Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 14 May 2006
When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from
Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the
innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last
week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as
treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to
publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the
Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials
who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war
and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely
those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the
thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both
The Times and The Washington Post.
This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public
has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard
defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess
what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time
the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on
Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the
C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post).
Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both
papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called
the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that
is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A.
director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing
leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising
national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded
Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by
bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged
under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the
leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the
journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White
House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not
the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and
unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more
administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's
the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's
exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at
risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the
buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's
where it should begin.
Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons
last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets"
secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first
reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees
"to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New
York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists,
activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the
mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms.
Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do
show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered
the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war
of ideas that we can't afford to lose.
The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and
Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to
suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, ***** Cheney
immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives."
The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, wrote that the Times exposÎ "may have ruined one of
our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."
Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective"
programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart
enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored
24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for
72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted).
As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than
ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted
F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while
uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the
N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was
described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do
with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with
tracking terrorists.
Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government
blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's
often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about.
Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into
retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch
hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.
Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national
security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before
the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates
how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the
C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists
plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of
what went wrong was notoriously toothless.
Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like
most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national
interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial
positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one
of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime.
Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the
bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy
(Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip
about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this
Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't
play games with the nation's defense during wartime.
Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran
intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on
terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the
C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this
was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he
told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer
Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no
point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."
What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early
memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and
its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country
but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including
leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A.
intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers
also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former
clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American
command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him
trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for
alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified
intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her
boss's management disasters.
Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor,
Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart
reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with
the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man"
to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history."
That's not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can
portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any
national security move. It was this bullying that led so many
Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002
election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy
soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate
the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled
electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual
Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 - "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one -
and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful
summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some
of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the
national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington
Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and
plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as
the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees
exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the
same grocery stores."
If Democrats - and, for that matter, Republicans - let a
president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another
second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as
diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with
treason, too.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051406F.shtml
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