and explored in detail how,
indirect secrecy is engineered so as
to make it difficult, if not impossible, for the general
population to understand what is happening around us - in the
government, in the economy and the financial markets...
Indirect secrecy
includes,
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monetary and
fiscal policy (making sure you do not have accessible
central bank and government financial disclosure so you can
understand "how the money works")
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outsourcing
government operations and intelligence to private
corporations
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engineering
secret agreements and transactions through international
institutions
It is a challenge to
understand how so much is kept secret.
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Once you understand the
mechanics and infrastructure, however, that engineers this growing
divide between "official reality" and reality, the world we are
living in today starts to make a lot more sense.
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