The American public learned in April 2004 that some detainees were being abused in Iraq by U.S. military police who were encouraged to do so by Military Intelligence and by civilian employees of private intelligence contractors, of which there were sixty in Iraq. Little more would come to light about the private contractors, but eventually a substantial body of evidence developed suggesting the use of torture in the war on terror was by no means confined to isolated occurrences. As late as May 2006, the director of human rights for Amnesty International reported that “this increasing outsourcing of war has created a virtual rules-free zone for private military companies” and that the “awarding, overseeing, and enforcing of contracts is shrouded in secrecy....” She noted, “Contractors have been linked to shootings of civilians and to sexual abuse and torture of detainees.” One CIA contractor has been sent to prison for eight years for torture resulting in the death of a detainee. Two other cases have been thrown out of court, and seventeen others are languishing in the office of the US attorney for Eastern Virginia. That office is packed with loyal Bush appointees, who are not expected to investigate or act. The Justice Department has told Congress that there are jurisdictional problems in pursuing cases involving mercenaries. Experts, including those from Amnesty International , believe that the abuse cases involving military contractors easily run into the hundreds. In 2005, videotape footage surfaced showing contract employees machine-gunning occupied civilian cars on an Iraqi highway. This did not involve detainees, but it suggests that some contract employees are lawless cowboys. It is known that the number of contract employees in Iraq is about 2/3s of the number of Armed Forces personnel.
In 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a memorandum authorizing severe physical interrogation techniques that were to be combined with harsh psychological methods. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey objected and warned that those involved in producing the memo would be ashamed of themselves when the world eventually learned of this policy. The policy memorandum was signed at a time when the administration was vigorously denying that the U.S. was involved in torturing prisoners. When the memo came to light in 2007, the administration refused to provide Congress with any of the paperwork that had been developed as background and underpinning for the memo.
By August 2006, there were 450 prisoners at Guantanimo, as the US had released some prisoners due to international pressure. Those being released were told not to talk to a lawyer and often were asked to sign confessions as a condition for release. Five hundred people were detained in Afghanistan, where the US had used at one time or another 35 different detention centers. Another 13,000 were held in Iraq, and 98 died while in various detention centers. There was no data on how many were held in secret CIA prisons around the world.
In May 2004, photographs surfaced that showed two soldiers posing with the dead body of a detainee who had apparently been beaten to death by CIA or private intelligence contractor operatives. The body was there because the CIA and military interrogators could not agree on who should dispose of it. The Red Cross had been complaining about the abuses since October 2003 and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had also expressed deep concern about the abuses. The FBI had been complaining since 2002 that interrogation techniques at Guantanimo had crossed the line of propriety and that detainees were being abused. The administration claimed abuses were isolated to a handful of wayward National Guard personnel. Yet some of the photographs revealed torture techniques known only to skilled professionals. The interrogations were ultimately under the control of military task forces that answered to the Joint Special Operations command. A seasoned retired CIA officer claimed that these teams “had full authority to wack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action’….”
It is likely that the techniques were based on decades of the study of “no-touch” torture techniques. In the 1960s, the CIA spent enormous amounts on these investigations that included sleep deprivation, strange eating schedules, stressful positions, loud noises, self-inflicted pain, sexual humiliation, intense never ending light, and scrambled sleep. Some of the work was farmed out to experimenters at Cornell and McGill Universities. It was found that the interrogators easily slipped from no-touch techniques to traditional brutality.
It soon became apparent that a pattern of abuse had existed in Afghanistan and at the Guantanimo detention facility. In Bagram, Afghanistan two men died due to repeated beatings in December 2002. At first, the military tried to sweep the matter under the rug, but eventually seven soldiers were charged with abuses. The investigation continued for two years, but documents were somehow lost, key people not interviewed, and evidence was mishandled. Finally, in October 2004, it appeared that twenty others might be charged for offenses ranging from lying to unintentional manslaughter. A year later, a regiment of the 173 Airborne burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan, a clear violation of Islamic custom. Across the globe at Guantanimo, authorities were looking into charges that soldiers had degraded the corpse of a prisoner.
It became known that commandos, probably acting under operation “Copper Green,” seized people in Afghanistan and placed them in “the Pit” and other detention centers, where they were subjected to various forms of abuse, including sexual. They had learned that sex, especially homosexual sex, was especially taboo among Muslims. It was thought that sexual degradation and photographing people in compromising sexual situations would produce information and even recruit prisoners to become informers. The prisoners would do whatever was necessary to prevent the photographs from being shown to their families. These techniques would also be employed in Iraq, and interrogation methods designed to play upon Islamic sensibilities were to be widely reported in Afghanistan, Guantanimo, and Iraq.
One of the Military Intelligence units involved in Bagram abuses was transferred to Iraq, where they continued to ply their skills. Months after the first revelation,, reports began to surface that some prisoners who were released from Guantanimo were claiming that they had been tortured by “prostitutes.” At Guantanimo, under the command of General Geoffrey Miller, interrogators played upon the detainees sexual sensitivities. A whole range of unspeakable techniques was used on Mohammed al Kahtani. This was the first indication that the pattern of abuse existed in Afghanistan and Guantanimo before we had military prisons in Iraq. Evidence surfaced that women questioned these men at Guantanimo in late night sessions that included the use of fake menstrual blood. Female interrogators wore Tight T-shirts, engaged in sexual touching, and paraded in miniskirts, and left bras and thong underwear hanging in the room. This often reduced the detainees to uncontrollable crying. One woman in a tight shirt rubbed her breasts against the back of a praying internee and then mocked him because he had an erection. A class action suite brought the Center for Rights has brought some complaints by detainees. One named Ahmed, was held for five months and tortured in various ways including being frequently bound, stripped, exposed to extreme cold, and kicked and beaten. He was also kicked in his genitals. Ahmed also had to watch his father being tortured. His savings were confiscated and his house destroyed.
Four months of extreme abuses at Abu Ghraib seemed to begin after the Guantanimo Camp X-Ray commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller was ordered to visit the site. Rumsfeld sent him there with oral orders to “Gitmoize” the camp. He was sent to “Gitmoize” the facility, and he told its commander Reserve Brigadier General Janice Karpinski to turn over effective control of the prison to military intelligence. General Miller told the staff to “treat these prisoners like dogs” and said that the guards should soften up the detainees for the intelligence people. Even before his visit, the prison was a hellhole due to overcrowding and the failure of higher command to provide adequate supplies and staff. Karpinski was refused permission to release people who had been cleared. After Miller’s visit, the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade had control of the facility. When news of the torture came out, Karpinski was relieved of command, and the Bush administration later reduced her to colonel on charges that had nothing to do with Abu Gharib. She had no opportunity to defend herself
Lt. General Keith Alexander, as Army Chief of Staff, was sent to Iraq to persuade Colonel T. Pappas, the intelligence officer who had been given control of the camp, to comply with General Jeffrey Miller’s plan to “Gitmoize” interrogation facilities in Iraq by intensifying interrogation techniques. In 2006, Pappas faced the possibility that he could be charged with permitting prisoners to be abused. .
On September 14, 2003, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez also ordered more intense questioning methods, but they did not include the most troubling techniques revealed in photographs, except the use of dogs. Most of the abuses occurred in Cellblock 1A, which was off-limits to Karpinski and her Reserve troops. General Miller had ordered some unusual interrogation techniques for Mohammed el Quahtani, the so-called “Twentieth Hijacker.” This person was dressed in women’s underwear and required to perform sex acts in the presence of a female. A leash was placed around his neck and he was required to perform dog tricks. A leaked December 2005 inspector general’s report stated that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld monitored these sado-sexual practices via telephone.
It is unclear what measures Major General Miller recommended. At some time after the visit, he was briefed –“read in”- about “Copper Green” which Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice had approved after 9/11, and was most probably pursuant to the program Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft signed off to, which was designed to extract information from “high value” prisoners. It was a “black”, special-access program (SAP) that authorized elite personnel from the CIA, Seals, and other agencies to “Grab whom you must. Do what you want.”
Dr. Rice signed off on Copper Green, but there is evidence that she did not know about the 2002 “torture memo” which made Copper Green and its outgrowths so horrible. However, it is known that Dr. Rice played a major role in shaping torture policy. She and other NSC officers carefully reviewed what the CIA could do to detainees. They all but orchestrated interrogation sessions, detailing whether slapping. Simulated drowning, etc. could occur. President Bush acknowledged that he knew that these discussions took place and approved of them.
On January 11, 2002, CIA briefers met with White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and David S. Addington, Cheney’s lawyer. The briefers said they would have problems obtaining actionable intelligence if they had to work within the rules of the Geneva Convention. Vice President Cheney took it upon himself to lead the effort to promote “robust interrogation” by finding a way around international law by redefining torture. The famous memo justifying torture was the work of Gonzales, Timothy E. Flanigan of the White House, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, John Yoo, also of Justice, and Addington. Yoo, who is usually given most of the credit for the memo, later said it would be dangerous to let the military implement the memo. Built into it was a defense for the torturer. If he or she acted with the intent of obtaining information rather than inflicting harm, no crime was committed. Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s old mentor, claimed Cheney was the driving force in forging the new policy. Rice and Colin Powell learned of the August, 2002 memo on June 8, 2004. International Law professor Jordan Paust wrote, “Not since the Nazi era have so many lawyers been so clearly involved in international crimes concerning the treatment and interrogation of persons detained during war.”
It was the creation of the Copper Green program and its subsequent extension to Iraq that set the scene for horrible transgressions of human rights and international law.. Among them were guards urinating on detainees, riding them, and having snakes bite them. There were reports of homosexual rape and of guards jumping on the injured leg of a prisoner. It was later learned that some of the Arabic-speaking interrogators/torturers were the same people the Israelis used in South Lebanon in 1991. Under- Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone authorized “Copper Green” tactics at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq. Apparently “Copper Green” originally dealt with the abuse of high value detainees. Cambone’s order made possible the use of these techniques against many more detainees. More Military Intelligence and civilian intelligence people appeared, using aliases, and instructed military police to abuse the detainees. Some detainees were singled out for such extensive abuse that their names were not recorded. They were “ghost detainees” who existed in no records. Cambone resigned in late 2006.
Specialist Charles A. Garner, Jr. confided to whistle-blower Joseph M. Darby, “The Christian in me says its wrong. But the corrections officers says, ‘ I love to make a grown man piss on himself.’” In one instance, the sickly son of a former Iraqi official was stripped naked, driven around in a truck with mud spattered over him in order to induce the “high value” detainee to talk. He did so when more threats were made against the boy and rest of the family. The boy was later placed in cellblock where a sergeant warned he was likely to be raped. Smothering and chest compression techniques were often used to bring on near asphyxiation as a means of getting other high value captives to talk. At least two high-ranking Iraqi officers died this way, and there are believed to be at least six other homicides; although twenty-seven people died under interrogation in Iraq. One of the dead was the former head of the Iraqi Air Force, Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush.
There have been complaints of Islamic women being raped. A British paper first broke this story. Then Newsweek said that unreleased photographs showed a soldier having sex with a female detainee and soldiers having sex with juveniles. Nadia, a reporter for a London-based paper, was held there for six months and was first raped bt five soldiers to the refrains of heavy metal music. She reported :
One month later, a soldier showed up and told me in broken Arabic to take a shower. And before finishing my bath, he kicked the door open. I slapped him but he raped me like animals and called two of his colleagues, who forced me to have sex with them for up to 10 times," added Nadia.
Four months later, the female soldier came along with four male soldiers with a digital camera. She stripped me naked and started fondling me as if she was a man while her male colleagues broke into laughter and started taking photos.
Reluctant as I was, she fired four shots close to my head and threatened to kill me if I resist. Then, four soldiers raped me sadistically and I lost conscience. Later, she forced me to watch a clip of my raping, saying bluntly: ‘You were born to give us pleasure’.
When it was clear that the operations at Abu Ghraib prison had gotten out of hand, the CIA withdrew from the project. Several military Judge Advocate general officers tried unsuccessfully to get the New York State Bar Association to intervene. There was also great concern about the number of civilian contractors used in the operation because they were subjected to no restrains. For months, the International Red Cross and various human rights organizations had alerted the administration to the growing abuses.
It is unclear if the deaths of high value detainees at Al Asad, a remote air base, were connected to this program. There is unmistakable evidence based on photographic evidence that Sunni tribal leader Abdul Kareem Abdul Jaleel was tortured to death there. American medical personnel said he died of natural causes. About five bodies a week are delivered to Forensic Institute in Baghdad from American detention facilities. The Iraqi coroners and scientists are forbidden to examine bodies for which there is a US- issued death certificate, but they do look at them. Off the record, they say the bodies show obvious signs of torture.
High value suspected terrorists could be moved across borders and kept in various locations in a vast US interrogation network. This secret gulag or network of prisons was linked largely by CIA operated Gulf Stream and other executive jets. There is evidence that a number of shell corporations were used in these rendition operations. Rendition involved seizing a person in a foreign land and flying him to a secret CIA prison , also abroad, or to a foreign prison where he would be questioned by foreign jailers who were not bound by any rules of conduct. One was Aero Contractors, which operated out of the Johnston County Airport in Smithfield, NC. Prisoners were also turned over to other regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan for torture and interrogation. One Canadian citizen was held in Syria for three months, a matter that caused great consternation in Canada. Some were sent to other countries known for the use of brutal torture techniques Australian citizen Mamdouh Habid was held for forty-eight months in Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Guantanimo. The experiences he claimed were consistent with reports from other former detainees. He may have been considered a fairly high value prisoner because U.S. authorities knew he had trained in two Al Qaeda camps and had reason to suspect he might have trained people for the attack on 9/11.
At several of these sites, electric shock techniques were employed. Sometimes a wired helmet was used, which interrogators said was truth detector. American female interrogators touched his private parts, and one reached under her skirt and threw what she claimed were blood at him. `Egyptians snubbed out cigarettes on his skin and a Pakistani interrogator dropkicked him in the skull. Americans also beat him, and his head was hit against the floor at Guantanimo. By 2007, it was known that at least 300 people had been subjected to rendition by the George W. Bush administration.
These abuses have their origins in the Clinton administration, but they were vastly magnified in the subsequent administration. In the mid- 1990s, the Clinton administration laid the foundations for this program when it began to sanction the transportation of terrorist detainees to foreign countries for questioning. This policy of “rendition” was limited to people who had already been found guilty in our courts. The Bush administration broadened this policy to include mere suspects, and about one hundred and fifty have been subjected to rendition since 2001. The new policy was part of what Alberto Gonzales called the New Paradigm, the administration’s new approach to detention and interrogation. Rendition also changed in that it often meant more than just sending detainees to foreign countries, they were often held and questioned by Americans in safe houses in those countries.
Some theorize that much of the torture would have occurred even without the involvement of civilian and military authorities because soldiers were led to believe that the people they were fighting were terrorists, closely connected to those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.Eventually, Pentagon officials admitted that 90% of its detainees were innocent. The Geneva Conventions states: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed," and "collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” So far, the preferred opinion of the government and most Americans is that these abuses were very limited and entirely the actions of a few low-ranking individuals.
