Forty Years of Secrecy Is the Length of a Career, and That Is Not a Coincidence

The minutes of the meetings at which Israel decided to go into Lebanon in 1982 were kept from the public for about four decades. I want to set aside the war itself, about which enough has been written, and look at the number.

Forty years. Ask why that number and not another, and the answers offered are about security. Ask what security could possibly have been at stake in the fortieth year that was not at stake in the tenth, and the answers stop.

The Question Nobody Asks

Here is the plain version of the problem. In a democracy the public is said to be the source of authority. The government acts on the public's behalf, with the public's power, and answers to the public for how the power was used.

Now imagine any other arrangement in which one party acts on behalf of another. A manager runs a company for its owners. An agent handles a client's affairs. In every such arrangement, the one who is acting owes the one on whose behalf he acts an account of what he did, and the account is owed promptly, not forty years later.

Can you name any other relationship in which a subordinate withholds the minutes of the most important meeting from his principal for forty years and keeps his job? A manager who did this to a board would be dismissed the day it was discovered. Yet the government did exactly this to the public, and the public, its supposed principal, did not even have the standing to demand otherwise.

Either the public is not the principal, or the word means something different in politics than it means everywhere else. I think it is the first.

The Security Argument Is Not the Argument

I do not dismiss the possibility that a document from a war contains something genuinely dangerous: a source, a method, a capability that still exists. That is what redaction is for. You release the minutes and black out the lines that would cost lives. This is done routinely, it works, and nobody proposes to abolish it.

But redaction is a scalpel and forty years is a blanket. If the concern were a specific dangerous fact, a specific dangerous fact is what would be withheld. Withholding the entire record, for the entire period, tells you that the concern is not any fact in the record. It is the record itself.

And what a record of a decision to go to war reveals, once the operational details are blacked out, is not military. It is who said what, who knew what, who warned and was ignored, who promised a short campaign and delivered a long one. That is not security. That is accountability, and it is the one thing the classification reliably prevents.

Why Forty

Now the number, which I find more telling than anything in the minutes.

A politician who takes a decision of this kind is typically somewhere around forty years old, give or take a decade. Add forty and you are at eighty, which is roughly a human lifespan. A forty-year seal is, in other words, a seal that expires when the people who took the decision are dead or very nearly so.

I cannot prove that this is how the number was chosen. It may be a convention inherited from other countries, or an arbitrary round figure. But observe what it does regardless of how it was chosen: it guarantees that no one who made the decision will ever be held to account for it by anyone who can still vote against him. The record becomes available exactly when accountability becomes impossible. Whatever the intent, that is the effect, and the effect is suspiciously precise.

Circumstantial, yes. But when the length of a secrecy period coincides with the length of the careers it protects, the burden shifts to whoever claims the coincidence is innocent.

What the Public Is Actually Entitled To

The standard defence is that the public cannot handle raw deliberation, that leaders need room to speak frankly, that released minutes would chill honest debate. There is something to this, and it is the reason executive sessions exist.

But notice the shape of the claim. It is that the principal cannot be trusted with knowledge of what the agent did. In every other domain that claim, made by the agent, is treated as the reddest of flags. We do not let fund managers decide that clients are better off not knowing where the money went. We do not let doctors decide that patients are better off not seeing the chart. We built entire professions around forcing the account to be rendered.

In politics we accept it, and I think we accept it because we have been trained to regard the government as the parent rather than the employee. A parent can decide what the child is ready to hear. An employee cannot decide that about the employer. Which relationship we are in is not a matter of taste; it is a matter of who is supposed to hold the power, and the answer given in every civics class is the public.

The Test

So here is a test for any democracy, and it is not a subtle one. Take the most consequential decision its government made in a given decade. Ask how long the public had to wait to read how the decision was made.

If the answer is measured in years, the public is a principal in name. If the answer is measured in careers, the public is not a principal at all, and the officials who set the seal knew it. Forty years is measured in careers.