Watergate Lessons Remain for Media, US
by Charles Lewis
The tension between power and the press, between spinning and searching
for truth, between disinformation and information, is of course endemic
to the human condition itself. And in trying times like these, when
reporters at major news organizations are facing jail time for refusing
to disclose confidential source information and it looks as if things
are going to hell, it is strangely consoling to recall that others
before us have also traveled on what must have seemed to be the road to
perdition.
The Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate scandal about Richard Nixon's
White House still represent the bleakest moments and the loftiest
triumphs of journalism in contemporary America. They provide an
invaluable perspective as we ponder the future and assess the tectonic
damage to our long-cherished freedoms of speech and information in the
past three years in the wake of the unimaginable carnage of Sept. 11,
2001.
In the weeks and months before Sept. 11, the Bush administration's
obsession with secrecy and its aggressive control tactics had already
become apparent. For example, instead of turning his gubernatorial
papers over to the Texas State Library and Archives, as tradition would
have it, Gov. Bush, in his last hours, tried to shelter his official
records inside his father's presidential library at Texas A&M
University, outside the jurisdiction of the strong Texas public
information law. He was overruled by the state attorney general.
In the summer of 2001, Vice President Cheney refused to release basic
information about meetings he and other administration officials had
held - on government time and property - with energy company executives
to help formulate federal policies, a position on which he remains
steadfastly adamant.
And a month before Sept. 11, the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed
Associated Press reporter John Solomon's home telephone records. As
Solomon, the AP deputy Washington bureau chief, told me, "The Justice
Department has indicated to us that they were actually trying to stop
the publication of a story that I was working on and tried to find out
who I was talking to and cut off the flow of information. So it does get
into the issue of prior restraint, along with First and Fourth Amendment
issues.''
Government news blackout
As we all know too well, in the weeks immediately after Sept. 11, the
Bush administration obtained passage of the USA Patriot Act, with no
public debate or amendments, among other things, giving federal
authorities more power to access e-mail and telephone communications.
The federal government detained hundreds of people indefinitely without
releasing even the most basic information about them. Attorney General
John Ashcroft described the news blackout in Orwellian fashion, "It
would be a violation of the privacy rights of individuals for me to
create some kind of list.''
It is hard to overstate the weeks immediately after Sept. 11. In 300
cases, federal authorities were granted more power to access government
records by executive order, or proposed new laws to sharply curtail
their availability, according to the National Conference of State
Legislatures. More recently, sunshine activists are most alarmed about
the Homeland Security Act, especially its Protected Critical
Infrastructure Information section.
Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive in
Washington, wrote in National Security and Open Government, "The
government has successfully framed the debate after 9/11 as terrorism
fighters versus civil libertarians, as soldiers versus reporters, as
hawks versus doves. In wartime, the poundage of the former will always
outweigh the latter. ... We need to place openness where it belongs, not
only at the center of our values, but also at the center of our strategy
for security.''
Excessive secrecy
Both the congressional Sept. 11 investigation and the 9/11 Commission
appointed by President Bush separately documented extensive
"intelligence hoarding'' and petty bureaucratic turf wars inside the
government, excessive secrecy for all the wrong reasons and the dire
consequences of not sharing information. The 9/11 Commission concluded,
"We believe American and international public opinion might have been
different - and so might the range of options for a president - had they
(the American people) been informed of (the growing al-Qaida danger).''
Besides educating the American people about the Vietnam War, the
greatest result of courageous publication of the Pentagon Papers was the
confidence it imbued in newsrooms all across America.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in the Pentagon Papers case
words we should all remember, "In the absence of governmental checks and
balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective
restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national
defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry -
in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect
the values of democratic government.''
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1212-28.htm
.
|