. In 2005, Dana Priest of the Washington Post revealed that the US maintained a network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The paper was persuaded not to mention two of the locations. A Swiss paper published intelligence information that showed that there were black holes in Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and the Ukraine. The highest-ranking Al Qaeda operatives are sent to “Bright Light,” a prison, it is said, from which there is no return. ABC News soon discovered secret prisons were in Poland and Romania. It also reported some of the black sites were being evacuated with prisoners being removed to somewhere in North Africa. The White House persuaded the network not to mention sites in Poland and Romania for four days, probably allowing time to complete the removals. The ABC television network agreed to this, not realizing the whole story had been broadcast on ABC Radio and placed on the website. All this fancy footwork was necessary so that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could deny the existence of the black holes and torture during a hastily arranged trip to Europe. Of course, all of this had been widely reported in Europe, but these “secrets” were withheld from American news consumers. The Republican Congress promptly launched an investigation of how this information was leaked.
Ms. Priest and her paper did their jobs, but most of the American media avoided using the word “torture” and followed the administration line of blaming a few, low-ranking bad apples. Moreover, the Democrats did not raise the question in the 2004 presidential campaign. When Bush was reelected, Yoo said the election had been a referendum on torture and that the public had decisively upheld the administration’s position. Although Secretary Rice denied the existence of secret prisons and seemed to deny rendition, Europeans did not drop the matter. On June 6, 2006, the Council of Europe released a 67-page report on CIA renditions across Europe. It even provided flight logs. At about that time, Italian investigative judge Armando Spataro in Milan activated a case against 22 agents who kidnapped Hussan Nsar. In November 2006, investigators finally found a memorandum in which President George W. Bush authorized policies for the handling of foreign detainees.
To appease public opinion, the Pentagon ordered Major General Antonio M. Taguba to undertake an investigation of the situation at Abu Ghraib. His orders were very narrow. He was to investigate the military police there but no one above them, including the military intelligence teams. One can assume that a report was expected that would result in the punishment of untrained prison guards and few else. It would develop later that it would be almost impossible to investigate many of the military intelligence people who were involved because they used fake names. Taguba’s report was thorough and it took little reading between the lines to understand the extent of the abuse and that this was just the work of young kids in the military police.
The report was leaked, and this, along with its contents, would destroy Taguba’s career. Old friends in uniform now avoided him, and Secretary Rumsfeld did not conceal his displeasure. The Secretary was mainly concerned with finding the leak and creating the false impression that he knew very little about all this and had only seen the pictures of abuse briefly before testifying before Congress. In fact, he had access to all that for months. General John Abizaid told him, “You and your report will be investigated.” Taguba thought, “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time T thought I was in the Mafia.” He eventually concluded that it was impossible that the President had not been aware of the torture program all along. A member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee offered the prevailing view of the scandal: “Abu Ghraib was the price of defending democracy.” In January 2006, Taguba was ordered to resign.
Subsequently, the Pentagon decided that water-boarding should be discontinued, and the revised manual on interrogation specifically forbids it. However, the CIA is permitted to water-board prisoners, and both the Pentagon and Justice Department have ruled that testimony from detainees gathered through torture was admissible in court. Detainees do not have the right of habeas corpus to determine if their detainment is appropriate.
A FBI report released in 2008 revealed that agents knew of the torture almost at its inception. They were instructed not to participate. Agents watched prisoners being tortured hundreds of times but nothing was done to expose or stop these deplorable practices. This internal report praised the agents for their integrity and professionalism.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
More on Bush Secrecy
In dealing with Congress, the Bush administration has been worse than its predecessors in sharing information. To avoid confirmation hearings, it has resorted to a number of recess appointments. When it was clear there would be trouble confirming someone, as in the case of the nomination of John Bolton as UN ambassador, it abandoned the hearings route and made a recess appointment. Letters from Congressmen requesting information are treated in a cavalier manner, and those from Democrats are sometimes ignored. After a spate of mine disasters, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the problem. The top mine safety official, David G. Dye, testified and left, announcing that he had “pressing matters” to attend to. Those who testify are expected to remain in case matters come up that they can address. When Bush instructed the NSA to spy on private telephone conversations without warrants, the administration briefed only Congressional leaders, and the briefings were only fig-leaves. Yet Bush bragged about his openness in this matter. The Congressional Research Service noted that the law requires that whole committees be briefed and concluded that the administration may have broken the law.
Taking its cue from the administration, the Republican Congress has usually refused to investigate controversial matters; perhaps thinking party loyalty demanded this. Of course, observers with good memories know that Democratic Congresses did investigate Democratic presidents. Norman Ornstein has suggested that the subservience of Congress is part of a “battered Congress syndrome,” something akin to a battered spouse syndrome.
Despite the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department promulgated regulations that enabled agencies to keep secret any information they thought should not be available to the public. A very small case in point was the abuse of secrecy rules to make Bill Clinton look bad in his negotiations with Israeli Prime minister Ehud Barach. The transcripts of their telephone discussions were labeled top secret, and the Bush administration edited them to the disadvantage of its predecessor. There was also a massive increase in the number of classified documents, from 8 million in 1999 to 23 million in 2002. The administration appointed a new federal archivist who had been accused of violations of the code of the International Council of Archivists. It did not seem to be an administration committed to the public’s right to know what was transpiring.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in March 2001 ordered all agencies to develop guidelines to prevent disclosure of information they considered “sensitive but unclassified.” Bush’s EPA began making scholars register before they could use its Envirofacts database After September 11, the movement toward secrecy in government was intensified under the pretext that security made this necessary. In contrast, the Clinton administration had declassified millions of records and had supported passage of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act. In 2002, Mitch Daniels, head of the Office of Management and Budget proposed that departments and agencies print their own materials, perhaps using private printers. This would end the practice of sending materials to the Government Printing Office, which was then required to send copies of what it printed to library depositories throughout the country. Daniels insisted that his plan was designed only to save money, but its effect would be to greatly limit the flow of information to the public.
The Bush administration refused to release Reagan administration documents that federal law mandated be made public in January 2001. The Bush administration delayed the release of 60,000 pages for more than a year, despite the requirements of law. On March 15, 2002, all but 155 pages were released. Most of that material seems to relate to the process of nominating judges. Bruce Craig, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, believes the administration does not want scholars to know how the Reagan administration stacked the judiciary with conservative judges. “What they did was brilliant, no question about it.” Some of the papers still withheld were those of then Vice President George H. W. Bush.
There are still millions of Reagan era papers to be processed before release can even be considered. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 required that the National Archives have ultimate control of presidential papers. In obedience to the law, the National Archives screened the Reagan papers for materials that related to national security and prepared about 68,000 that could be safely released in 2001 as the first installment of the Reagan papers. Alberto Gonzalez, White House Counsel, persuaded the Archives to accept three delays to give the White House time to deal with legal questions. After September 11, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, asserting the right to decide what was released and when. The fact that the country was on a war footing was used to justify the order as well as executive privilege. The order, for the first time, extended executive privilege to cover vice-presidential papers.
Presumably, the reason for the concealment of these documents was that many former Reagan administration officials were serving in the second Bush administration. Concealment of these records and the refusal to obey the law was scarcely mentioned in most of the press. Bush attempted to resolve the matter with the executive order giving presidents, beginning with Reagan, the same power as sitting presidents to keep their papers private. The executive order reversed the Presidential Records Act. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said the action was justified because of the September 11 attack on America. Molly Ivins, one of the few to comment upon this usurpation of power thought it was because the papers could “contain information damaging to the reputation of Poppy Bush, who was then vice president, and/or the reputations of old Reaganites like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.” The Executive Order is being challenged in the courts by Public Interest, but the political outlooks of the judges who hear the case could determine the outcome.
Bush had also moved to keep control of his gubernatorial papers by placing them in his father’s presidential library. Using the terrorist threat as an excuse, Attorney General John Ashcroft advised government agencies that he would support their efforts to withhold records requested under the Freedom of Information Act. A few newspapers noted that the Bush administration made haste to release the correspondence of Enron chairman Ken Lay with Clinton’s two Secretaries of the Treasury, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Lay offered Rubin a seat on the Enron board, which was declined. Summers was asked to resist a call to regulate derivatives. There was no evidence that the letters produced the desired results. On the other hand, Kenneth Lay had spent more than $600,000 to advance the political career of George W. Bush. During the campaign of 2000, Enron also loaned Bush a corporate jet for whistle-stopping. Lay had been appointed to the senior Bush’s Energy Council, and the Energy Policy Act, passed under the first Bush, forced utilities to permit energy traders like Enron to use their pipelines. By long delaying the seizure of Enron’s papers after it was clear that there had been widespread corporate wrong-doing, the Bush administration made it possible for extensive shredding of documents to occur.
In 2006, the Bush administration refused to release papers on its badly bungled handling of the hurricane Katrina, which did massive damage to the Gulf coast. After Katrina struck, Bush said he had no idea that New Orleans would be flooded or its levees would break, yet evidence turned up in February 2006 that he had been warned about those possibilities hours before the disaster occurred. The decision to stonewall on the FEMA papers issue and the refusal to permit top White House officials to testify before Congressional committees was clearly an attempt at damage control. In 2007, a federal judge commented on the “Kafkaesque” hurdles people had to jump in order to obtain FEMA assistance. FEMA legal service people were kept under a gag order so that the complete picture of the agency’s ineptitude or disinterest could not be revealed. It was also revealed that much FEMA food has simply gone to rot and that the agency had put out false figures about how many people it put into hotel rooms. While dealing with disastrous fires that year, the agency resorted to a faked press conference to burnish its image.
The Bush administration in 2002 stopped reporting information about factory closings, and acknowledged that it was doing so only in a footnote to a document released on Christmas Eve, 2002. In the environmental arena, there was an effort to tone down and/or delete scientific data from reports written by government environmental professionals that contradicted administration policy. Pollster Frank Luntz warned that the scientific debate about global warming “is closing against us but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science.” This was essentially done by censorship and editing. By early 2004, the administration found the ultimate policy for dealing with scientific findings. It created a scientific review process under the Office of Management and Budget that could delay the implementation of environmental and health regulations until the scientific information underpinning them was approved by this new review process. Joan Claybrook remarked, “this is an attempt at paralysis by analysis.”
There seemed to be a distrust of government experts as though they were somehow uninformed obstructionists determined to get in the way of progress. This characterization was applied to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, economists, environmentalists, and the CIA. The latter was particularly distrusted because it often criticized estimates and claims made by the Neo Conservatives and their Iraqi exile clients. This deep distrust of experts is partly an outgrowth of the Republicans’ critique of the so-called New Class. Even the Bush administration’s assault on the findings of hard sciences, particularly in regard to global warming, is more than pandering to industrial donors. It is a manifestation of the ideologues hostility to experts and is rooted in their critique of the so-called New Class.
In 2006, Dr. James E. Hansen, head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, complained that NASA has attempted to stop his frequent warnings about global warming. It ordered the public relations people to monitor future lectures, papers, and postings as well as requests from journalists for interviews. A public relations official relayed to him that NASA warned there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to speak in the same manner about global warming. A NASA official went on record as being unhappy that Hansen spoke on liberal NPR and stated that his job was “to make the president look good” and that Hansen was disloyal civil servant. For a time, his superiors assigned a “minder” to Hansen, but they it was learned that the young man who was to monitor Hansen’s behavior did not possess the degree he claimed to have. In 2006, Hansen compared Bush’s censorship of science with the way Stalin’s minions distorted it. It was reported that political appointees at NASA exerted heavy pressure during the 2004 election to prevent publication of information about glaciers melting, climate change, or global warming.
When government scientists produce facts that offend the Bush administration's corporate allies, the administration has moved to suppress the information. Dr. James Zahn was ordered by the Department of Agriculture not to publicize information about superbugs in huge hog farms due to pressure from the National Pork Producers Council. At the Department of Interior, the deletion and alteration of scientific information became a standard procedure. Scientists who were likely to find information that contradicted Bush policies or threatened corporate interests have been removed from federal panels. Tony Oppegard, a federal engineer heading a geodesic study of mountain top strip mining was fired as soon as Bush took office. The White House had little reason to share information with Congress or seek its imput. Republicans in the House and Senate are held in line by Teutonic discipline, and dutifully follow the White House line. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska complained that “You have an administration that does not reach out or see much value in consulting with Congress. They treat Congress as an appendage, a constitutional nuisance .
The George W. Bush administration has found another means to avoid vigorous enforcement of regulatory law by packing the top levels of the civil service with political appointees. Other administrations have done some of this, but Paul Light of the Brookings Institution considered the 12% increase of employees at this level “stunning. ” Appointments on Schedule C do not require Congressional approval. But the extent of these appointments suggests an intention to politicize the federal service and challenge the long-standing merit principle in civil service hiring. The plan for undoing much of the federal civil service system was laid out in January 2001 in the Heritage Foundation’s “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The document called for appointments based on loyalty as the first criterion rather than expertise. It maintained that the professional civil service should be considered the enemy and called for the outsourcing of as much work as possible. In early, 2007 the Bush administration capped its battle against the professional civil service with an executive order that required any changes in federal regulations had to be approved by political appointees in the departments and agencies of government.
The penchant for secrecy also involves an effort to control the flow of information about foreign policy. Just as William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan, purged dissidents in the agency, Porter Goss, George W. Bush’s appointee, has made it clear that information coming out of the agency must fit the administration’s policy line. He has refused to release to Congress an assessment of how much damage was done by the outing of covert agent Valerie Plame. Goss and his aides have expressed displeasure with the results of a study by former deputy director Richard Kerr that detailed intelligence failures prior to the invasion of Iraq. He has delayed publication of the issue of Studies in Intelligence that referenced the report, erected new barriers to what can be printed there, and provoked the resignation of the editor and chairman of the editorial board. Career officers have vacated 20 top positions and 90 senior officials have resigned. A purge also occurred in Condi Rice’s Department of State, but it was more gentle. Officials who disagreed verbally or in their reports with the Bush Cheney NeoCons have had their security clearances pulled and they have been reassigned to less important tasks. Some had dealt with the Middle East, Iran, international law, the environment, non-proliferation, Latin America, and Africa.
Perhaps the administration’s penchant for secrecy is simply a reflection of the mindset of corporate CEO, who are impatient with public discussion and the squabbling of politicians. Bush and Cheney were both corporate CEOs and promised to use their executive skills to solve national problems. After the disclosure of many CEO-induced scandals, they said no more about the advantages of putting CEOs in office but their governing style did not change. It was marked by impatience with discussion, contempt for compromise, ruthlessness with opponents, chumminess with business cronies, secretiveness, and hierarchal outlook. Whether several of these traits represented a disdain for some aspects of democracy remains to be seen.
The Bush energy plan was developed in secret by Vice President Cheney and passed in 2005 in proceedings often clouded in secrecy. There were efforts to open the task force records, but they were successfully blocked in the courts. The Bush administration acknowledged that Vice President met with Enron executives six times about the proceedings of his energy task force. More complete information about its proceedings has not yet become available. It is known, however, that representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as well as Carl Pope, director of the Sierra Club, were given an audience with the vice president only after the details of the energy plan had been made public. The deliberations of the energy task force resulted in quick approval for controversial of the pebble-bed nuclear reactor of Exelon Corporation. The firm, which has made large contributions to the Republican Party, insists that the design will provide safer cheap power in abundance, but environmentalists dispute these claims.
