Secrets, Surveillance, and Scapegoating the Press
by Robert Miraldi

I was on my way to the Mohonk Preserve to hike at a place called Split Rock where the cool stream is a summer delight.  But the conversation I ran into on the way was rather heated.  I stopped at Twiggy’s Restaurant in Accord, N.Y., where I picked up a sandwich to go.

As I waited, the waitress, pleasant but aloof, talked to a man at the counter about the war in Iraq. He had a shaved head, was perhaps 35 years old, and had the muscled look of a U.S. Marine.

“They were both beheaded,” she said about the two U.S. soldiers who had just recently been captured and killed by so-called Iraqi insurgents.

“We should not know about it,” the man said, adding, the press should not tell us; just get the troops in and clean them out.

In fact, he said, looking at me, almost as if he knew I was a long-time journalist, the press should not even be In Iraq.  “They have no right to be there.”

I bit my tongue, and changed the topic.  “Well,” I said, “You gotta expect that if our soldiers are captured they will be killed, and you gotta expect that our guys will kill anyone who does not seem to be a friend, including civilians.  It is just another bad war.”

They both glared at me, not sure what I was saying.

“I don’t wanna know anything that will hurt the boys,” the waitress said. The conversation ended when my tuna wrap arrived.  They seemed glad I was leaving.

But the conversation was a wakeup call for me that -- once again -- many Americans want to keep their heads in the sand and just not know what is going on in a conflict that has lasted longer than World War II.  Scarier stills is that the Bush Authoritarians know about the American antipathy toward the press, and are trying to pursue secret and arguably illegal policies without involving the public or its representatives.

And as it was in Vietnam, the press is stuck in the middle again, with the messenger being blamed for the message and putting journalism in the center of a heated debate about the relationship between the media and the government.

But the issue goes deeper; it is really about the relationship between the American public and the government.  How much should the public be involved in public policy decisions that effect foreign policy, national security, and how the nation seeks to quell terrorism?  Do we leave such decisions to the “wise elders” in Washington? My answer: I trust the people and the press more than I trust the authorities.  Bush, Cheney and Co. work for us, and they need our permission to act.  For the press to reveal that the government was spying, perhaps illegally, even in an effort to capture terrorists, is not a treasonous act.  On the contrary, information is the lifeblood of a democracy, not a dagger in its heart.

The issue comes to a boil today because the New York Times has revealed in separate exposes that the Bush administration, in pursuit of terrorists, has been secretly spying on citizens and tracking foreign banking transactions, stories that have drawn the ire of conservatives who have demanded prosecution of editors and the removing of the Times’ press credentials.  This is an old story actually.

In 1971, the Times and other major newspapers revealed a hidden history of the Vietnam war, using classified documents; the government sued the press.  Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court had to settle the question about whether the press or government had primacy.

Richard Nixon was furious at the Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers, calling its behavior “traitorous.” Eventually the Supreme Court did not agree with him, but what is haunting is the similarity between what Nixon and Henry Kissinger argued and what George Bush and Dick Cheney are saying.  They, too, view the leak of government efforts as a traitorous assault on the government’s effort to stop terrorism.  And the Fox-fed nation often buys into this.

The question of illegality will become clearer over time.  But what is very clear is the responsibility of the press is to the people, not the government.  The constitution gave the government little control over the press for a simple reason: reporters need to be free to tell the public what its government is doing. 

As Ulster County Congressman Maurice Hinchey recently said, "The New York Times' decisions to publish articles about the …warrantless surveillance program are not only entirely appropriate, but essential to the maintenance of political responsibility at the highest levels of our government.”

No one is saying – or believes – that suspected terrorists should not be closely monitored.  But judges and congressional oversight committees need to approve such spying.  And they would if asked.  But the Bush Administration, apparently mostly spurred by a Vice President who thinks the Executive needs super-power in the age of terrorism, did not get those approvals.

The recent disclosure were revealed first by the Times and then by the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers.  But it is the Times that is the lightening rod for criticism.  The right-wind bloggers have been flogging Times editor Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, for this “traitorous” act. They contend that the expose ruins the chance of following the terrorists.

In 1971 Nixon argued that the revelations of how America had lied its way into Vietnam might cause the U.S. to have difficulty in negotiating a peace. How could foreign nations possibly trust us if we could not keep secrets?  No one really bought that argument, and as historians have shown, the Times kept documents that were truly secret from ever reaching the public. 

Blaming the messenger for the message is an old diversionary trick. When in 1988 Dan Rather asked George Bush, the father, a question on CBS news that he did not like, the President attacked Rather’s behavior for a time when Rather walked off the air and left the stage empty.  Nice public relations but it was a diversion from having to answer tough questions. 

When a war goes poorly (Iraq), when your chief terrorist can’t be found (bin Laden) and when your whole reason for going to war (weapons of mass destruction) is bogus, you would like to change the discussion.  Attack the press. Always a nice scapegoat. No one likes those big corporate wealthy establishment media companies anyway.

We need to go back to Civics 100.  The press is protected by the First Amendment for a simple reason:  America needs a Fourth Branch of government to watch over the other three so that when they try to act in authoritarian ways – snooping, threatening and abridging civil liberties and  telling lies – the public can find out and make judgments about what to do. Anything short of that is not a democracy.

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