Raising the Level of Secrecy on Classified Documents in Western Countries

-        Posted on: 30-5-2018

-        Your secret, O homeland, in a well!

-        The most important bases for making decisions in politics and economics, in addition to international relations, deliberations and investigations, are information. Accurate information. And in most international relations and agreements some aspects of the agreements and their annexes are kept classified as secret. They are not uncovered except after decades. Journalists, researchers and those interested cannot obtain this information, despite the existence of freedom of information laws, protected by the constitution in those countries. The justification of these countries for classifying this information as secret is that disclosing it would harm that country's national and defense security, or the private interests of a certain group in it, or it concerns information that, if published, would harm the other state in the relationship, as with agreements. Many countries such as Britain and the United States of America keep the degree of secrecy according to rules of certain time periods, where they adopted a 30-year rule, another 50 years, another 75 years, in addition to exceptions even after the 75-year rule... Some researchers file cases in that country's courts against the National Archives as in the United States, or the British archival documents concerning certain ministries such as the Home Office..or the Foreign Office.....These courts in some of their decisions issue orders to lift secrecy from certain documents..while in other cases they are unable to succeed in their attempts, due to the state's lawyers confronting these courts with justifications that demand non-disclosure of these documents because of the great harm from publishing them.

-        The documents of the British Foreign Office and the Colonial Office and the Mandatory authorities in Palestine have published many important documents, including what relates to Palestine from 1914 up to 1951. Some of these documents have appeared in books by researchers in graduate programs in political science, history, international law, etc. In Israel, however, they do not adopt a 30-year or 50-year rule for releasing classified documents..rather they adopt a 75-year rule to begin with, and in most cases do not publish documents classified as sensitive even after 75 years have passed since their existence in the Israeli secret archive, especially documents that speak about Israel's relations with Arab leaders and other personalities, so as not to cause any embarrassment to such leaders....neither to their peoples nor before the Arab leaders themselves or other leaders in the world, because each one has his deal and conditions and details of dealings with them--Israel--so that no one should know the privileges each secured, or the responsibilities he was obliged to perform in exchange for a price....

-        I reviewed and read many books in the past half year, books by foreign researchers obtaining master's or doctoral degrees, or research related to a specific region such as Palestine during the British Mandate on it, from 1922 until 14-5-1948, and one's hair turns gray from the information, documents and secrets related to the Arab politicians of that period, and their relations with the Zionist movement, the Jewish Agency and Jewish and British leaders, and how they were a tool to obstruct Palestinian unity, and spoke to them in a language different from the truth before the Arabs watching; before those Arabs those politicians were not sincere, so at times they publicly announced support for Palestine's independence and support for the Palestinians' struggle, while these documents reveal secret treaties, agreements and meetings with Jewish or British leaders to help them curb Palestinian resistance and Palestinian factions at that time, in addition to making deals to sell land and receiving money and bribes to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine at that time....

-        These books are banned in Arab countries, and the publishing or printing sites for these books are blocked by those countries' electronic censors..

-        Among some of the documents as well is the role of Arab leaders from the beginning of the British Mandate over Palestine in 1922, in attempting to co-opt the Palestinians for most British projects in cooperation with the Jewish Agency, whose purpose was for Palestinian Arabs to cooperate in passing political and economic projects whose essence was to serve and implement the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which calls for the establishment of a state for the Jews in Palestine, and which the Mandate instrument adopted by the League of Nations in 47 articles required implementing the texts of the Balfour Declaration in addition to the League of Nations' 1922 recognition in the Mandate document of the special historical connection of the Jews to Palestine... Some Arab leaders, or some of them, had to convince the Palestinians not to raise unrest in exchange for continuing their support for the ruling systems and the provision of grants, money and salaries to them, and helping to bring these Arab leaders closer to Jewish leaders in the Jewish Agency and others. As for the British Mandatory authorities, because they announced that that served the Palestinians' interest, one of the items in these books described the role of one Arab state in ending the Palestinian strike in 1936, and promised the Palestinians that good would come to them only if they ended the strike and cooperated with the British in administering the country's affairs, where representatives of that state claimed that there were friendly relations linking them with Great Britain...I happened to review the records of the British Peel Royal Commission in late 1936 and early 1937, which was tasked with investigating the reasons for the famous Palestinian strike of 1936, and all the recommendations and clarifications about the main cause of the strike stated that the Palestinians were fed up with Jewish immigration, and the Palestinians demanded the establishment of a state for themselves and the restriction of Jewish immigration to Palestine, for the Palestinians had become convinced at that time that the phases of Jewish immigration and the intensity of Jewish arrivals to Palestine, whether secretly or openly, revealed the Jews' intention to establish a national home for them according to the Balfour Declaration..inevitably. The Peel Royal Commission recommended proposing to partition Palestine into a Jewish state giving the Jews lands amounting to 33% of the area of Palestine, while at that time in 1937 they owned only 5%. As for the Palestinian Arabs, a state would be established for them over specified areas, in addition to the Jerusalem area which they recommended to internationalize the geographically designated zone for, and in the same recommendation regarding the Palestinian state the recommendation indicated that the recommended Palestinian Arab state should be merged with the Emirate of Transjordan as it was called at that time; that was in the Peel Commission's decision in 1937 and ten years before the partition decision taken at the United Nations in 1947, according to the same measures per the Peel Commission's recommendations mentioned..

-        I feel bewildered about the usefulness of opening the files of the Arab leaders then, according to the information that was revealed through the published British documents whose secrecy was lifted and included in the annexes of the aforementioned books..I wonder what the Arab person among us will benefit, after about 100 years since the events and meetings took place...before us are scenes from the WikiLeaks documents leaked in millions of pages by the founder of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange, concerning secrets of the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Department of State and the United States National Archives which were obtained from highly secure databases in the CIA's cyber space and affiliated institutions, in years between 2007 and 2012, and the leaking is still ongoing but at a slower pace than at the beginning, yet these are leaks where no more than 5 years have passed.

