One Man's Chronicles

When is a government secret no longer a secret? Generally, when it shows up at the National Archives, that’s one pretty good clue.

Then again, maybe not. In a program that predates the secretive Bush administration, the nation’s intelligence agencies have been taking thousands of declassified documents out of the archives, essentially making them secrets again.

Hadn’t heard about that? That’s because the program itself is a secret.

According to a story in The New York Times, the push to pull documents is a backlash — stronger since 9/11 — against a Clinton-era executive order that made it harder to keep secrets more than 25 years old.

So now about 30 government workers spend each day going over old archived papers in search of ones that should be made secrets again. So far, more than 55,000 pages have been hidden again from public view, at a cost in the millions of dollars, according to The Times. The purge would’ve remained a secret, but a historian stumbled across signs of your tax dollars at work.

Nobody wants sensitive material available to just anybody. But some documents were yanked not to protect state secrets, but to avoid embarrassment. Like the 1950 CIA assessment that the Chinese were unlikely to intervene in the Korean War, written two weeks before 300,000 Chinese troops did just that. Or the 1948 memo about using balloons to drop propaganda leaflets in Eastern Europe.

Both of those are gone from the archives. It’s hard to know much more about the program, since officials there are generally forbidden from talking about it, or even who’s involved. According to one expert quoted by The Times, the secrecy is coming from the intelligence agencies, rather than directly from the White House.

A CIA spokesman said that the agency is just double-checking, and fixing mistakes made in earlier releases. A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency refused to even admit the Pentagon was involved.

Guess that’s a secret.

Endorsing an operation to help Muslim women feign sexual innocence

Faking one’s virginity hardly seems like something a religious leader would condone. But late last month, Egypt’s grand mufti (the country’s official Islamic spokesman) endorsed what’s been dubbed the “re-hymenization fatwa” — an edict that effectively allows Muslim women to feign sexual innocence through surgery that restores the hymen. Appearing on national television, the mufti counselled women who opt for the procedure to be discreet. “If God wants us to know everything about each other, he would have given us the ability to read each other’s minds,” he said. Other supporters of the fatwa have made some highly enlightened statements; one scholar at Cairo’s esteemed Al Azhar University told an Egyptian newspaper: “Any man who is concerned about his prospective wife’s hymen should first provide a proof that he himself is a virgin.”

But is this seemingly feminist fatwa as progressive as it appears? The edict could be seen as silently sanctioning a system that denies women any measure of sexual self-determination. In some communities, women are forced to undergo “virginity testing” (in which a doctor checks the status of the hymen), and face a range of “honour crimes,” the most extreme of which is murder, for bringing shame to their families by having premarital sex. What’s more, the penal codes of many Muslim countries offer leniency to men who commit honour crimes against female family members. In the Palestinian territories, prosecutors will order posthumous virginity testing on women believed to be victims of honour killings; if a forensic doctor concludes that a victim was non-virginal, her killer could be eligible for a reduced sentence.

Muslim women’s advocates like Nuzhat Jafri, who sits on the national board of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, emphasize that Islam does not, in fact, require a bloodied sheet as proof of a woman’s virginity; such rituals (which have also been practised by Jews in the Middle East and Europe) are cultural rather than religious. If anything, such customs have been rejected by Islamic scholars. “Lawyers through the centuries always resisted very strongly the idea that an intact hymen equals virginity,” explains Lynda Clarke, an Islamicist in Concordia’s religion department. Part of the rationale for this position is practical, a recognition of the fact that a ruptured hymen can result from many things. “However, I strongly suspect that the primary motivation of the jurists was to prevent sexual accusations against females along with the violence that involves,” says Clarke.

Still, even if the ancient jurists and modern-day mufti have tried to protect women in a roundabout way, it may just be the most realistic one. Social workers in the Palestinian territories find themselves in this bind when women come to their offices asking to be referred to a doctor for hymenoplasty. “They feel very strongly that this is a problematic process perpetuating a view that women’s sexuality should be controlled,” explains Farida Deif, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But they really don’t want to turn that woman away when she feels it’s the only way to protect herself. Some of them do provide referrals, because they feel that women shouldn’t be victims of violence, and victims shouldn’t be agents of social change.”