A successful effort to cloak critical information in secrecy was accompanied by a very skillful effort to manipulate the press and manage the news. By the end of George W. Bush’s third year in the White House, Harpers’ Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur told a radio interviewer that the “White House press corps...has now turned into ...[a] full time press agency for the President of the United States.” Later in the interview he added that the public should “assume that the press is now part of the government.” On reflection, Mac Arthur would certainly back off from full meaning of these assessments, but he was correct in noting that the national press had lost its ability to critically cover this GOP administration. British journalist Greg Palast has referred to the mainstream American press as the dependent press because information is so tightly controlled that it must cater to the Bush administration in order to be rewarded with even small pieces of information. Richard L. Ehrlich, Jr., Maryland’s Republican governor, formalized this way of dealing with the press in November 2004 when he signed a written order forbidding employees to talk to two reporters for the Baltimore Sun. Two federal courts subsequently upheld the legality of that order.
It insists upon enforcing the Pentagon’s 1991 ban on taking photographs of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. When the President held a huge rally for troops at Fort Carson, the press was ordered not to talk to any soldiers before, during, or after the rally. They obeyed, and only the Rocky Mountain News reported on the orders given to the press. The skill of the Bush administration in manipulating the press was demonstrated in 2004, when the Social Security Administration ran many advertisements clearly touting the advantages of Bush’s prescription care plan. Few noticed that the advertisements could have a political effect. Later that year, the Department of Education, paid $700,000 to an agency to advertise Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a major Bush bragging point. The department also paid TV talk show host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to talk up the program in the black community. When the payment came to light, there was little discussion about blurring the lines between a journalist and an paid advocate.
The federal government paid Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the Bush approach to marriage, and another conservative columnist was paid $10,000 to do the same. The use of taxpayer money for political purposes was nearly a non-issue in the public and political forums. In a related matter, private corporations began to provide local television stations with video news releases, which the stations presented as ordinary news. Sometimes the releases had political content and other times they were more commercial in nature.
By early, 2006, it was becoming clear to some that unilateral actions of the Bush administration were establishing a “creeping presidential autocracy.” These actions were partly inspired by Richard Cheney’s view that the presidency had lost too much power as a result of the Vietnam War and Watergate crisis, but it was the 9/11 attacks on the US that provided the justification for these steps. The administration claimed the power to hold foreign detainees indefinitely, and even American citizens could be held if they were classified as” enemy combatants.” The newly enacted Patriot Acts were interpreted in the most expansive ways. The administration lifted many restrictions on torture, on the theory that the commander-in-chief’s authority trumped international law. Eventually, it was revealed that U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at the Guantanimo detention facility practiced torture. It even took to spying on telephone conversations without warrants.
The Republican Congress refused to investigate some of the administration’s questionable conduct and it tended to legalize actions many considered illegal. When the Supreme Court ruled twice that the administration’s treatment of detainees violated the law, Congress legislated to legalize this conduct and then passed a law stripping the courts of the power to rule on how detainees were treated. Similarly, the Congress, without even investigating the matter, legalized the warrantless spying. By striking an empty compromise with the administration on the spying, the Republican Congress posed as heroic in standing up to the president, claiming it had “rebelled.” In fact, it had again aided and abetted the unwarranted expansion of the executive’s power.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, the darling of the GOP right, demonstrated no uneasiness with the diminution of civil liberties that battling terrorism seemed to require. Ashcroft demonstrated his hostility to organized labor when he used 9/11 as an excuse to forbid secretaries in federal prosecutors offices to join unions. Ashcroft also used his power to advance the agenda of the Christian Right. He expended valuable resources attempting to break up a ring of bordellos in 2001 and 2002 and battled a state’s legislation permitting assisted suicide in carefully defined cases. The Attorney General vigorously moved against people who grew marijuana for medicinal purposes in states that bucked federal drug policy to the extent of legalizing medicinal marijuana. An enthusiastic supporter of the death penalty, he overruled the recommendations of federal prosecutors in 28 cases where the death penalty could be applied. Ashcroft also moved to intimidate federal judges whose sentences were more generous than federal sentencing guidelines suggested. His effort to create a blacklist of liberal judges was even criticized by Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
His enforcement of the USA Patriots Act, which was enacted in late October 2001 to strengthen federal investigators and prosecutors after the September 11, 2001 attack by Islamic terrorists seemed authoritarian to some. Many talked of the Ashcroft Doctrine, which held that in security cases the accused’s rights must be subordinated to the demands of national security. However, Ashcroft labeled “un-American” any criticism of his uses of the Patriot Act, including efforts to monitor what people read. Section 215 was one of the most controversial sections because it stripped non-citizens of search and seizure rights and also made it possible to deprive citizens of these rights. Under this section a person or organization could be ordered to provide information to the FBI and would be subjected to a gag order forbidding it to reveal to anyone that it had been ordered to surrender information. Working hurriedly, the House Judiciary Committee, remodeled this section, but at 3:30 AM, the original version reappeared in the printed version, and it was subsequently passed in that form. It is doubtful if many members of Congress had a chance to read the final version.
John Turley, a George Washington University law professor, told Nightline on August 20, 2002 that Attorney General John Ashcroft had moved from constituting “a political embarrassment” to “being a constitutional menace.” The conservative Turley had become familiar face on television in the Clinton years when he appeared many times making a case for the president’s impeachment and removal. The measure even made it possible to admit hearsay evidence and permitted prosecutors to refuse to identify witnesses.
In combating terrorism, it is probably true that individual rights must sometimes be sacrificed to necessity, but the abridgments of rights should be as limited as possible. However, the administration has sought to cover its use of the Patriot Act in secrecy and misrepresentations of fact. It is also seeking the repeal of sunset provisions that apply to some extraordinary and worrisome powers. In June 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s contention that in time of war it should wield unfettered power. The court ruled that the foreign nationals held as “enemy combatants” had the right to file habeas corpus petitions and that an American citizen being held as a suspected terrorist had the right to be informed of the charges against them and to exercise the right to defend himself. The decisions freed no one, and left much room for executive power to be exercised, but it cancelled the blank check the administration thought it possessed.
After 9-11, the Justice Department rounded up between 1500 and 2000 people. A purpose of the dragnet was to find people who could provide information about terrorists or who may have helped them. The great majority of them were not citizens, and many could be held on technical immigration violations. The detainees were often held under no charges. A year later, almost all had been released or deported. Ashcroft permitted the FBI to continue to misrepresent requests for wiretaps and searches. The abuses reached the point where a secret federal tribunal felt it necessary to issue a public protest. In May 2002, the secret federal court that reviews Justice Department requests for investigative powers in terror cases took the unprecedented step of making public a decision in which it refused to grant the Department additional powers. The court complained that the FBI and the Department had provided false information in over 75 requests for wiretaps and search warrants in the two previous years. Moreover, the agencies were accused of improperly sharing intelligence information with New York law enforcement agencies.
The Department claimed that the decision wrongfully limited its authority under the Patriot Act and said it would appeal. Later, a higher secret security court reversed this ruling. A major effect of this ruling was to breach the wall that was separate investigations of terrorists and foreign agents and ordinary criminal probes. The barrier to the sharing of any information between criminal justice agencies and intelligence agencies should have been modified and the secret security court did this. Yet the administration insisted it remained in place. In persuading Congress to pass this sweeping measure, Ashcroft insisted that critics of the bill were providing “ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.”
With respect to the enforcement of the act, House Majority Leader Dick Armey told reporters, “I told the president I thought his Justice Department was out of control... Are we going to save ourselves from international terrorism in order to deny the fundamental liberties we protect to ourselves? It doesn't make sense to me." In a little more than two years, five thousand people were detained under its provisions, and only a handful of them were convicted. There were numerous reports that some of them were mistreated, even beaten. The measure also empowered FBI agents to quiz librarians about the books read by their patrons. The measure was so sweeping in nature that it opened the door to possible abuses. Defending the Act, John Miller, an FBI spokesman, said that the freedoms the press enjoy under the First Amendment does not constitute a basis for academic freedom in the universities.
In December 2002, one Mike Maginnis was arrested at his home for photographing the hotel where Vice President Cheney was staying in while in Denver as well as the neighborhood around it. A Special Agent demanded that he admit to being a terrorist collaborator and called him a “dirty pinko fagot” and a “ragtag collaborator.” He was subsequently released, and the Denver police denied he had ever been held. In another Keystone Cops episode, a local sheriff and three Secret Service agents, empowered by the Patriot Act, invaded the privacy of a retired chief petty officer named Michael Moore in North Carolina. The officers must have confused him with the populist by the same name who was critical of Bush and the proposed war on Iraq. The agents intercepted his e-mail and searched his home without a warrant. The agents told Moore they were working with the National Security Agency and FBI on national security issues. Moore had made the mistake of calling Bush names in his e-mail and expressed displeasure with the 2002 election. Moore was required to sign forms permitting the agents to access his medical history at two hospitals. Moore had threatened no one in his e-mail, but the agents told him not to go to Washington in the future and asked him what he thought about assassinations.
The FBI began resorting to the tactics of the Hoover era when it started gathering information on peace demonstrators and the ways they raised funds, recruited, trained and organized rallies. In Des Moines, the FBI, acting with a local sheriff, used the Patriot Act to get a federal grand jury to subpoena records from local organizations involved in the peace movement. They included Drake University, the state chapter of the Lawyers’ Guild, a Catholic Worker House, and the Catholic Peace Ministry. The FBI later withdrew the subpoenas, saying it was only looking into simple trespass charges. Moreover, the agency, in Intelligence Bulletin no. 89, urged local law enforcement to emulate its tactics. Police were warned that demonstrators tried to intimidate law enforcement by videotaping their demonstrations and even “documenting potential cases of police brutality.” Homeland Security also warned local law enforcement to watch people with nervous mannerisms or who arrogantly expressed “dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government."
By 2007, a Justice Department web site noted that the FBI terrorist watch included 509,000 names. In Pittsburgh, the ACLU obtained FBI files that showed that the bureau had been spying on the Thomas Merton Center from November 29, 2002 to at least March 2005. The documents referred to a source that must have been an infiltrator. Perhaps some of this work was carried out by the new National Security Service, a branch of the FBI placed directly under the White House by Executive Order. There is also a new National Clandestine Service, a wing of the CIA that can carry out some operations within the United States.
Efforts were also made to track down dissenters in other ways and to limit the information they accessed through alternative news outlets. The owner of the company that serves Capitol Hill.com and some other alternative news outlets received a “national security letter” that demanded information about the publisher, his disbursements, and traffic information about his web operations. This would give the FBI the names of people who read the site, and, of course, they were tracking his sources. Capitol Hill Blue claims to have inside sources, but its exposes do not go beyond rumors about possible indictments and the president’s mental state and possible drinking habits.
The Patriot Act and its extensions made it possible for the administration to create a two-track justice system. Cases involving “enemy combatants” or material witnesses in terrorism cases could be handled completely outside the ordinary justice system. In the extraordinary track, citizens and non-citizens alike can be investigated and jailed without the normal guarantees of rights and procedures. People can be held for long periods without the right to consult attorneys. Non-citizens can be tried by military tribunals and be deported after closed hearings. Solicitor General Theodore Olsen, who had played a key role in the effort to tie Bill Clinton to illegal activities, is the Bush administration’s lead lawyer in anti-terrorism matters. In a 5-3 ruling in June 2006, the Supreme Court blocked the use of these military tribunals in hearing the cases of foreign detainees. It held that the Bush Administration had overstepped its authority. The door was left open for Congress to craft a way of trying these people within the US court system in a manner satisfactory to the administration.
The amended Patriot Act also included a little-known provision that enabled the administration to appoint interim U.S. Attorneys who could serve indefinitely. In this way, controversial appointments could be made without the scrutiny and approval of the Senate. An aid of Senator Arlen Specter admitted that he inserted the provision at the last minute and only discussed the change with fellow Republicans. Armed with this provision, the administration began quietly pushing out U.S. Attorneys and replacing them with people who were extreme partisans. In Arkansas, Timothy Griffin, a man with “a thin legal record” became an interim U.S. Attorney. He had headed opposition research for the Republican National Committee and had worked closely with Karl Rove. One of the purged US Attorneys was Carol Lam of San Diego, who had put Randy Duke Cunningham in prison and was investigating Representative Jerry Lewis.
The preference for secrecy became a hallmark of the administration’s approach to terrorism. In November 2001, a presidential order stated that non-citizens found harboring terrorists or with terrorism could be tried by military tribunal. This order seemed to set the tone for the hard-line Justice Department policies that were to follow. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan all cases in the United States were to be tried in civil courts so long as they were open. It would seem that this meant that these military tribunals had no standing in 2001. Later, several American citizens would be held as “enemy combatants” and would be deprived of their constitutional rights to legal representation. Later, Bush authorized the CIA to kill Americans if they were working with Al Qaeda in some way.
The doctrine that suspected terrorists need not be given even the rights of prisoners of war seems to suggest a denial of the generally held notion that all people share a common humanity, which brings with it some basic rights. There were so many questions about Ash croft’s enforcement of the Patriot Act that on June 13, 2002, the ranking Democrat and the Republican chairman on the House Judiciary Committee sent fifty questions to the Attorney General. The chairman was James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, one of the most conservative people in the House. The Justice Department responded that it would respond to some
of the questions only if the two Congressional intelligence committees asked them.
While many of Ashcroft’s policies should have concerned civil libertarians, it might also be conceded that occasionally he had to do battle with judicial rules that were probably too restrictive in counter- terrorist matters. The secret federal “spy court” ruled that FBI criminal and intelligence squads cannot freely communicate and share information. If the sharing would result in action against someone in matters not remotely involving terrorism, the ruling would make sense. However, Ashcroft probably was on the right track in challenging it insofar as it prevented full cooperation in terrorism matters. The ruling was later overturned. Progressives kept up a steady discussion of the dangers to civil liberties the act posed, and a few conservatives joined in efforts to expose the legislation’s worst features, but, as ACLU president Anthony Romero said , the political dialogue on this issue was essentially “anemic.”
Attorney General Ashcroft’s treatment of two American citizens apprehended while fighting for the Taliban or Al Qaeda raised troubling questions for civil libertarians. John Walker Lindh was permitted to enter a plea in a US court. Y. Esam Hamdi was long held incommunicado in a Navy brig in Norfolk. He did not have access to an attorney while a French citizen, Zacarias Moussaoui, had access to attorneys and is being tried in open federal court. The Justice Department said it was permissible to hold Hamdi indefinitely and without access to a lawyer because he is being charged with nothing and was clearly an enemy combatant. Another US citizen, Jose Padilla was being held in a South Carolina brig without charges or an attorney. He was apprehended as a possible dirty bomb builder, but no charges were lodged for some time. The Attorney General has talked about building camps where such US citizens could be held.
In summer, 2004, the case against Padilla was dropped and he was sent back to Saudi Arabia without his US citizenship. In addition, the military has seized 1500 detainees as a result of the Afghan War and other operations and has maintained that these prisoners have no rights under the Geneva Convention. The government’s original intention was to hold them until a worldwide terrorist network no longer existed. In 2002, the Bush administration issued a formal waiver on the Geneva Convention, stating that they did not apply to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In June 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s contention that in time of war it should wield unfettered power. The court ruled that the foreign nationals held at “enemy combatants” had the right to file habeas corpus petitions and that an American citizen being held as a suspected terrorist had the right to be informed of the charges against him and to exercise the right to defend himself.
