Washington's 5 Worst Arguments for Keeping Secrets From You

Military patches, courtesy of milspecmonkey.com

The government's vast secrecy bureaucracy does two things with great frequency. The first, of course, is keeping secrets. The second is devising elaborate reasons why you can't know what those secrets are.

It's hardly a secret that the government overclassifies basic information about what it does. What often gets overlooked is that the reasons it cites are often absurd. Sometimes they're craven cover-ups learned years after the fact. Sometimes they're ironic ' or cynical ' invocations that disclosure would aggravate the very problem it's supposed to solve. Sometimes they're bald contradictions of established policy or routine procedure.

Either way, the government has left a long, twisted trail of pretzel logic when it comes to all of the reasons you can't know what it's doing. Here are some of the lowlights.

Nuclear Experiments on People Would Have 'Adverse Effects on Public Opinion'

Government secrecy is perhaps at its most pronounced with nuclear weapons. And most people would probably agree that discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to the US's most dangerous arsenal. But that leeway probably doesn't extend to atomic experiments on human beings. Still, back in the 1940s, the Atomic Energy Commission decided you couldn't know about anything of the sort.

We now know that at the dawn of the nuclear age, the commission indeed used human guinea pigs to learn what the effects of atomic blasts and lingering radiation would be on the human physiology. In 1947, the commission wanted word that it was, among other things, feeding irradiated food to handicapped children kept very quiet. Its rationale was straightforward in its brazenness: We don't want to be sued by an outraged public.

'It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effects on public opinion or result in legal suits,' Army Col. O.G. Haywood Jr. wrote to fellow commission personnel on April 17, 1947. The memo's title itself is an artifact of the days when government personnel felt safe to engage in a baldfaced cover-up: 'Subj: MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS ON HUMANS.' (.pdf)

Haywood succeeded. Word of these atomic Tuskeegee Airmen ' a practice that continued for another 15 years ' came to light only after a savvy reporter named Eileen Welsome began exhuming long-forgotten documents at Kirtland Air Force Base in 1987. What she uncovered after a six-year inquiry would later compel President Clinton to form a major commission that ultimately led to official compensation for some of the family members of nuclear test subjects. Even Haywood couldn't keep everything a secret.

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