It's part of the arrogance of the government and their power to manipulate public opinion that they've been using for decades. They are smart and we are dumb. That justifies keeping information out of the hands of us, the public.
If anybody remembers the era of the Vietnam War, there were multiple examples of the purposes for which government secrecy was used. For one thing, the Pentagon did not want the news media to be able to show images of the bodies of soldiers who'd been killed as they arrived back on U.S. soil. Why? Because when people are more vividly shown the cost of war, in the form of the bodies of dead soldiers, they are more apt to oppose war.
Also in the Vietnam era, the so-called Pentagon Papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. In 1996, twenty-five years after that leak occurred, the New York Times wrote that the Pentagon Papers
demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.*
Wikipedia says,
The papers revealed that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by media in the US . . . .
But the most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled the public regarding their intentions.**
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
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* Apple, R.W. (1996-06-23). "Pentagon Papers". New York Times. Quoted in Wikipedia s.v. Pentagon Papers.
** Wikipedia, s.v. Pentagon Papers.
I remember the Vietnam era well since I was a teen by then and had a very real concern about being drafted. Also my parents left the news on during lunch times so I remember seeing American body bags from places like Da Nang on the tv screen as I ate. The government agencies did try and keep things quiet during that era but weren't able to control the press or public as much as they might have wished. Stubborn old war hawks in public office did as best they could to keep that wretched Vietnam conflict alive but couldn't shield the public from realities of American attrocities like agent orange and the Mi Lai massacre. I remember as I 'm sure many others do the images of the American hellicopter fleein Saigon on the final days of the communist Norths seige on the South Vietnamese capital. No, the American government failed to successfully conclude the conflict just as much as it failed to keep the public from witnessing the attrocities, horrors, political division, and final outcome of a bad war with a bitter end.
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