The decisions freed no one, left much room for executive power to be exercised, but it cancelled the blank check the administration thought it possessed. Congress subsequently defined the way these people would be tried by military courts. The detainees would not see the evidence against them and information gained through torture was admissible. There was to be very little room for appeals. Though the legislation flew in the face of basic American principles, Democrat Karl Levin was a co-sponsor. With the surrender of Levin and other Democrats, it seemed there was little further interest in exploring the matter of torture. In May 2006, Mary McCarthy, deputy inspector general of the CIA, was fired one day before she was to retire. It seems she had learned that some high CIA official had lied to congress about torturing prisoners. Unnamed sources said she had been fired because she had leaked something to the press or, even worse, Congress. There was no effort on the part of the two intelligence committees to interview her.
In 2003, the Justice Department prepared Patriot Act II, which passed the House in September , 2003. Named the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, it was designed to expand government’s domestic surveillance powers. It also made possible stripping people of citizenship if they assisted groups the Attorney General designated as terrorist organization. It greatly expanded the FBI’s powers in the use of national security letters or administrative subpoenas. The bureau was authorized to obtain telephone, internet, and financial date from financial institutions whenever it thought national security was involved without the scrutiny of a judge. Financial institutions included casinos, travel agencies, the Postal Service, pawnbrokers, insurance companies, and dealers in precious metals. Those ordered to turn over records were forbidden to disclose that this had occurred In March 2007 the Department of Justice Inspector General revealed that in many instances the FBI used national security letters illegally and improperly to gather information. It was also found that the Bureau had often understated to Congress how many of these letters it was employing.
Arrests of people who were “threats” to the economy were to be facilitated. Since September 11, 2001, hundreds had been quietly taken into custody and the government refused to give their names on grounds it was protecting their privacy. The new measure facilitated secret arrests. It was signed into law on the day Saddam Hussein was captured, December 13, 2003. The third extension of the Patriot Act came before Congress in 2005, but final passage was delayed until early 2006. The press reported that the delay was mainly due to disagreement over whether law enforcement agents should be able to get access to anyone’s medical records and library usage. Defenders of the measure argued that only the guilty had reason to worry about abuse resulting from having their records checked. The bill provided a more controversial section ( 605) which created a permanent and secret Homeland Security force known as the “United States Secret Uniformed Division.” When it thought it had good reason, it could arrest people without warrant. It would also function at special events of national significance (SENS), which it was free to designate itself.
This new provision is the more worrisome when it is recalled that on January 6, 2003, President Bush signed an executive order permitting himself to set aside habeas corpus and the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using troops in domestic situations. He did not invoke this power when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, but it remains on the books. This provision was lifted from a 1982 plan by Lt. Colonel Oliver North to give FEMA a new mission.” The act was overwhelming extended in March 2006 after some “legislative hocus-pocus” which changed little but provided a “fig leaf” of a compromise which enabled moderates and most liberals enough cover to join the stampede.
The Bush Justice Department has also taken to intimidating defense attorneys. In 2005, Lynne Stewart was sent to prison because she represented an accused terrorist in a manner prosecutors disliked. She was charged with providing material support for terrorism. In 2006, prosecutors threatened to jail the attorney for Kenneth Ford, an NSA analyst whose views on WMDs probably resulted in his incarceration on trumped-up charges of stealing classified documents. The judge noted that there was no information on how the documents ended up in Ford’s kitchen and that the government’s confidential informant was a “curious figure,” but he still sentenced Ford to 6 years in prison. Tom Flocco, an internet muckraker, has claimed that his computer firewall system showed through internet identification numbers that the Department of Defense was surveiling him when he talked to intelligence sources or agents or when he wrote stories about intelligence or the Bush White House. In early April not long after Flocco reported his troubles, someone hacked into the E-Mail of “Good Morning America” John Green and found two unacceptable notes. In one Green called former Secretary of State Madeline Albright “NeoCon lite without NutraSweet.” In another, he criticized Bush. Each was leaked to a different conservative outlet: the Drudge Report and The New York Post. ABC suspended him and forced him to apologize to the White House Communications director. At the same time, Chris Graff, Vermont AP Bureau Chief, was fired for putting a Patrick Leahey op-ed on the wire.
John Ashcroft cooperated with the Bush administration in hacking away at many Bill of Rights protections, but he appeared to draw the line at supporting without reservation the creation of a massive database with information on potentially all American citizens. When he was desperately ill in a Washington hospital, the president’s chief of staff Andrew Card and chief legal counsel Alberto Gonzales came to demand that he authorize the FEMA database named Main Core. At issue was FEMA’s desire to greatly expand it by means of various forms of surveillance and incorporation of rad data from NSA telecommunications intercepts. Ashcroft refused, as did Acting Attorney General James Comey. More than two years later, the mainstream press claimed the argument was about reauthorizing wireless wiretaps, which Ashcroft and repeatedly supported. Finally, in late July 2007, Attorney General Gonzales admitted to a Senate panel "The disagreement that occurred was about other intelligence activities, and the reason for the visit to the hospital was about other intelligence activities . . . It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people."
In foreign affairs, the Bush administration also moved toward unilateralism denial of international law, a posture that delighted foreign policy fundamentalists. John Bolton, who eventually became ambassador to the UN, claimed that it is “a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law” even when doing so yields some short-term advantages. Alberto Gonzales, who was to become Attorney General, believed that international conventions on the treatment of prisoners were “obsolete” and “quaint.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Taking its cue from the administration, the Republican Congress has usually refused to investigate controversial matters; perhaps thinking party loyalty demanded this. Of course, observers with good memories know that Democratic Congresses did investigate Democratic presidents. Norman Ornstein has suggested that the subservience of Congress is part of a “battered Congress syndrome,” something akin to a battered spouse syndrome.
Despite the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department promulgated regulations that enabled agencies to keep secret any information they thought should not be available to the public. A very small case in point was the abuse of secrecy rules to make Bill Clinton look bad in his negotiations with Israeli Prime minister Ehud Barach. The transcripts of their telephone discussions were labeled top secret, and the Bush administration edited them to the disadvantage of its predecessor. There was also a massive increase in the number of classified documents, from 8 million in 1999 to 23 million in 2002. The administration appointed a new federal archivist who had been accused of violations of the code of the International Council of Archivists. It did not seem to be an administration committed to the public’s right to know what was transpiring.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in March 2001 ordered all agencies to develop guidelines to prevent disclosure of information they considered “sensitive but unclassified.” Bush’s EPA began making scholars register before they could use its Envirofacts database After September 11, the movement toward secrecy in government was intensified under the pretext that security made this necessary. In contrast, the Clinton administration had declassified millions of records and had supported passage of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act. In 2002, Mitch Daniels, head of the Office of Management and Budget proposed that departments and agencies print their own materials, perhaps using private printers. This would end the practice of sending materials to the Government Printing Office, which was then required to send copies of what it printed to library depositories throughout the country. Daniels insisted that his plan was designed only to save money, but its effect would be to greatly limit the flow of information to the public.
The Bush administration refused to release Reagan administration documents that federal law mandated be made public in January 2001. The Bush administration delayed the release of 60,000 pages for more than a year, despite the requirements of law. On March 15, 2002, all but 155 pages were released. Most of that material seems to relate to the process of nominating judges. Bruce Craig, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, believes the administration does not want scholars to know how the Reagan administration stacked the judiciary with conservative judges. “What they did was brilliant, no question about it.” Some of the papers still withheld were those of then Vice President George H. W. Bush.
There are still millions of Reagan era papers to be processed before release can even be considered. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 required that the National Archives have ultimate control of presidential papers. In obedience to the law, the National Archives screened the Reagan papers for materials that related to national security and prepared about 68,000 that could be safely released in 2001 as the first installment of the Reagan papers. Alberto Gonzalez, White House Counsel, persuaded the Archives to accept three delays to give the White House time to deal with legal questions. After September 11, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, asserting the right to decide what was released and when. The fact that the country was on a war footing was used to justify the order as well as executive privilege. The order, for the first time, extended executive privilege to cover vice-presidential papers.
Presumably, the reason for the concealment of these documents was that many former Reagan administration officials were serving in the second Bush administration. Concealment of these records and the refusal to obey the law was scarcely mentioned in most of the press. Bush attempted to resolve the matter with the executive order giving presidents, beginning with Reagan, the same power as sitting presidents to keep their papers private. The executive order reversed the Presidential Records Act. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said the action was justified because of the September 11 attack on America. Molly Ivins, one of the few to comment upon this usurpation of power thought it was because the papers could “contain information damaging to the reputation of Poppy Bush, who was then vice president, and/or the reputations of old Reaganites like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.” The Executive Order is being challenged in the courts by Public Interest, but the political outlooks of the judges who hear the case could determine the outcome.
Bush had also moved to keep control of his gubernatorial papers by placing them in his father’s presidential library. Using the terrorist threat as an excuse, Attorney General John Ashcroft advised government agencies that he would support their efforts to withhold records requested under the Freedom of Information Act. A few newspapers noted that the Bush administration made haste to release the correspondence of Enron chairman Ken Lay with Clinton’s two Secretaries of the Treasury, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Lay offered Rubin a seat on the Enron board, which was declined. Summers was asked to resist a call to regulate derivatives. There was no evidence that the letters produced the desired results. On the other hand, Kenneth Lay had spent more than $600,000 to advance the political career of George W. Bush. During the campaign of 2000, Enron also loaned Bush a corporate jet for whistle-stopping. Lay had been appointed to the senior Bush’s Energy Council, and the Energy Policy Act, passed under the first Bush, forced utilities to permit energy traders like Enron to use their pipelines. By long delaying the seizure of Enron’s papers after it was clear that there had been widespread corporate wrong-doing, the Bush administration made it possible for extensive shredding of documents to occur.
In 2006, the Bush administration refused to release papers on its badly bungled handling of the hurricane Katrina, which did massive damage to the Gulf coast. After Katrina struck, Bush said he had no idea that New Orleans would be flooded or its levees would break, yet evidence turned up in February 2006 that he had been warned about those possibilities hours before the disaster occurred. The decision to stonewall on the FEMA papers issue and the refusal to permit top White House officials to testify before Congressional committees was clearly an attempt at damage control. In 2007, a federal judge commented on the “Kafkaesque” hurdles people had to jump in order to obtain FEMA assistance. FEMA legal service people were kept under a gag order so that the complete picture of the agency’s ineptitude or disinterest could not be revealed. It was also revealed that much FEMA food has simply gone to rot and that the agency had put out false figures about how many people it put into hotel rooms. While dealing with disastrous fires that year, the agency resorted to a faked press conference to burnish its image.
The Bush administration in 2002 stopped reporting information about factory closings, and acknowledged that it was doing so only in a footnote to a document released on Christmas Eve, 2002. In the environmental arena, there was an effort to tone down and/or delete scientific data from reports written by government environmental professionals that contradicted administration policy. Pollster Frank Luntz warned that the scientific debate about global warming “is closing against us but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science.” This was essentially done by censorship and editing. By early 2004, the administration found the ultimate policy for dealing with scientific findings. It created a scientific review process under the Office of Management and Budget that could delay the implementation of environmental and health regulations until the scientific information underpinning them was approved by this new review process. Joan Claybrook remarked, “this is an attempt at paralysis by analysis.”
There seemed to be a distrust of government experts as though they were somehow uninformed obstructionists determined to get in the way of progress. This characterization was applied to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, economists, environmentalists, and the CIA. The latter was particularly distrusted because it often criticized estimates and claims made by the Neo Conservatives and their Iraqi exile clients. This deep distrust of experts is partly an outgrowth of the Republicans’ critique of the so-called New Class. Even the Bush administration’s assault on the findings of hard sciences, particularly in regard to global warming, is more than pandering to industrial donors. It is a manifestation of the ideologues hostility to experts and is rooted in their critique of the so-called New Class.
In 2006, Dr. James E. Hansen, head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, complained that NASA has attempted to stop his frequent warnings about global warming. It ordered the public relations people to monitor future lectures, papers, and postings as well as requests from journalists for interviews. A public relations official relayed to him that NASA warned there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to speak in the same manner about global warming. A NASA official went on record as being unhappy that Hansen spoke on liberal NPR and stated that his job was “to make the president look good” and that Hansen was disloyal civil servant. For a time, his superiors assigned a “minder” to Hansen, but they it was learned that the young man who was to monitor Hansen’s behavior did not possess the degree he claimed to have. In 2006, Hansen compared Bush’s censorship of science with the way Stalin’s minions distorted it. It was reported that political appointees at NASA exerted heavy pressure during the 2004 election to prevent publication of information about glaciers melting, climate change, or global warming.
When government scientists produce facts that offend the Bush administration's corporate allies, the administration has moved to suppress the information. Dr. James Zahn was ordered by the Department of Agriculture not to publicize information about superbugs in huge hog farms due to pressure from the National Pork Producers Council. At the Department of Interior, the deletion and alteration of scientific information became a standard procedure. Scientists who were likely to find information that contradicted Bush policies or threatened corporate interests have been removed from federal panels. Tony Oppegard, a federal engineer heading a geodesic study of mountain top strip mining was fired as soon as Bush took office. The White House had little reason to share information with Congress or seek its imput. Republicans in the House and Senate are held in line by Teutonic discipline, and dutifully follow the White House line. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska complained that “You have an administration that does not reach out or see much value in consulting with Congress. They treat Congress as an appendage, a constitutional nuisance .
The George W. Bush administration has found another means to avoid vigorous enforcement of regulatory law by packing the top levels of the civil service with political appointees. Other administrations have done some of this, but Paul Light of the Brookings Institution considered the 12% increase of employees at this level “stunning. ” Appointments on Schedule C do not require Congressional approval. But the extent of these appointments suggests an intention to politicize the federal service and challenge the long-standing merit principle in civil service hiring. The plan for undoing much of the federal civil service system was laid out in January 2001 in the Heritage Foundation’s “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The document called for appointments based on loyalty as the first criterion rather than expertise. It maintained that the professional civil service should be considered the enemy and called for the outsourcing of as much work as possible. In early, 2007 the Bush administration capped its battle against the professional civil service with an executive order that required any changes in federal regulations had to be approved by political appointees in the departments and agencies of government.
The penchant for secrecy also involves an effort to control the flow of information about foreign policy. Just as William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan, purged dissidents in the agency, Porter Goss, George W. Bush’s appointee, has made it clear that information coming out of the agency must fit the administration’s policy line. He has refused to release to Congress an assessment of how much damage was done by the outing of covert agent Valerie Plame. Goss and his aides have expressed displeasure with the results of a study by former deputy director Richard Kerr that detailed intelligence failures prior to the invasion of Iraq. He has delayed publication of the issue of Studies in Intelligence that referenced the report, erected new barriers to what can be printed there, and provoked the resignation of the editor and chairman of the editorial board. Career officers have vacated 20 top positions and 90 senior officials have resigned. A purge also occurred in Condi Rice’s Department of State, but it was more gentle. Officials who disagreed verbally or in their reports with the Bush Cheney NeoCons have had their security clearances pulled and they have been reassigned to less important tasks. Some had dealt with the Middle East, Iran, international law, the environment, non-proliferation, Latin America, and Africa.
