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  • Secret Government
  • Abraham R. Wagner (bio)
William O. Walker III . National Security and Core Values in American History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xiv + 351 pp. Select bibliography, notes and index. $90 (cloth); $24.99 (paper).
Christopher H. Pyle . Getting Away with Torture: Secret Government, War Crimes, and the Rule of Law. Washington: Potomac Books. xiii + 403 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.
Harold H. Bruff . Bad Advice: Bush's Lawyers in the War on Terror. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. 403 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95.

Abuse of executive power and government secrecy has been a recurring theme for much of American history. The Founders spent considerable time debating a more viable plan for democratic government, and the first years of the Republic were characterized by a series of weak presidents presiding over a very small federal government, which faced issues that grew increasingly grave with the Civil War and afterwards. Following the 9/11 attacks, the nation embarked on military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as well as a "Global War on Terror," attempting to deal with threats both at home and abroad, some real and others largely imagined. The George W. Bush administration undertook several secret operations to obtain information considered vital to national security. For all its efforts to run a secret government, however, most operations came into public view with astounding speed and were subject to investigation and scholarly inquiry.

Much of what is done for national security is necessarily secret, as disclosure threatens sources, methods, and the success of operations. Too often these protections have been used to avoid legitimate oversight and run roughshod over the Constitution. President Bush's efforts to run a secret government failed quickly, with the result being a veritable cornucopia of newspaper and journal articles as well as books on all aspects of programs undertaken during his presidency. Of particular concern have been the detainment of foreign nationals at Guantanamo and elsewhere, torture of prisoners, and domestic [End Page 549] surveillance programs. Seeking to put these events in perspective have been journalists, insiders, and scholars. 1

William O. Walker's exploration of national values and security from colonial times through the Bush presidency, in National Security and Core Values in American History, offers an outstanding interpretation, in the tradition of William Appleman Williams, of America's evolving role abroad. His overriding concern has been to explore the relationship between "American core values and U.S. security policy," with the major premise that the nation became an imperial power in the 1890s and has increasingly become unable to protect the principles of liberty and individual freedom. Although these made America distinctive in the colonial era, Walker questions whether basic values, rights, and liberties—"having been compromised in the name of security throughout modern American history"—can endure in the twenty-first century (p. xiii).

Walker is joined by a number of writers who see the U.S. as a nascent imperial power, while Dimitri Simes offers a more conservative analysis, concluding:

Whether or not the United States now views itself as an empire, for many foreigners it increasingly looks, walks and talks like one, and they respond to Washington accordingly. There is certainly no reason for American policymakers to refer to the United States as such in public pronouncements, but an understanding of America as an evolving, if reluctant, modern empire is an important analytic tool with profound consequences that American leaders should understand. 2

The notion that the U.S. became an imperial power in the 1890s is open to debate. Growth of the U.S. through 1867 was the result of both land purchase and military campaigns involving Mexico, various European nations, and Native Americans. Following the Alaska purchase, the U.S. was not on an expansionist path or in search of an empire. The 1898 Spanish-American War can be seen as either a fluke or a publicity stunt that got out of control, rather than a search for American empire. Revolts against Spanish rule had been endemic for decades in Cuba, and American public opinion reacted to reports of Spanish atrocities. After the mysterious sinking of the American battleship Maine in...

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