Truth and justice
Two Newark historians in the public sphere
Archived article from Nov 10, 2000
By Douglas Frank
Page 2 of 3
“No one advocates revealing information that would threaten today’s national security. But we cannot allow that to become a means for our government agencies to hide their embarrassment, their failures, or their violations of law and our sense of ethics — especially when the events are 30 or more years in the past.”
Kimball notes that there are some “ludicrous” examples of withholding information, but hesitates telling about most of them.
“The best example I can give is the time when the Danish government published part of the text of the U.S.–Danish agreement on stationing of weapons in Greenland. Despite the fact that the Danes had already published the information, our agencies hesitated to open the U.S. record because American policy was: ‘We don’t do that.’ That is silly, and that kind of silliness wastes a lot of time and money. They eventually came to their senses.”
Kimball’s committee operates for the State Department, but only some 20 percent of the documents published are State Department documents, he points out. The rest are from the Defense Department, CIA, National Security Council, Joint Chiefs of Staff and White House.
“We have access and talk to the CIA and Department of Defense and others only because the law requires them to support the foreign relations series. We don’t demand that anything be opened; we are not a declassification authority. All we can do is drive people up the wall challeng-ing their decisions and reporting to the secretary of state.
“The main thing is that, like a gadfly, we don’t go away. No matter what happens, no matter what awkward things we say — we keep saying them. There is always beneath the surface the threat that we will report problems, because we are required by law to make a report to the secretary of state on our findings once a year. And a copy of that report must go to the Senate and to the House.”
Kimball says the advisory committee has met with enough success to suggest that its legal mandate should be expanded. Many CIA records, previously locked up tightly, are now examined by State Department historians, and a few documents are being opened and published.
“There are no victories in the fight against excessive secrecy, just an ongoing struggle to strike a reasonable balance. But the glare of public scrutiny gives some leverage to reasonable people,” concludes Kimball.
Jonathan Lurie: Military justice on trial
During World War I at the Army’s Camp Logan in Texas, some 40 black soldiers were court-martialed for participating in a riot in town. After conviction, 15 were summarily hanged on the orders of the camp commander.
Word of the executions reached the War Department, and although they were perfectly legal from a military standpoint, there was outrage and calls for an appellate process to review cases before executions were carried out.
Unfortunately, nothing came of this until World War II, when numerous examples of excessive sentences and other problems led Congress to develop the Uniform Code of Military Justice applicable to all services, which were unified into the Department of Defense in the postwar era.
The statute also created the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, which went into operation in 1951 as, essentially, the supreme court of the military, handling appeals from courts-martial throughout the services. Its five civilian judges, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, serve 15-year terms.
This little-known judicial body, which holds tremendous power over the lives of the nation’s servicemen and women, has been the subject of close scrutiny over the past 13 years by Jonathan Lurie, professor of history on the Newark campus, who serves as historian and archivist for the court.
Lurie, a legal historian, has written a two-volume history of military justice from 1775 to 1980, to be revised and synthesized into a paperback version by the University of Kansas Press early next year. Princeton University Press published “Arming Military Justice” in 1992 and “Pursuing Military Justice” in 1998.
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