Perhaps the administration’s penchant for secrecy is simply a reflection of the mindset of corporate CEO, who are impatient with public discussion and the squabbling of politicians. Bush and Cheney were both corporate CEOs and promised to use their executive skills to solve national problems. After the disclosure of many CEO-induced scandals, they said no more about the advantages of putting CEOs in office but their governing style did not change. It was marked by impatience with discussion, contempt for compromise, ruthlessness with opponents, chumminess with business cronies, secretiveness, and hierarchal outlook. Whether several of these traits represented a disdain for some aspects of democracy remains to be seen.
The Bush energy plan was developed in secret by Vice President Cheney and passed in 2005 in proceedings often clouded in secrecy. There were efforts to open the task force records, but they were successfully blocked in the courts. The Bush administration acknowledged that Vice President met with Enron executives six times about the proceedings of his energy task force. More complete information about its proceedings has not yet become available. It is known, however, that representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as well as Carl Pope, director of the Sierra Club, were given an audience with the vice president only after the details of the energy plan had been made public. The deliberations of the energy task force resulted in quick approval for controversial of the pebble-bed nuclear reactor of Exelon Corporation. The firm, which has made large contributions to the Republican Party, insists that the design will provide safer cheap power in abundance, but environmentalists dispute these claims.
A successful effort to cloak critical information in secrecy was accompanied by a very skillful effort to manipulate the press and manage the news. By the end of George W. Bush’s third year in the White House, Harpers’ Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur told a radio interviewer that the “White House press corps...has now turned into ...[a] full time press agency for the President of the United States.” Later in the interview he added that the public should “assume that the press is now part of the government.” On reflection, Mac Arthur would certainly back off from full meaning of these assessments, but he was correct in noting that the national press had lost its ability to critically cover this GOP administration. British journalist Greg Palast has referred to the mainstream American press as the dependent press because information is so tightly controlled that it must cater to the Bush administration in order to be rewarded with even small pieces of information. Richard L. Ehrlich, Jr., Maryland’s Republican governor, formalized this way of dealing with the press in November 2004 when he signed a written order forbidding employees to talk to two reporters for the Baltimore Sun. Two federal courts subsequently upheld the legality of that order.
It insists upon enforcing the Pentagon’s 1991 ban on taking photographs of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. When the President held a huge rally for troops at Fort Carson, the press was ordered not to talk to any soldiers before, during, or after the rally. They obeyed, and only the Rocky Mountain News reported on the orders given to the press. The skill of the Bush administration in manipulating the press was demonstrated in 2004, when the Social Security Administration ran many advertisements clearly touting the advantages of Bush’s prescription care plan. Few noticed that the advertisements could have a political effect. Later that year, the Department of Education, paid $700,000 to an agency to advertise Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a major Bush bragging point. The department also paid TV talk show host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to talk up the program in the black community. When the payment came to light, there was little discussion about blurring the lines between a journalist and an paid advocate.
The federal government paid Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the Bush approach to marriage, and another conservative columnist was paid $10,000 to do the same. The use of taxpayer money for political purposes was nearly a non-issue in the public and political forums. In a related matter, private corporations began to provide local television stations with video news releases, which the stations presented as ordinary news. Sometimes the releases had political content and other times they were more commercial in nature.
By early, 2006, it was becoming clear to some that unilateral actions of the Bush administration were establishing a “creeping presidential autocracy.” These actions were partly inspired by Richard Cheney’s view that the presidency had lost too much power as a result of the Vietnam War and Watergate crisis, but it was the 9/11 attacks on the US that provided the justification for these steps. The administration claimed the power to hold foreign detainees indefinitely, and even American citizens could be held if they were classified as” enemy combatants.” The newly enacted Patriot Acts were interpreted in the most expansive ways. The administration lifted many restrictions on torture, on the theory that the commander-in-chief’s authority trumped international law. Eventually, it was revealed that U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at the Guantanimo detention facility practiced torture. It even took to spying on telephone conversations without warrants.
The Republican Congress refused to investigate some of the administration’s questionable conduct and it tended to legalize actions many considered illegal. When the Supreme Court ruled twice that the administration’s treatment of detainees violated the law, Congress legislated to legalize this conduct and then passed a law stripping the courts of the power to rule on how detainees were treated. Similarly, the Congress, without even investigating the matter, legalized the warrantless spying. By striking an empty compromise with the administration on the spying, the Republican Congress posed as heroic in standing up to the president, claiming it had “rebelled.” In fact, it had again aided and abetted the unwarranted expansion of the executive’s power.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, the darling of the GOP right, demonstrated no uneasiness with the diminution of civil liberties that battling terrorism seemed to require. Ashcroft demonstrated his hostility to organized labor when he used 9/11 as an excuse to forbid secretaries in federal prosecutors offices to join unions. Ashcroft also used his power to advance the agenda of the Christian Right. He expended valuable resources attempting to break up a ring of bordellos in 2001 and 2002 and battled a state’s legislation permitting assisted suicide in carefully defined cases. The Attorney General vigorously moved against people who grew marijuana for medicinal purposes in states that bucked federal drug policy to the extent of legalizing medicinal marijuana. An enthusiastic supporter of the death penalty, he overruled the recommendations of federal prosecutors in 28 cases where the death penalty could be applied. Ashcroft also moved to intimidate federal judges whose sentences were more generous than federal sentencing guidelines suggested. His effort to create a blacklist of liberal judges was even criticized by Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
His enforcement of the USA Patriots Act, which was enacted in late October 2001 to strengthen federal investigators and prosecutors after the September 11, 2001 attack by Islamic terrorists seemed authoritarian to some. Many talked of the Ashcroft Doctrine, which held that in security cases the accused’s rights must be subordinated to the demands of national security. However, Ashcroft labeled “un-American” any criticism of his uses of the Patriot Act, including efforts to monitor what people read. Section 215 was one of the most controversial sections because it stripped non-citizens of search and seizure rights and also made it possible to deprive citizens of these rights. Under this section a person or organization could be ordered to provide information to the FBI and would be subjected to a gag order forbidding it to reveal to anyone that it had been ordered to surrender information. Working hurriedly, the House Judiciary Committee, remodeled this section, but at 3:30 AM, the original version reappeared in the printed version, and it was subsequently passed in that form. It is doubtful if many members of Congress had a chance to read the final version.
John Turley, a George Washington University law professor, told Nightline on August 20, 2002 that Attorney General John Ashcroft had moved from constituting “a political embarrassment” to “being a constitutional menace.” The conservative Turley had become familiar face on television in the Clinton years when he appeared many times making a case for the president’s impeachment and removal. The measure even made it possible to admit hearsay evidence and permitted prosecutors to refuse to identify witnesses.
In combating terrorism, it is probably true that individual rights must sometimes be sacrificed to necessity, but the abridgments of rights should be as limited as possible. However, the administration has sought to cover its use of the Patriot Act in secrecy and misrepresentations of fact. It is also seeking the repeal of sunset provisions that apply to some extraordinary and worrisome powers. In June 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s contention that in time of war it should wield unfettered power. The court ruled that the foreign nationals held as “enemy combatants” had the right to file habeas corpus petitions and that an American citizen being held as a suspected terrorist had the right to be informed of the charges against them and to exercise the right to defend himself. The decisions freed no one, and left much room for executive power to be exercised, but it cancelled the blank check the administration thought it possessed.
After 9-11, the Justice Department rounded up between 1500 and 2000 people. A purpose of the dragnet was to find people who could provide information about terrorists or who may have helped them. The great majority of them were not citizens, and many could be held on technical immigration violations. The detainees were often held under no charges. A year later, almost all had been released or deported. Ashcroft permitted the FBI to continue to misrepresent requests for wiretaps and searches. The abuses reached the point where a secret federal tribunal felt it necessary to issue a public protest. In May 2002, the secret federal court that reviews Justice Department requests for investigative powers in terror cases took the unprecedented step of making public a decision in which it refused to grant the Department additional powers. The court complained that the FBI and the Department had provided false information in over 75 requests for wiretaps and search warrants in the two previous years. Moreover, the agencies were accused of improperly sharing intelligence information with New York law enforcement agencies.
The Department claimed that the decision wrongfully limited its authority under the Patriot Act and said it would appeal. Later, a higher secret security court reversed this ruling. A major effect of this ruling was to breach the wall that was separate investigations of terrorists and foreign agents and ordinary criminal probes. The barrier to the sharing of any information between criminal justice agencies and intelligence agencies should have been modified and the secret security court did this. Yet the administration insisted it remained in place. In persuading Congress to pass this sweeping measure, Ashcroft insisted that critics of the bill were providing “ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.”
With respect to the enforcement of the act, House Majority Leader Dick Armey told reporters, “I told the president I thought his Justice Department was out of control... Are we going to save ourselves from international terrorism in order to deny the fundamental liberties we protect to ourselves? It doesn't make sense to me." In a little more than two years, five thousand people were detained under its provisions, and only a handful of them were convicted. There were numerous reports that some of them were mistreated, even beaten. The measure also empowered FBI agents to quiz librarians about the books read by their patrons. The measure was so sweeping in nature that it opened the door to possible abuses. Defending the Act, John Miller, an FBI spokesman, said that the freedoms the press enjoy under the First Amendment does not constitute a basis for academic freedom in the universities.
In December 2002, one Mike Maginnis was arrested at his home for photographing the hotel where Vice President Cheney was staying in while in Denver as well as the neighborhood around it. A Special Agent demanded that he admit to being a terrorist collaborator and called him a “dirty pinko fagot” and a “ragtag collaborator.” He was subsequently released, and the Denver police denied he had ever been held. In another Keystone Cops episode, a local sheriff and three Secret Service agents, empowered by the Patriot Act, invaded the privacy of a retired chief petty officer named Michael Moore in North Carolina. The officers must have confused him with the populist by the same name who was critical of Bush and the proposed war on Iraq. The agents intercepted his e-mail and searched his home without a warrant. The agents told Moore they were working with the National Security Agency and FBI on national security issues. Moore had made the mistake of calling Bush names in his e-mail and expressed displeasure with the 2002 election. Moore was required to sign forms permitting the agents to access his medical history at two hospitals. Moore had threatened no one in his e-mail, but the agents told him not to go to Washington in the future and asked him what he thought about assassinations.
The FBI began resorting to the tactics of the Hoover era when it started gathering information on peace demonstrators and the ways they raised funds, recruited, trained and organized rallies. In Des Moines, the FBI, acting with a local sheriff, used the Patriot Act to get a federal grand jury to subpoena records from local organizations involved in the peace movement. They included Drake University, the state chapter of the Lawyers’ Guild, a Catholic Worker House, and the Catholic Peace Ministry. The FBI later withdrew the subpoenas, saying it was only looking into simple trespass charges. Moreover, the agency, in Intelligence Bulletin no. 89, urged local law enforcement to emulate its tactics. Police were warned that demonstrators tried to intimidate law enforcement by videotaping their demonstrations and even “documenting potential cases of police brutality.” Homeland Security also warned local law enforcement to watch people with nervous mannerisms or who arrogantly expressed “dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government."
By 2007, a Justice Department web site noted that the FBI terrorist watch included 509,000 names. In Pittsburgh, the ACLU obtained FBI files that showed that the bureau had been spying on the Thomas Merton Center from November 29, 2002 to at least March 2005. The documents referred to a source that must have been an infiltrator. Perhaps some of this work was carried out by the new National Security Service, a branch of the FBI placed directly under the White House by Executive Order. There is also a new National Clandestine Service, a wing of the CIA that can carry out some operations within the United States.
Efforts were also made to track down dissenters in other ways and to limit the information they accessed through alternative news outlets. The owner of the company that serves Capitol Hill.com and some other alternative news outlets received a “national security letter” that demanded information about the publisher, his disbursements, and traffic information about his web operations. This would give the FBI the names of people who read the site, and, of course, they were tracking his sources. Capitol Hill Blue claims to have inside sources, but its exposes do not go beyond rumors about possible indictments and the president’s mental state and possible drinking habits.
The Patriot Act and its extensions made it possible for the administration to create a two-track justice system. Cases involving “enemy combatants” or material witnesses in terrorism cases could be handled completely outside the ordinary justice system. In the extraordinary track, citizens and non-citizens alike can be investigated and jailed without the normal guarantees of rights and procedures. People can be held for long periods without the right to consult attorneys. Non-citizens can be tried by military tribunals and be deported after closed hearings. Solicitor General Theodore Olsen, who had played a key role in the effort to tie Bill Clinton to illegal activities, is the Bush administration’s lead lawyer in anti-terrorism matters. In a 5-3 ruling in June 2006, the Supreme Court blocked the use of these military tribunals in hearing the cases of foreign detainees. It held that the Bush Administration had overstepped its authority. The door was left open for Congress to craft a way of trying these people within the US court system in a manner satisfactory to the administration.
The amended Patriot Act also included a little-known provision that enabled the administration to appoint interim U.S. Attorneys who could serve indefinitely. In this way, controversial appointments could be made without the scrutiny and approval of the Senate. An aid of Senator Arlen Specter admitted that he inserted the provision at the last minute and only discussed the change with fellow Republicans. Armed with this provision, the administration began quietly pushing out U.S. Attorneys and replacing them with people who were extreme partisans. In Arkansas, Timothy Griffin, a man with “a thin legal record” became an interim U.S. Attorney. He had headed opposition research for the Republican National Committee and had worked closely with Karl Rove. One of the purged US Attorneys was Carol Lam of San Diego, who had put Randy Duke Cunningham in prison and was investigating Representative Jerry Lewis.
The preference for secrecy became a hallmark of the administration’s approach to terrorism. In November 2001, a presidential order stated that non-citizens found harboring terrorists or with terrorism could be tried by military tribunal. This order seemed to set the tone for the hard-line Justice Department policies that were to follow. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan all cases in the United States were to be tried in civil courts so long as they were open. It would seem that this meant that these military tribunals had no standing in 2001. Later, several American citizens would be held as “enemy combatants” and would be deprived of their constitutional rights to legal representation. Later, Bush authorized the CIA to kill Americans if they were working with Al Qaeda in some way.
The doctrine that suspected terrorists need not be given even the rights of prisoners of war seems to suggest a denial of the generally held notion that all people share a common humanity, which brings with it some basic rights. There were so many questions about Ash croft’s enforcement of the Patriot Act that on June 13, 2002, the ranking Democrat and the Republican chairman on the House Judiciary Committee sent fifty questions to the Attorney General. The chairman was James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, one of the most conservative people in the House. The Justice Department responded that it would respond to some
of the questions only if the two Congressional intelligence committees asked them.
While many of Ashcroft’s policies should have concerned civil libertarians, it might also be conceded that occasionally he had to do battle with judicial rules that were probably too restrictive in counter- terrorist matters. The secret federal “spy court” ruled that FBI criminal and intelligence squads cannot freely communicate and share information. If the sharing would result in action against someone in matters not remotely involving terrorism, the ruling would make sense. However, Ashcroft probably was on the right track in challenging it insofar as it prevented full cooperation in terrorism matters. The ruling was later overturned. Progressives kept up a steady discussion of the dangers to civil liberties the act posed, and a few conservatives joined in efforts to expose the legislation’s worst features, but, as ACLU president Anthony Romero said , the political dialogue on this issue was essentially “anemic.”
