The Rise of the Computer State by David Burnham

Author:David Burnham
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781497696846
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Values

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

—T.S. Eliot

In March 1969, the U.S. Air Force initiated a series of bombing raids against the people and jungles of Cambodia. Partly because Richard Nixon correctly perceived that the Cambodian raids would reinforce the already bitter opposition to the Vietnam War, he decided the bombing should be kept secret. On the basis of Nixon’s decision, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and General Earle Wheeler, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed a top-secret memorandum directing the air force to falsify its records about the B-52 raids.

“All sorties against targets in Cambodia will be programmed against preplanned alternate targets in the Republic of Vietnam and strike messages will so indicate,” the Laird-Wheeler order commanded. A short time later, an unknown Defense Department programmer adjusted the instructions of the Pentagon computer that processed the bombing reports coming from Southeast Asia so that the raids against the targets in Cambodia would appear to be raids on targets in Vietnam. Computer summaries that included the false information subsequently were submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Nixon administration’s effort to keep the raids secret collapsed a few months later when William Beecher wrote a story about them in the New York Times. It was not until four years later, however, that Congress learned about the Laird-Wheeler cover-up memorandum ordering the air force to deliberately lie about this significant extension of the Vietnam War.

In 1973, Admiral Thomas H. Morer, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was called to testify to the same Senate committee that had been handed the false reports in 1969. The admiral attempted to persuade the incredulous senators that contrary to the unequivocal language of the Laird-Wheeler order, “no one authorized the falsification of reports.”

What had happened, he explained, was not the fault of any individual officer, but simply a perverse technical requirement of the Defense Department’s naughty computer system. The raids against the Cambodian targets, he said, carried such a high classification that information about them could not be recorded in the Pentagon’s computer, which was authorized to store only lesser categories of military secrets. But it was absolutely essential that the flying time consumed by these most secret raids somehow be noted in the central computer so that the fuel, bombs and other supplies actually used in sending the B-52S over Cambodia were accounted for and therefore replaced in the supply line. This was the only reason, he explained, why the program in the Pentagon computer had been adjusted so that the geographic coordinates of the actual targets in Cambodia appeared in the printouts as the coordinates of targets in Vietnam.

“It’s unfortunate that we have become slaves to these damned things,” Admiral Morer told the committee. National leaders have of course sought to deceive their citizens as long as there have been nations. But the lie about the bombing in Cambodia demonstrates how in certain circumstances the computer helps leaders deceive.

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