-        On the day the documents were leaked the first time, I hurried to try to obtain documents related to our Arab countries....all of them..but I found many of these leaked documents concerning the relationship of the United Arab Emirates with Saudi Arabia on 24 January 2007, in one of these documents that Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed told U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Nicholas Burns during a meeting in Abu Dhabi, "If they did what I do, and if I declared my support publicly for some matters, they would stone me to death."..and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed told General Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command in Iraq on 12-6-2004, that "the Saudi leadership is decrepit.""..And it is clear that the documents showed the malice of Arab officials in the Gulf toward their other Gulf brethren.

- But even if the people interested in these secrets knew what happened, there was no embarrassment; people in the Arab world received them as something from the distant past.... And it is possible that their publication is a Western means to further fragment the Arab states and create creative chaos in the Middle East....!!
In the search for the truth about any event, everyone searches for reliable information in order to deal with the events. For example, the crash of the Egyptian plane Boeing 767 B, belonging to EgyptAir, flight number 990, on the date 31-10-1999, off the western shores of the United States of America, in which 217 people all perished; among the victims were 33 officers of the Egyptian Armed Forces of high ranks, and 3 Egyptian nuclear scientists who were coming to the United States of America as part of a program under American aid from the period 14-31/10-1999. The information indicates that the military delegation’s travel was scheduled for 29-10 and not 31-10, and there was a striking change in the bookings. American investigation teams attempted with the Egyptians to determine the truth behind the crash of the Egyptian plane and the death of the high-ranking delegation of Egyptian military officers, and information and fact-finding circulated about the disappearance of the doomed plane from the radar screen for 4 hours, after which only ashes were found,

- The American investigation team concluded and claimed that the first officer — al-Battouti — had committed suicide, and that the phrase “I rely on God” was heard from the first officer... and all this information came from the American investigation team. The Egyptians refused to conduct an independent investigation, and relatives of the victims and the nephew of the first officer, Walid al-Battouti, doubted that his brother the first officer could commit suicide, in addition to the point that a person committing suicide would not utter such phrases. In addition to all that, Mr. Walid al-Battouti, the nephew of the first officer, added that Amr Musa and Ahmed Shafik and other officials know dangerous secrets but remain silent. There were reports that American lawyers blackmailed the families of the Egyptian victims and threatened them and used various means to force them to waive the case... There were also reports that the Egyptian authorities — the Ministry of Interior — issued instructions to the victims’ families not to publish obituaries for the victims in the newspapers, and information was conveyed alleging the involvement of the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in this conspiracy, and that the Americans were accused of downing the plane with a missile and eliminating Egypt’s best senior military personnel and the Egyptian nuclear scientists. A businessman named Issam al-Maghrabi, who was supposed to travel on the same doomed flight but whose travel was postponed, recounts his suspicion of the involvement of a conspiracy that wiped out a team of Egyptian military officers and scientists.... People forgot the story... and did not know the truth...
There are many cases whose documents have not been uncovered; for example: the assassination of U.S. President John Kennedy on 22-11-1963. Classified documents related to the assassination of former President John Kennedy were declassified decades after his assassination. President Trump issued an order to release 3,000 documents, some of which concern the biographies of some Arab and foreign politicians, while thousands of these documents remained classified in the U.S. National Archives because, according to the justifications of those defending the retention of such documents under wraps, they could affect national security, the maintenance of order in the United States, foreign affairs, and publication of these documents could also affect the lives of informants and their roles in the investigation..

- There are events that remain under wraps, and none of their documents have been leaked; for example, the poisoning and assassination of President Arafat remains a mystery, whether for the Israelis, the Palestinians, the French, or the Swiss; many parties are involved

- In this case the mystery still surrounds it.. and no one can approach the case file...
The file of the case of Gaddafi’s assassination, the World Bank files, secrets of inspections of conventional weapons.. documents of Sadat’s assassination, the downing of the Libyan plane, on board which was the late Libyan Foreign Minister Masoud Buwaisir, over the Sinai desert....etc... From the thousands of painful events in the Arab world whose secrets we do not know............

- There are phrases related to the issue of secret documents such as the principle of accountability and transparency, and that some countries enacted laws concerning freedom of access to information and fostering public awareness.. But, the Arab citizen cannot freely access any information intended for the Arab homeland even in the midst of the information and technology revolution..

- It is perfectly clear that the temporal rules after which documents that were classified secret by the political and security authorities in some countries are released, are based on discouraging the efforts of those who try to learn the secrets that govern the relations between states, relying on the rule... time will cause events to be forgotten... Also, knowing some secrets after a period of time, such as 50 years, does not help and can even harm, because there are other events more recent created by the West and Israel in the Arab world; the Arab citizen begins to try to catch up and obtain information about them, and these recent events have already erased what preceded them.... Just as happens with continuous and long negotiations... new agreements, or decisions or deals... cancel political or security or even economic agreements, and historical decisions of international organizations... provide rights to their holders according to international law, such as resolutions 194 and 242,,,,,,,,, and hundreds of decisions that are somewhat just to the Palestinian cause, for example..........

- Do we open the files...according to the released documents, or do we close them, and say the documents were true in their time, intended now to do wrong, and be content to treat the wounds of current events... because enough already inside us!!!!.. and reach an Arab consensus perhaps within the framework of popular Arab institutions, and not through the Arab League, which should be closed, because it is a concern... and an illusion... exactly as I intended in its founding year 1945.