Attorney General Ashcroft’s treatment of two American citizens apprehended while fighting for the Taliban or Al Qaeda raised troubling questions for civil libertarians. John Walker Lindh was permitted to enter a plea in a US court. Y. Esam Hamdi was long held incommunicado in a Navy brig in Norfolk. He did not have access to an attorney while a French citizen, Zacarias Moussaoui, had access to attorneys and is being tried in open federal court. The Justice Department said it was permissible to hold Hamdi indefinitely and without access to a lawyer because he is being charged with nothing and was clearly an enemy combatant. Another US citizen, Jose Padilla was being held in a South Carolina brig without charges or an attorney. He was apprehended as a possible dirty bomb builder, but no charges were lodged for some time. The Attorney General has talked about building camps where such US citizens could be held.
In summer, 2004, the case against Padilla was dropped and he was sent back to Saudi Arabia without his US citizenship. In addition, the military has seized 1500 detainees as a result of the Afghan War and other operations and has maintained that these prisoners have no rights under the Geneva Convention. The government’s original intention was to hold them until a worldwide terrorist network no longer existed. In 2002, the Bush administration issued a formal waiver on the Geneva Convention, stating that they did not apply to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In June 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s contention that in time of war it should wield unfettered power. The court ruled that the foreign nationals held at “enemy combatants” had the right to file habeas corpus petitions and that an American citizen being held as a suspected terrorist had the right to be informed of the charges against him and to exercise the right to defend himself.
The decisions freed no one, left much room for executive power to be exercised, but it cancelled the blank check the administration thought it possessed. Congress subsequently defined the way these people would be tried by military courts. The detainees would not see the evidence against them and information gained through torture was admissible. There was to be very little room for appeals. Though the legislation flew in the face of basic American principles, Democrat Karl Levin was a co-sponsor. With the surrender of Levin and other Democrats, it seemed there was little further interest in exploring the matter of torture. In May 2006, Mary McCarthy, deputy inspector general of the CIA, was fired one day before she was to retire. It seems she had learned that some high CIA official had lied to congress about torturing prisoners. Unnamed sources said she had been fired because she had leaked something to the press or, even worse, Congress. There was no effort on the part of the two intelligence committees to interview her.
In 2003, the Justice Department prepared Patriot Act II, which passed the House in September , 2003. Named the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, it was designed to expand government’s domestic surveillance powers. It also made possible stripping people of citizenship if they assisted groups the Attorney General designated as terrorist organization. It greatly expanded the FBI’s powers in the use of national security letters or administrative subpoenas. The bureau was authorized to obtain telephone, internet, and financial date from financial institutions whenever it thought national security was involved without the scrutiny of a judge. Financial institutions included casinos, travel agencies, the Postal Service, pawnbrokers, insurance companies, and dealers in precious metals. Those ordered to turn over records were forbidden to disclose that this had occurred In March 2007 the Department of Justice Inspector General revealed that in many instances the FBI used national security letters illegally and improperly to gather information. It was also found that the Bureau had often understated to Congress how many of these letters it was employing.
Arrests of people who were “threats” to the economy were to be facilitated. Since September 11, 2001, hundreds had been quietly taken into custody and the government refused to give their names on grounds it was protecting their privacy. The new measure facilitated secret arrests. It was signed into law on the day Saddam Hussein was captured, December 13, 2003. The third extension of the Patriot Act came before Congress in 2005, but final passage was delayed until early 2006. The press reported that the delay was mainly due to disagreement over whether law enforcement agents should be able to get access to anyone’s medical records and library usage. Defenders of the measure argued that only the guilty had reason to worry about abuse resulting from having their records checked. The bill provided a more controversial section ( 605) which created a permanent and secret Homeland Security force known as the “United States Secret Uniformed Division.” When it thought it had good reason, it could arrest people without warrant. It would also function at special events of national significance (SENS), which it was free to designate itself.
This new provision is the more worrisome when it is recalled that on January 6, 2003, President Bush signed an executive order permitting himself to set aside habeas corpus and the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using troops in domestic situations. He did not invoke this power when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, but it remains on the books. This provision was lifted from a 1982 plan by Lt. Colonel Oliver North to give FEMA a new mission.” The act was overwhelming extended in March 2006 after some “legislative hocus-pocus” which changed little but provided a “fig leaf” of a compromise which enabled moderates and most liberals enough cover to join the stampede.
The Bush Justice Department has also taken to intimidating defense attorneys. In 2005, Lynne Stewart was sent to prison because she represented an accused terrorist in a manner prosecutors disliked. She was charged with providing material support for terrorism. In 2006, prosecutors threatened to jail the attorney for Kenneth Ford, an NSA analyst whose views on WMDs probably resulted in his incarceration on trumped-up charges of stealing classified documents. The judge noted that there was no information on how the documents ended up in Ford’s kitchen and that the government’s confidential informant was a “curious figure,” but he still sentenced Ford to 6 years in prison. Tom Flocco, an internet muckraker, has claimed that his computer firewall system showed through internet identification numbers that the Department of Defense was surveiling him when he talked to intelligence sources or agents or when he wrote stories about intelligence or the Bush White House. In early April not long after Flocco reported his troubles, someone hacked into the E-Mail of “Good Morning America” John Green and found two unacceptable notes. In one Green called former Secretary of State Madeline Albright “NeoCon lite without NutraSweet.” In another, he criticized Bush. Each was leaked to a different conservative outlet: the Drudge Report and The New York Post. ABC suspended him and forced him to apologize to the White House Communications director. At the same time, Chris Graff, Vermont AP Bureau Chief, was fired for putting a Patrick Leahey op-ed on the wire.
John Ashcroft cooperated with the Bush administration in hacking away at many Bill of Rights protections, but he appeared to draw the line at supporting without reservation the creation of a massive database with information on potentially all American citizens. When he was desperately ill in a Washington hospital, the president’s chief of staff Andrew Card and chief legal counsel Alberto Gonzales came to demand that he authorize the FEMA database named Main Core. At issue was FEMA’s desire to greatly expand it by means of various forms of surveillance and incorporation of rad data from NSA telecommunications intercepts. Ashcroft refused, as did Acting Attorney General James Comey. More than two years later, the mainstream press claimed the argument was about reauthorizing wireless wiretaps, which Ashcroft and repeatedly supported. Finally, in late July 2007, Attorney General Gonzales admitted to a Senate panel "The disagreement that occurred was about other intelligence activities, and the reason for the visit to the hospital was about other intelligence activities . . . It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people."
In foreign affairs, the Bush administration also moved toward unilateralism denial of international law, a posture that delighted foreign policy fundamentalists. John Bolton, who eventually became ambassador to the UN, claimed that it is “a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law” even when doing so yields some short-term advantages. Alberto Gonzales, who was to become Attorney General, believed that international conventions on the treatment of prisoners were “obsolete” and “quaint.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Sunday, May 11, 2008
The G.W. Bush Administration and Secrecy
Even more dangerous for the republic than using the FBI for political purposes or the Interior Department manipulating situations to enrich a key Republican lobbyist is the persistent use of secrecy as a governing tactic. Combine secrecy with a politicized Justice Department, and one has the potential for all manner of abuses that may never come to light. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jack Nelson said “This administration [ that of George W. Bush] is by far the most secretive administration I have had any experience with at all. They have no shame… in doing things in the dark….”
Few who read the papers carefully could state with some certainty why the United States invaded Iraq or the full reasoning process behind the energy policies adopted in 2005. Secrecy has extended from such large matters to any number of other matters. Judge Damon Keith wrote in 2002 that “democracies die behind closed doors,” and John Adams said, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” An essential requirement for democracy is assuring that the people have an opportunity to gain a full understanding of public matters. By avoiding presidential press conferences and indulging a mania for secrecy, the Bush administration reduced the degree of Democracy enjoyed by the American people. George W. Bush held fewer press conference than any president since FDR. At the fourteen he did hold up to June 2004, the president regularly refused to answer difficult questions.
To some extent, the belief in keeping the public in the dark and even lying to them can be seen as a carefully thought out approach to governance which has some support among philosophers and academicians. More than a few in the Bush administration had been influenced by the writings of Leo Strauss, who taught that “lies, far from being a regrettable necessity of political life, are instead virtuous and noble instruments of wise policy.” Whether Bush subscribed to the philosophy of the noble lie cannot be documented, but his conduct in leading the nation into invading Iraq could be the result of this outlook.
Even before entering the White House, George W. Bush demonstrated a devotion to secrecy in government. As soon as he learned that the Supreme Court had awarded him the presidency, he set out to circumvent a Texas law that required that gubernatorial papers be immediately indexed and made available to the public. He arranged to have his papers placed in his father’s library, which placed them under federal jurisdiction and met the Texas requirement that placement of papers be made in consultation with the head of the state library and archives commission by simply notifying the commission of his action. Some have suggested that his papers would reveal that he handled death row commutation matters too quickly and perfunctorily.
. The Bush administration’s policymaking process often seemed a closely-held secret, perhaps suggesting “a blithe sense of class entitlement” or the Neo Conservatives’ belief that the masses should be kept in the dark Policy making procedures developed over decades by previous administrations simply fell into disuse on many occasions.
The Bush White House adopted a policy of using e-mail accounts provided by the Republican National Committee rather than those provided by the federal government. The National Journal reported that Karl Rove did 95% of his electronic communicating using the RNC account. There is something troubling about conducting government business on e-mail accounts provided by a partisan entity. The point of doing this was to circumvent the requirements of the Presidential Records act which requires that all such communications be preserved. By using partisan e-mail accounts to get around Congressional investigations, it is possible that White House aids are exposing sensitive data to hackers, assuming the commercial accounts are less secure than those provided by the US government.
From the outset, the Bush administration moved quickly to limit the flow of information about what went on in the executive branch. This administration became known for its culture of secrecy, and made itself far less accessible to Congress and the media than any previous government. For example it punished a DEA agent who helped the Times of London write about money laundering, and it tried to suppress information about mad cow disease in the United States. Democratic members of Congressional investigative committees were denied access to some administration briefings and papers from the executive branch. Congress was denied access to information on telephone calls advisor Cark Rove made to firms in which he held stock.
Consumers found new roadblocks to obtaining information about automobile safety. Even Republicans such as Representative Dan Burton and activist Phyllis Schlafley have complained about the administration’s penchant for operating in secrecy. Burton was angry when the Bush administration refused to release information on Clinton’s midnight pardons. Eventually it released only t hose papers that would put Clinton in a bad light. In many ways it demonstrated clear opposition to open government. The quest for secrecy even including the scrubbing of routinely produced scientific data of information that could be used to challenge administration policy. Scientific results that offended administration ideology were simply deleted or reversed.
In 2003, the administrations even withheld information on many consumer issues as well as tire and auto safety reports. In the same year, the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee found that the administration had scrubbed and manipulated data in 21 scientific areas that included stem-cell research and global warming.
In 1999, 8 million documents were classified as confidential; that number jumped to 23 million by the end of 2002. The desire to cloak government actions in secrecy animates Bush administration efforts to shut down the Government Printing Office, though the proposal is claimed to be an economy move. Perhaps there were no sinister intentions for so much secrecy and the deletion of some scientific data. The administration was filled with conservative ideologues who placed theory and ideology above rational empiricism. It may not be a matter of spinning facts to their advantage; it is quite possible that these people simply find contradictory data irrelevant because they have such an unalterable faith in their policies and ideology. Sometimes, what others saw as secrecy many have just been adroit news management to the Bush administration. For example, it adhered strictly to the 1991 Pentagon rule against the photographing of body bags (“transfer tubes”), the arrival of soldiers’ bodies at Dover Air Force Base , or burials at Arlington on the grounds that the appearance of these pictures would upset the soldiers’ relatives and friends.
Before the horrific events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was busy expanding governmental secrecy. Vice President Cheney’s refusal to make public information about the composition of his energy task force was only a small part of this effort. In August 2002, Assistant Attorney General Robert McCallum filed pleadings with a district court requesting that executive privilege be permanently extended to all matters involving pardons. It might be recalled that President George H.W. Bush pardoned the key figures involved in the Iran-Contra controversy as well as a Cuban exile who bombed an airliner carrying over 170 people. Mc Callum was a Skull and Bone’s classmate of the president’s. Under Bush, the government was much more reluctant to grant requests made by the media and others under the Freedom of Information Act. The administration charged very high fees to people and organizations seeking information under the act. When a small nonprofit agency asked the Department of Education for information on students barred from federal grants and loans due to drug convictions, it faced “much foot-dragging and finally ruinous” fees.
The president’s desire to operate in secrecy was also reflected in his signing of a measure that provided for fines and jail time for journalists who publish information related to security matters. It was essentially the official secrets measure that Bill Clinton had vetoed. Secrecy is employed to hide some activities and also to discipline reporters. Only those who are friendly to the administration are given access to some information. Knight-Ridder CEO and president of the Newspaper Association of America Tony Ridder told the National Press Club that there is “a blend of fear, frustration and anger on the part of many Washington journalists” and he reminded listeners that “access to information is essential to democracy” and that secrecy diminishes the freedoms of most citizens.
In dealing with Congress, the Bush administration has been worse than its predecessors in sharing information. To avoid confirmation hearings, it has resorted to a number of recess appointments. When it was clear there would be trouble confirming someone, as in the case of the nomination of John Bolton as UN ambassador, it abandoned the hearings route and made a recess appointment. Letters from Congressmen requesting information are treated in a cavalier manner, and those from Democrats are sometimes ignored. After a spate of mine disasters, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the problem. The top mine safety official, David G. Dye, testified and left, announcing that he had “pressing matters” to attend to. Those who testify are expected to remain in case matters come up that they can address. When Bush instructed the NSA to spy on private telephone conversations without warrants, the administration briefed only Congressional leaders, and the briefings were only fig-leaves. Yet Bush bragged about his openness in this matter. The Congressional Research Service noted that the law requires that whole committees be briefed and concluded that the administration may have broken the law.
Taking its cue from the administration, the Republican Congress has usually refused to investigate controversial matters; perhaps thinking party loyalty demanded this. Of course, observers with good memories know that Democratic Congresses did investigate Democratic presidents. Norman Ornstein has suggested that the subservience of Congress is part of a “battered Congress syndrome,” something akin to a battered spouse syndrome.
rmation Act, the Justice Department promulgated regulations that enabled agencies to keep secret any information they thought should not be available to the public. A very small case in point was the abuse of secrecy rules to make Bill Clinton look bad in his negotiations with Israeli Prime minister Ehud Barach. The transcripts of their telephone discussions were labeled top secret, and the Bush administration edited them to the disadvantage of its predecessor. There was also a massive increase in the number of classified documents, from 8 million in 1999 to 23 million in 2002. The administration appointed a new federal archivist who had been accused of violations of the code of the International Council of Archivists. It did not seem to be an administration committed to the public’s right to know what was transpiring.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in March 2001 ordered all agencies to develop guidelines to prevent disclosure of information they considered “sensitive but unclassified.” Bush’s EPA began making scholars register before they could use its Envirofacts database After September 11, the movement toward secrecy in government was intensified under the pretext that security made this necessary. In contrast, the Clinton administration had declassified millions of records and had supported passage of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act. In 2002, Mitch Daniels, head of the Office of Management and Budget proposed that departments and agencies print their own materials, perhaps using private printers. This would end the practice of sending materials to the Government Printing Office, which was then required to send copies of what it printed to library depositories throughout the country. Daniels insisted that his plan was designed only to save money, but its effect would be to greatly limit the flow of information to the public.
