[Dialogue] Spying and Lying

Wed Dec 21 13:34:08 EST 2005

Colleagues, very sobering indeed! Peace, Harry 
  _____  

AlterNet

Spying and Lying

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation
Posted on December 21, 2005, Printed on December 21, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/29894/

"This shocking revelation ought to send a chill down the spine of every
American."
-- Senator Russell Feingold, December 17, 2005 

As reported by the New York Times on Friday, "Months after the September 11
attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency
(NSA) to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to
search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved
warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying."

A senior intelligence officer says Bush personally and repeatedly gave the
NSA permission for these taps -- more than three dozen times since October
2001. Each time, the White House counsel and the Attorney General -- whose
job it is to guard and defend our civil liberties and freedoms -- certified
the lawfulness of the program. (It is useful here to note "The Yoo Factor":
The domestic spying program was justified by a "classified legal opinion"
written by former Justice Department official John Yoo, the same official
who wrote a memo arguing that interrogation techniques only constitute
torture if they are "equivalent in intensity to...organ failure, impairment
of bodily function or even death.")

Illegally spying on Americans is chilling -- even for this Administration.
Moreover, as Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security
Studies, told the Times, "the secret order may amount to the president
authorizing criminal activity." Some officials at the NSA agree. According
to the Times, "Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program,
apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation." Others were
"worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or
criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was
elected President."

It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know,
and this Administration and its foot soldiers have used every means
available to undermine journalists' ability to exercise their First
Amendment function of holding power accountable. But compounding the
Administration's double-dealing, the media has been largely complicit in the
face of White House mendacity. David Sirota puts it more bluntly in a recent
entry from his blog: "We are watching the media being used as a tool of
state power in overriding the very laws that are supposed to confine state
power and protect American citizens."

Consider this: the New York Times says it "delayed publication" of the NSA
spying story for a year. The paper says it acceded to White House arguments
that publishing the article "could jeopardize continuing investigations and
alert would-be-terrorists that they might be under scrutiny."

Despite Administration demands though, it was reported in yesterday's
Washington Post that the decision by Times editor Bill Keller to withhold
the article caused friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according
to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in
the paper's DC bureau had apparently pushed for earlier publication.

In an explanatory statement, Keller issued the excuse that, "Officials also
assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been
imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal
questions."

This from a paper, which as First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus pointed out
in a letter to the editor "rejected similar arguments when it courageously
published the Pentagon Papers over the government's false objections that it
would endanger our foreign policy as well as the lives of individuals." The
Times, Garbus went on to argue, "owes its readers more. The Bush
Administration's record for truthfulness is not such that one should rely on
its often meaningless and vague assertions."

Readers and citizens deserve to know why the New York Times capitulated to
the White House's request. It is true that Friday's revelations of this
previously unknown, illegal domestic spying program helped stop the Patriot
Act reauthorization. But what if the Times had published its story before
the election? And what other stories have been held up due to Administration
cajoling, pressure, threats and intimidation?

The question of how this Administration threatens the workings of a free
press, a cornerstone of democracy, remains a central one. Every week brings
new evidence of White House attempts to delegitimize the press's role as a
watchdog of government abuse, an effective counter to virtually unchecked
executive power.

Last month, for example, the Washington Post published Dana Priest's
extraordinary report about the CIA's network of prisons in Eastern Europe
for suspected terrorists. Priest's reporting helped push passage of a ban on
the metastasizing use of torture. But, as with the New York Times, the Post
acknowledged that it had acceded to government requests to withhold the
names of the countries in which the black site prisons exist.

How many other cases are there of news outlets choosing to honor government
requests for secrecy over the journalistic duty of informing the public
about government abuse and wrongdoing?

Never has the need for an independent press been greater. Never has the need
to know what is being done in our name been greater. As Bill Moyers said in
an important speech delivered on the 20th anniversary of the National
Security Archive, a dedicated band of truth-tellers, "...There has been
nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy."
Moyers added. "It's an old story: the greater the secrecy, the deeper the
corruption."

Federation of American Scientists secrecy specialist Steven Aftergood
bluntly says, "an even more aggressive form of government information
control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as
government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in
libraries, archives, websites and official databases." This practice,
Aftergood adds, "also accords neatly with the Bush Administration's
preference for unchecked executive authority."

"Information is the oxygen of democracy," Aftergood rightly insists. This
Administration is trying to cut off the supply. Journalists and media
organizations must find a way to restore their role as effective watchdogs,
as checks on an executive run amok. 

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation. 

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