The government's secret disservice.

When, a few months ago, the U.S. Air Force revealed that in 1947 it had conducted a somewhat offbeat research project in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, a large cohort of Americans felt both vindicated and dissatisfied. This cohort consisted of people who are convinced that many so-called unidentified objects sighted in the skies over the years, UFOs, were intentionally directed to Earth and were probably piloted by "people" from other planets. They were dissatisfied because they refused to believe the Air Force's explanation of the event.

Dead serious in their beliefs, the UFO fans gathered in force to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the landings of large weather balloons the Air Force launched for research purposes. But many others found humor in the occasion, some perhaps recalling comedian Jonathan Winter's hilarious skit mocking an extraterrestrial landing. Still others asked why it had taken the Air Force so long to come clean, as it were. The Cold War has been over for quite a while; the secret maneuvers seemed pretty routine and could hardly have given comfort to an enemy.

So, it seems, the brouhaha with its comic overtones raised a more significant issue -- our government's obsession with secrecy. As long-classified documents and explanations of activities trickle out of Coventry, it is usually their unremarkableness that is most striking. How often, we wonder, has secrecy become an end in itself? Or how often in the dim, dark past has the protection of some bureaucrat's posterior been considered of paramount importance?

Some declassified revelations, however, have been truly shocking. When, for example, Hazel O'Leary the now unfortunately defrocked Secretary of Energy unearthed a year or two ago the World War II-era government experiment that deliberately exposed human guinea pigs to venereal disease, there was genuine outrage, as there should have been. Again the question was, "Why only now are we being told of this malfeasance?"

In another ghastly government experiment, some victims of disease were allowed to die without treatment as others undergoing treatment were matched in a macabre race against the first group. So shocking was this disclosure that President Clinton felt it appropriate to apologize to the victims on behalf of the United States.

Our various governmental bodies, of course, are not alone in sweeping dirt, both their own and that of others, under carpets. Other domestic institutions play this game, too. Witness our exalted "newspaper of record," The New York Times.

On June 7 the Times reported in a page-one story that "more than 100,000 people were killed during the 36-year conflict in Guatemala. Another 40,000 disappeared and are presumed dead."

The story gave a grisly account of how the Guatemalans have begun the painstaking process of excavating the hundreds of mass graves that dot the countryside.

In the words of Robert Parry in The Consortium, this story dealt with "the slaughter of an estimated quarter million people by the sadistic Guatemalan army, a military that has dominated the Central American country since the CIA-sponsored and directed coup in 1954 to oust a democratically elected government."

(It might be noted with pride here, either pardonable or unpardonable, that this magazine, in a 1954 cover story before the coup, praised the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz and its attempt to distribute land fairly.)

A U.S. media cover-up of this incident in 1954 was by no means limited to the Times. It was broad and universal. In that sense, this year's revelation by the newspaper is to be applauded. Not to be applauded, though, was the cooperation that the Times, in 1954, gave indirectly to the coup and ultimately to its horrendous aftermath.

The Times also deserves credit for confessing its complicity in the coup, although the confession merited only a low-key story on page 11.

As described in The Consortium, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger acquiesced to a CIA request that the newspaper black out its independent news coverage of the covert operation. CIA director Allen Dulles asked the Times to keep its Latin American correspondent, Sydney Gruson, out of the way so he could not blow the whistle.

"In the days before the coup, Dulles personally appealed to Sulzberger, and the Times publisher obliged the CIA. 'I telephoned Allen Dulles and told him that we would keep Gruson in Mexico City,' Sulzberger stated in a dictated memorandum."

Historians will note that this story is only one of many that might be told if (and when) the cloak of secrecy is lifted to describe what ought to be the business of the citizenry in a democratic country. It would be naive not to realize that many such secrets for the sake of secrecy are not extant at the moment.

What's that about eternal vigilance being the price of freedom?