The Bush administration refused to release Reagan administration documents that federal law mandated be made public in January 2001. The Bush administration delayed the release of 60,000 pages for more than a year, despite the requirements of law. On March 15, 2002, all but 155 pages were released. Most of that material seems to relate to the process of nominating judges. Bruce Craig, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, believes the administration does not want scholars to know how the Reagan administration stacked the judiciary with conservative judges. “What they did was brilliant, no question about it.” Some of the papers still withheld were those of then Vice President George H. W. Bush.
There are still millions of Reagan era papers to be processed before release can even be considered. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 required that the National Archives have ultimate control of presidential papers. In obedience to the law, the National Archives screened the Reagan papers for materials that related to national security and prepared about 68,000 that could be safely released in 2001 as the first installment of the Reagan papers. Alberto Gonzalez, White House Counsel, persuaded the Archives to accept three delays to give the White House time to deal with legal questions. After September 11, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, asserting the right to decide what was released and when. The fact that the country was on a war footing was used to justify the order as well as executive privilege. The order, for the first time, extended executive privilege to cover vice-presidential papers.
Presumably, the reason for the concealment of these documents was that many former Reagan administration officials were serving in the second Bush administration. Concealment of these records and the refusal to obey the law was scarcely mentioned in most of the press. Bush attempted to resolve the matter with the executive order giving presidents, beginning with Reagan, the same power as sitting presidents to keep their papers private. The executive order reversed the Presidential Records Act. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said the action was justified because of the September 11 attack on America. Molly Ivins, one of the few to comment upon this usurpation of power thought it was because the papers could “contain information damaging to the reputation of Poppy Bush, who was then vice president, and/or the reputations of old Reaganites like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.” The Executive Order is being challenged in the courts by Public Interest, but the political outlooks of the judges who hear the case could determine the outcome.
Bush had also moved to keep control of his gubernatorial papers by placing them in his father’s presidential library. Using the terrorist threat as an excuse, Attorney General John Ashcroft advised government agencies that he would support their efforts to withhold records requested under the Freedom of Information Act. A few newspapers noted that the Bush administration made haste to release the correspondence of Enron chairman Ken Lay with Clinton’s two Secretaries of the Treasury, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Lay offered Rubin a seat on the Enron board, which was declined. Summers was asked to resist a call to regulate derivatives. There was no evidence that the letters produced the desired results. On the other hand, Kenneth Lay had spent more than $600,000 to advance the political career of George W. Bush. During the campaign of 2000, Enron also loaned Bush a corporate jet for whistle-stopping. Lay had been appointed to the senior Bush’s Energy Council, and the Energy Policy Act, passed under the first Bush, forced utilities to permit energy traders like Enron to use their pipelines. By long delaying the seizure of Enron’s papers after it was clear that there had been widespread corporate wrong-doing, the Bush administration made it possible for extensive shredding of documents to occur.
In 2006, the Bush administration refused to release papers on its badly bungled handling of the hurricane Katrina, which did massive damage to the Gulf coast. After Katrina struck, Bush said he had no idea that New Orleans would be flooded or its levees would break, yet evidence turned up in February 2006 that he had been warned about those possibilities hours before the disaster occurred. The decision to stonewall on the FEMA papers issue and the refusal to permit top White House officials to testify before Congressional committees was clearly an attempt at damage control. In 2007, a federal judge commented on the “Kafkaesque” hurdles people had to jump in order to obtain FEMA assistance. FEMA legal service people were kept under a gag order so that the complete picture of the agency’s ineptitude or disinterest could not be revealed. It was also revealed that much FEMA food has simply gone to rot and that the agency had put out false figures about how many people it put into hotel rooms. While dealing with disastrous fires that year, the agency resorted to a faked press conference to burnish its image.
The Bush administration in 2002 stopped reporting information about factory closings, and acknowledged that it was doing so only in a footnote to a document released on Christmas Eve, 2002. In the environmental arena, there was an effort to tone down and/or delete scientific data from reports written by government environmental professionals that contradicted administration policy. Pollster Frank Luntz warned that the scientific debate about global warming “is closing against us but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science.” This was essentially done by censorship and editing. By early 2004, the administration found the ultimate policy for dealing with scientific findings. It created a scientific review process under the Office of Management and Budget that could delay the implementation of environmental and health regulations until the scientific information underpinning them was approved by this new review process. Joan Claybrook remarked, “this is an attempt at paralysis by analysis.”
There seemed to be a distrust of government experts as though they were somehow uninformed obstructionists determined to get in the way of progress. This characterization was applied to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, economists, environmentalists, and the CIA. The latter was particularly distrusted because it often criticized estimates and claims made by the Neo Conservatives and their Iraqi exile clients. This deep distrust of experts is partly an outgrowth of the Republicans’ critique of the so-called New Class. Even the Bush administration’s assault on the findings of hard sciences, particularly in regard to global warming, is more than pandering to industrial donors. It is a manifestation of the ideologues hostility to experts and is rooted in their critique of the so-called New Class.
In 2006, Dr. James E. Hansen, head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, complained that NASA has attempted to stop his frequent warnings about global warming. It ordered the public relations people to monitor future lectures, papers, and postings as well as requests from journalists for interviews. A public relations official relayed to him that NASA warned there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to speak in the same manner about global warming. A NASA official went on record as being unhappy that Hansen spoke on liberal NPR and stated that his job was “to make the president look good” and that Hansen was disloyal civil servant. For a time, his superiors assigned a “minder” to Hansen, but they it was learned that the young man who was to monitor Hansen’s behavior did not possess the degree he claimed to have. In 2006, Hansen compared Bush’s censorship of science with the way Stalin’s minions distorted it. It was reported that political appointees at NASA exerted heavy pressure during the 2004 election to prevent publication of information about glaciers melting, climate change, or global warming.
When government scientists produce facts that offend the Bush administration's corporate allies, the administration has moved to suppress the information. Dr. James Zahn was ordered by the Department of Agriculture not to publicize information about superbugs in huge hog farms due to pressure from the National Pork Producers Council. At the Department of Interior, the deletion and alteration of scientific information became a standard procedure. Scientists who were likely to find information that contradicted Bush policies or threatened corporate interests have been removed from federal panels. Tony Oppegard, a federal engineer heading a geodesic study of mountain top strip mining was fired as soon as Bush took office. The White House had little reason to share information with Congress or seek its imput. Republicans in the House and Senate are held in line by Teutonic discipline, and dutifully follow the White House line. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska complained that “You have an administration that does not reach out or see much value in consulting with Congress. They treat Congress as an appendage, a constitutional nuisance .
The George W. Bush administration has found another means to avoid vigorous enforcement of regulatory law by packing the top levels of the civil service with political appointees. Other administrations have done some of this, but Paul Light of the Brookings Institution considered the 12% increase of employees at this level “stunning. ” Appointments on Schedule C do not require Congressional approval. But the extent of these appointments suggests an intention to politicize the federal service and challenge the long-standing merit principle in civil service hiring. The plan for undoing much of the federal civil service system was laid out in January 2001 in the Heritage Foundation’s “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The document called for appointments based on loyalty as the first criterion rather than expertise. It maintained that the professional civil service should be considered the enemy and called for the outsourcing of as much work as possible. In early, 2007 the Bush administration capped its battle against the professional civil service with an executive order that required any changes in federal regulations had to be approved by political appointees in the departments and agencies of government.
The penchant for secrecy also involves an effort to control the flow of information about foreign policy. Just as William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan, purged dissidents in the agency, Porter Goss, George W. Bush’s appointee, has made it clear that information coming out of the agency must fit the administration’s policy line. He has refused to release to Congress an assessment of how much damage was done by the outing of covert agent Valerie Plame. Goss and his aides have expressed displeasure with the results of a study by former deputy director Richard Kerr that detailed intelligence failures prior to the invasion of Iraq. He has delayed publication of the issue of Studies in Intelligence that referenced the report, erected new barriers to what can be printed there, and provoked the resignation of the editor and chairman of the editorial board. Career officers have vacated 20 top positions and 90 senior officials have resigned. A purge also occurred in Condi Rice’s Department of State, but it was more gentle. Officials who disagreed verbally or in their reports with the Bush Cheney NeoCons have had their security clearances pulled and they have been reassigned to less important tasks. Some had dealt with the Middle East, Iran, international law, the environment, non-proliferation, Latin America, and Africa.
Perhaps the administration’s penchant for secrecy is simply a reflection of the mindset of corporate CEO, who are impatient with public discussion and the squabbling of politicians. Bush and Cheney were both corporate CEOs and promised to use their executive skills to solve national problems. After the disclosure of many CEO-induced scandals, they said no more about the advantages of putting CEOs in office but their governing style did not change. It was marked by impatience with discussion, contempt for compromise, ruthlessness with opponents, chumminess with business cronies, secretiveness, and hierarchal outlook. Whether several of these traits represented a disdain for some aspects of democracy remains to be seen.
The Bush energy plan was developed in secret by Vice President Cheney and passed in 2005 in proceedings often clouded in secrecy. There were efforts to open the task force records, but they were successfully blocked in the courts. The Bush administration acknowledged that Vice President met with Enron executives six times about the proceedings of his energy task force. More complete information about its proceedings has not yet become available. It is known, however, that representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as well as Carl Pope, director of the Sierra Club, were given an audience with the vice president only after the details of the energy plan had been made public. The deliberations of the energy task force resulted in quick approval for controversial of the pebble-bed nuclear reactor of Exelon Corporation. The firm, which has made large contributions to the Republican Party, insists that the design will provide safer cheap power in abundance, but environmentalists dispute these claims.
A successful effort to cloak critical information in secrecy was accompanied by a very skillful effort to manipulate the press and manage the news. By the end of George W. Bush’s third year in the White House, Harpers’ Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur told a radio interviewer that the “White House press corps...has now turned into ...[a] full time press agency for the President of the United States.” Later in the interview he added that the public should “assume that the press is now part of the government.” On reflection, Mac Arthur would certainly back off from full meaning of these assessments, but he was correct in noting that the national press had lost its ability to critically cover this GOP administration. British journalist Greg Palast has referred to the mainstream American press as the dependent press because information is so tightly controlled that it must cater to the Bush administration in order to be rewarded with even small pieces of information. Richard L. Ehrlich, Jr., Maryland’s Republican governor, formalized this way of dealing with the press in November 2004 when he signed a written order forbidding employees to talk to two reporters for the Baltimore Sun. Two federal courts subsequently upheld the legality of that order.
It insists upon enforcing the Pentagon’s 1991 ban on taking photographs of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. When the President held a huge rally for troops at Fort Carson, the press was ordered not to talk to any soldiers before, during, or after the rally. They obeyed, and only the Rocky Mountain News reported on the orders given to the press. The skill of the Bush administration in manipulating the press was demonstrated in 2004, when the Social Security Administration ran many advertisements clearly touting the advantages of Bush’s prescription care plan. Few noticed that the advertisements could have a political effect. Later that year, the Department of Education, paid $700,000 to an agency to advertise Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a major Bush bragging point. The department also paid TV talk show host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to talk up the program in the black community. When the payment came to light, there was little discussion about blurring the lines between a journalist and an paid advocate.
The federal government paid Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the Bush approach to marriage, and another conservative columnist was paid $10,000 to do the same. The use of taxpayer money for political purposes was nearly a non-issue in the public and political forums. In a related matter, private corporations began to provide local television stations with video news releases, which the stations presented as ordinary news. Sometimes the releases had political content and other times they were more commercial in nature.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Few who read the papers carefully could state with some certainty why the United States invaded Iraq or the full reasoning process behind the energy policies adopted in 2005. Secrecy has extended from such large matters to any number of other matters. Judge Damon Keith wrote in 2002 that “democracies die behind closed doors,” and John Adams said, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” An essential requirement for democracy is assuring that the people have an opportunity to gain a full understanding of public matters. By avoiding presidential press conferences and indulging a mania for secrecy, the Bush administration reduced the degree of Democracy enjoyed by the American people. George W. Bush held fewer press conference than any president since FDR. At the fourteen he did hold up to June 2004, the president regularly refused to answer difficult questions.
To some extent, the belief in keeping the public in the dark and even lying to them can be seen as a carefully thought out approach to governance which has some support among philosophers and academicians. More than a few in the Bush administration had been influenced by the writings of Leo Strauss, who taught that “lies, far from being a regrettable necessity of political life, are instead virtuous and noble instruments of wise policy.” Whether Bush subscribed to the philosophy of the noble lie cannot be documented, but his conduct in leading the nation into invading Iraq could be the result of this outlook.
Even before entering the White House, George W. Bush demonstrated a devotion to secrecy in government. As soon as he learned that the Supreme Court had awarded him the presidency, he set out to circumvent a Texas law that required that gubernatorial papers be immediately indexed and made available to the public. He arranged to have his papers placed in his father’s library, which placed them under federal jurisdiction and met the Texas requirement that placement of papers be made in consultation with the head of the state library and archives commission by simply notifying the commission of his action. Some have suggested that his papers would reveal that he handled death row commutation matters too quickly and perfunctorily.
. The Bush administration’s policymaking process often seemed a closely-held secret, perhaps suggesting “a blithe sense of class entitlement” or the Neo Conservatives’ belief that the masses should be kept in the dark Policy making procedures developed over decades by previous administrations simply fell into disuse on many occasions.
The Bush White House adopted a policy of using e-mail accounts provided by the Republican National Committee rather than those provided by the federal government. The National Journal reported that Karl Rove did 95% of his electronic communicating using the RNC account. There is something troubling about conducting government business on e-mail accounts provided by a partisan entity. The point of doing this was to circumvent the requirements of the Presidential Records act which requires that all such communications be preserved. By using partisan e-mail accounts to get around Congressional investigations, it is possible that White House aids are exposing sensitive data to hackers, assuming the commercial accounts are less secure than those provided by the US government.
From the outset, the Bush administration moved quickly to limit the flow of information about what went on in the executive branch. This administration became known for its culture of secrecy, and made itself far less accessible to Congress and the media than any previous government. For example it punished a DEA agent who helped the Times of London write about money laundering, and it tried to suppress information about mad cow disease in the United States. Democratic members of Congressional investigative committees were denied access to some administration briefings and papers from the executive branch. Congress was denied access to information on telephone calls advisor Cark Rove made to firms in which he held stock.
Consumers found new roadblocks to obtaining information about automobile safety. Even Republicans such as Representative Dan Burton and activist Phyllis Schlafley have complained about the administration’s penchant for operating in secrecy. Burton was angry when the Bush administration refused to release information on Clinton’s midnight pardons. Eventually it released only t hose papers that would put Clinton in a bad light. In many ways it demonstrated clear opposition to open government. The quest for secrecy even including the scrubbing of routinely produced scientific data of information that could be used to challenge administration policy. Scientific results that offended administration ideology were simply deleted or reversed.
In 2003, the administrations even withheld information on many consumer issues as well as tire and auto safety reports. In the same year, the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee found that the administration had scrubbed and manipulated data in 21 scientific areas that included stem-cell research and global warming.
In 1999, 8 million documents were classified as confidential; that number jumped to 23 million by the end of 2002. The desire to cloak government actions in secrecy animates Bush administration efforts to shut down the Government Printing Office, though the proposal is claimed to be an economy move. Perhaps there were no sinister intentions for so much secrecy and the deletion of some scientific data. The administration was filled with conservative ideologues who placed theory and ideology above rational empiricism. It may not be a matter of spinning facts to their advantage; it is quite possible that these people simply find contradictory data irrelevant because they have such an unalterable faith in their policies and ideology. Sometimes, what others saw as secrecy many have just been adroit news management to the Bush administration. For example, it adhered strictly to the 1991 Pentagon rule against the photographing of body bags (“transfer tubes”), the arrival of soldiers’ bodies at Dover Air Force Base , or burials at Arlington on the grounds that the appearance of these pictures would upset the soldiers’ relatives and friends.
