Repressive regimes are good at recordkeeping. Repression requires administration. Witness Nazi Germany, the Stasi, the Khmer Rouge.

So how to characterise the absence or subversion of recordkeeping seen in the policies of subsequent US Administrations in the detention of ‘terror suspects’ in Guantanamo Bay?

Can it be explained by the distinction between being an overt repressive regime as opposed to a covert one? Regimes with a need to confirm their power over citizens publicly, as part of creating the climate of fear in which they thrive, make elaborate recordkeeping a deliberate and widely known trait of their particular brand of power. The recordkeeping of surveillance, of blacklists, of executions. But when the prevailing power has a reputation to protect while it secretly carries out acts that contradict this, or where there are influential voices that interfere with its mission, recordkeeping can become a danger. As Chris Hurley has observed:

We cannot forget that Trotsky was airbrushed out of a photograph or that Winston Smith was an archivist. [2]

And so where it threatens to contradict a country’s reputation as a liberal democracy with respect for individual rights and the rule of law, recordkeeping must be carefully controlled so the traces of abuses of process and power are not permitted to exist let alone be revealed. In the case of the policies of the United States Government’s detainee management in places like Guantanamo Bay this extends to the recording of people. Not included in official registers, they are simply ‘disappeared’.  So, much in the way that Stalin ‘disappeared’ troublesome individuals such as Trotsky and Kamenev from official photographs, the United States disappears detainees from their system and into another’s, without a trace.

Layered on top of specific instances of authorised failure to make and keep records we see the special secrecy that is afforded policing, intelligence and military operations compounding the problem, and providing an even more fertile ground on which systematised abuses may thrive. As former Australian politician and anti corruption advocate John Hatton put it in a recent interview:

And the ability to contain information because the police have more power against the Freedom of Information laws than a normal department does in that they can argue that somehow it’s going to affect their investigations or their ability to prevent a crime or prosecute.  Consequently they can selectively withhold evidence and selectively present the evidence. [3]

In ‘The Detainee Policies’ media release, Julian Assange notes:

The ‘Detainee Policies’ show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the US Department of Defense

Rather than being a haphazard breakdown in adequate recordkeeping systems which can eventually encourage corrupt practices, this is (hidden) policy which is very carefully conceived and deployed through what might be labeled ‘anti-recordkeeping’. So that rather than resulting in a robust body of evidence against which those with unusual power can be held to account, like a photographic negative, these practices achieve the opposite; unaccountability.

http://wikileaks.org/detaineepolicies/

[1] Wikileaks, Press Release: The Detainee Policies 25 October, 2012

[2] Chris Hurley ‘The Evolving Role of Government Archives in Democratic Societies’ Plenary Address delivered to ACA Annual Conference, Winnipeg, 9 June, 2001

[3] ‘A Conversation with an Australian Living Treasure (Part II)’, interview by Kellie Tranter with John Hatton