Before the horrific events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was busy expanding governmental secrecy. Vice President Cheney’s refusal to make public information about the composition of his energy task force was only a small part of this effort. In August 2002, Assistant Attorney General Robert McCallum filed pleadings with a district court requesting that executive privilege be permanently extended to all matters involving pardons. It might be recalled that President George H.W. Bush pardoned the key figures involved in the Iran-Contra controversy as well as a Cuban exile who bombed an airliner carrying over 170 people. Mc Callum was a Skull and Bone’s classmate of the president’s. Under Bush, the government was much more reluctant to grant requests made by the media and others under the Freedom of Information Act. The administration charged very high fees to people and organizations seeking information under the act. When a small nonprofit agency asked the Department of Education for information on students barred from federal grants and loans due to drug convictions, it faced “much foot-dragging and finally ruinous” fees.
The president’s desire to operate in secrecy was also reflected in his signing of a measure that provided for fines and jail time for journalists who publish information related to security matters. It was essentially the official secrets measure that Bill Clinton had vetoed. Secrecy is employed to hide some activities and also to discipline reporters. Only those who are friendly to the administration are given access to some information. Knight-Ridder CEO and president of the Newspaper Association of America Tony Ridder told the National Press Club that there is “a blend of fear, frustration and anger on the part of many Washington journalists” and he reminded listeners that “access to information is essential to democracy” and that secrecy diminishes the freedoms of most citizens.
In dealing with Congress, the Bush administration has been worse than its predecessors in sharing information. To avoid confirmation hearings, it has resorted to a number of recess appointments. When it was clear there would be trouble confirming someone, as in the case of the nomination of John Bolton as UN ambassador, it abandoned the hearings route and made a recess appointment. Letters from Congressmen requesting information are treated in a cavalier manner, and those from Democrats are sometimes ignored. After a spate of mine disasters, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the problem. The top mine safety official, David G. Dye, testified and left, announcing that he had “pressing matters” to attend to. Those who testify are expected to remain in case matters come up that they can address. When Bush instructed the NSA to spy on private telephone conversations without warrants, the administration briefed only Congressional leaders, and the briefings were only fig-leaves. Yet Bush bragged about his openness in this matter. The Congressional Research Service noted that the law requires that whole committees be briefed and concluded that the administration may have broken the law.
Taking its cue from the administration, the Republican Congress has usually refused to investigate controversial matters; perhaps thinking party loyalty demanded this. Of course, observers with good memories know that Democratic Congresses did investigate Democratic presidents. Norman Ornstein has suggested that the subservience of Congress is part of a “battered Congress syndrome,” something akin to a battered spouse syndrome.
rmation Act, the Justice Department promulgated regulations that enabled agencies to keep secret any information they thought should not be available to the public. A very small case in point was the abuse of secrecy rules to make Bill Clinton look bad in his negotiations with Israeli Prime minister Ehud Barach. The transcripts of their telephone discussions were labeled top secret, and the Bush administration edited them to the disadvantage of its predecessor. There was also a massive increase in the number of classified documents, from 8 million in 1999 to 23 million in 2002. The administration appointed a new federal archivist who had been accused of violations of the code of the International Council of Archivists. It did not seem to be an administration committed to the public’s right to know what was transpiring.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in March 2001 ordered all agencies to develop guidelines to prevent disclosure of information they considered “sensitive but unclassified.” Bush’s EPA began making scholars register before they could use its Envirofacts database After September 11, the movement toward secrecy in government was intensified under the pretext that security made this necessary. In contrast, the Clinton administration had declassified millions of records and had supported passage of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act. In 2002, Mitch Daniels, head of the Office of Management and Budget proposed that departments and agencies print their own materials, perhaps using private printers. This would end the practice of sending materials to the Government Printing Office, which was then required to send copies of what it printed to library depositories throughout the country. Daniels insisted that his plan was designed only to save money, but its effect would be to greatly limit the flow of information to the public.
The Bush administration refused to release Reagan administration documents that federal law mandated be made public in January 2001. The Bush administration delayed the release of 60,000 pages for more than a year, despite the requirements of law. On March 15, 2002, all but 155 pages were released. Most of that material seems to relate to the process of nominating judges. Bruce Craig, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, believes the administration does not want scholars to know how the Reagan administration stacked the judiciary with conservative judges. “What they did was brilliant, no question about it.” Some of the papers still withheld were those of then Vice President George H. W. Bush.
There are still millions of Reagan era papers to be processed before release can even be considered. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 required that the National Archives have ultimate control of presidential papers. In obedience to the law, the National Archives screened the Reagan papers for materials that related to national security and prepared about 68,000 that could be safely released in 2001 as the first installment of the Reagan papers. Alberto Gonzalez, White House Counsel, persuaded the Archives to accept three delays to give the White House time to deal with legal questions. After September 11, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, asserting the right to decide what was released and when. The fact that the country was on a war footing was used to justify the order as well as executive privilege. The order, for the first time, extended executive privilege to cover vice-presidential papers.
Presumably, the reason for the concealment of these documents was that many former Reagan administration officials were serving in the second Bush administration. Concealment of these records and the refusal to obey the law was scarcely mentioned in most of the press. Bush attempted to resolve the matter with the executive order giving presidents, beginning with Reagan, the same power as sitting presidents to keep their papers private. The executive order reversed the Presidential Records Act. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said the action was justified because of the September 11 attack on America. Molly Ivins, one of the few to comment upon this usurpation of power thought it was because the papers could “contain information damaging to the reputation of Poppy Bush, who was then vice president, and/or the reputations of old Reaganites like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.” The Executive Order is being challenged in the courts by Public Interest, but the political outlooks of the judges who hear the case could determine the outcome.
Bush had also moved to keep control of his gubernatorial papers by placing them in his father’s presidential library. Using the terrorist threat as an excuse, Attorney General John Ashcroft advised government agencies that he would support their efforts to withhold records requested under the Freedom of Information Act. A few newspapers noted that the Bush administration made haste to release the correspondence of Enron chairman Ken Lay with Clinton’s two Secretaries of the Treasury, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Lay offered Rubin a seat on the Enron board, which was declined. Summers was asked to resist a call to regulate derivatives. There was no evidence that the letters produced the desired results. On the other hand, Kenneth Lay had spent more than $600,000 to advance the political career of George W. Bush. During the campaign of 2000, Enron also loaned Bush a corporate jet for whistle-stopping. Lay had been appointed to the senior Bush’s Energy Council, and the Energy Policy Act, passed under the first Bush, forced utilities to permit energy traders like Enron to use their pipelines. By long delaying the seizure of Enron’s papers after it was clear that there had been widespread corporate wrong-doing, the Bush administration made it possible for extensive shredding of documents to occur.
In 2006, the Bush administration refused to release papers on its badly bungled handling of the hurricane Katrina, which did massive damage to the Gulf coast. After Katrina struck, Bush said he had no idea that New Orleans would be flooded or its levees would break, yet evidence turned up in February 2006 that he had been warned about those possibilities hours before the disaster occurred. The decision to stonewall on the FEMA papers issue and the refusal to permit top White House officials to testify before Congressional committees was clearly an attempt at damage control. In 2007, a federal judge commented on the “Kafkaesque” hurdles people had to jump in order to obtain FEMA assistance. FEMA legal service people were kept under a gag order so that the complete picture of the agency’s ineptitude or disinterest could not be revealed. It was also revealed that much FEMA food has simply gone to rot and that the agency had put out false figures about how many people it put into hotel rooms. While dealing with disastrous fires that year, the agency resorted to a faked press conference to burnish its image.
The Bush administration in 2002 stopped reporting information about factory closings, and acknowledged that it was doing so only in a footnote to a document released on Christmas Eve, 2002. In the environmental arena, there was an effort to tone down and/or delete scientific data from reports written by government environmental professionals that contradicted administration policy. Pollster Frank Luntz warned that the scientific debate about global warming “is closing against us but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science.” This was essentially done by censorship and editing. By early 2004, the administration found the ultimate policy for dealing with scientific findings. It created a scientific review process under the Office of Management and Budget that could delay the implementation of environmental and health regulations until the scientific information underpinning them was approved by this new review process. Joan Claybrook remarked, “this is an attempt at paralysis by analysis.”
There seemed to be a distrust of government experts as though they were somehow uninformed obstructionists determined to get in the way of progress. This characterization was applied to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, economists, environmentalists, and the CIA. The latter was particularly distrusted because it often criticized estimates and claims made by the Neo Conservatives and their Iraqi exile clients. This deep distrust of experts is partly an outgrowth of the Republicans’ critique of the so-called New Class. Even the Bush administration’s assault on the findings of hard sciences, particularly in regard to global warming, is more than pandering to industrial donors. It is a manifestation of the ideologues hostility to experts and is rooted in their critique of the so-called New Class.
In 2006, Dr. James E. Hansen, head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, complained that NASA has attempted to stop his frequent warnings about global warming. It ordered the public relations people to monitor future lectures, papers, and postings as well as requests from journalists for interviews. A public relations official relayed to him that NASA warned there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to speak in the same manner about global warming. A NASA official went on record as being unhappy that Hansen spoke on liberal NPR and stated that his job was “to make the president look good” and that Hansen was disloyal civil servant. For a time, his superiors assigned a “minder” to Hansen, but they it was learned that the young man who was to monitor Hansen’s behavior did not possess the degree he claimed to have. In 2006, Hansen compared Bush’s censorship of science with the way Stalin’s minions distorted it. It was reported that political appointees at NASA exerted heavy pressure during the 2004 election to prevent publication of information about glaciers melting, climate change, or global warming.
When government scientists produce facts that offend the Bush administration's corporate allies, the administration has moved to suppress the information. Dr. James Zahn was ordered by the Department of Agriculture not to publicize information about superbugs in huge hog farms due to pressure from the National Pork Producers Council. At the Department of Interior, the deletion and alteration of scientific information became a standard procedure. Scientists who were likely to find information that contradicted Bush policies or threatened corporate interests have been removed from federal panels. Tony Oppegard, a federal engineer heading a geodesic study of mountain top strip mining was fired as soon as Bush took office. The White House had little reason to share information with Congress or seek its imput. Republicans in the House and Senate are held in line by Teutonic discipline, and dutifully follow the White House line. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska complained that “You have an administration that does not reach out or see much value in consulting with Congress. They treat Congress as an appendage, a constitutional nuisance .
The George W. Bush administration has found another means to avoid vigorous enforcement of regulatory law by packing the top levels of the civil service with political appointees. Other administrations have done some of this, but Paul Light of the Brookings Institution considered the 12% increase of employees at this level “stunning. ” Appointments on Schedule C do not require Congressional approval. But the extent of these appointments suggests an intention to politicize the federal service and challenge the long-standing merit principle in civil service hiring. The plan for undoing much of the federal civil service system was laid out in January 2001 in the Heritage Foundation’s “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The document called for appointments based on loyalty as the first criterion rather than expertise. It maintained that the professional civil service should be considered the enemy and called for the outsourcing of as much work as possible. In early, 2007 the Bush administration capped its battle against the professional civil service with an executive order that required any changes in federal regulations had to be approved by political appointees in the departments and agencies of government.
The penchant for secrecy also involves an effort to control the flow of information about foreign policy. Just as William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan, purged dissidents in the agency, Porter Goss, George W. Bush’s appointee, has made it clear that information coming out of the agency must fit the administration’s policy line. He has refused to release to Congress an assessment of how much damage was done by the outing of covert agent Valerie Plame. Goss and his aides have expressed displeasure with the results of a study by former deputy director Richard Kerr that detailed intelligence failures prior to the invasion of Iraq. He has delayed publication of the issue of Studies in Intelligence that referenced the report, erected new barriers to what can be printed there, and provoked the resignation of the editor and chairman of the editorial board. Career officers have vacated 20 top positions and 90 senior officials have resigned. A purge also occurred in Condi Rice’s Department of State, but it was more gentle. Officials who disagreed verbally or in their reports with the Bush Cheney NeoCons have had their security clearances pulled and they have been reassigned to less important tasks. Some had dealt with the Middle East, Iran, international law, the environment, non-proliferation, Latin America, and Africa.
Perhaps the administration’s penchant for secrecy is simply a reflection of the mindset of corporate CEO, who are impatient with public discussion and the squabbling of politicians. Bush and Cheney were both corporate CEOs and promised to use their executive skills to solve national problems. After the disclosure of many CEO-induced scandals, they said no more about the advantages of putting CEOs in office but their governing style did not change. It was marked by impatience with discussion, contempt for compromise, ruthlessness with opponents, chumminess with business cronies, secretiveness, and hierarchal outlook. Whether several of these traits represented a disdain for some aspects of democracy remains to be seen.
The Bush energy plan was developed in secret by Vice President Cheney and passed in 2005 in proceedings often clouded in secrecy. There were efforts to open the task force records, but they were successfully blocked in the courts. The Bush administration acknowledged that Vice President met with Enron executives six times about the proceedings of his energy task force. More complete information about its proceedings has not yet become available. It is known, however, that representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as well as Carl Pope, director of the Sierra Club, were given an audience with the vice president only after the details of the energy plan had been made public. The deliberations of the energy task force resulted in quick approval for controversial of the pebble-bed nuclear reactor of Exelon Corporation. The firm, which has made large contributions to the Republican Party, insists that the design will provide safer cheap power in abundance, but environmentalists dispute these claims.
A successful effort to cloak critical information in secrecy was accompanied by a very skillful effort to manipulate the press and manage the news. By the end of George W. Bush’s third year in the White House, Harpers’ Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur told a radio interviewer that the “White House press corps...has now turned into ...[a] full time press agency for the President of the United States.” Later in the interview he added that the public should “assume that the press is now part of the government.” On reflection, Mac Arthur would certainly back off from full meaning of these assessments, but he was correct in noting that the national press had lost its ability to critically cover this GOP administration. British journalist Greg Palast has referred to the mainstream American press as the dependent press because information is so tightly controlled that it must cater to the Bush administration in order to be rewarded with even small pieces of information. Richard L. Ehrlich, Jr., Maryland’s Republican governor, formalized this way of dealing with the press in November 2004 when he signed a written order forbidding employees to talk to two reporters for the Baltimore Sun. Two federal courts subsequently upheld the legality of that order.
It insists upon enforcing the Pentagon’s 1991 ban on taking photographs of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. When the President held a huge rally for troops at Fort Carson, the press was ordered not to talk to any soldiers before, during, or after the rally. They obeyed, and only the Rocky Mountain News reported on the orders given to the press. The skill of the Bush administration in manipulating the press was demonstrated in 2004, when the Social Security Administration ran many advertisements clearly touting the advantages of Bush’s prescription care plan. Few noticed that the advertisements could have a political effect. Later that year, the Department of Education, paid $700,000 to an agency to advertise Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a major Bush bragging point. The department also paid TV talk show host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to talk up the program in the black community. When the payment came to light, there was little discussion about blurring the lines between a journalist and an paid advocate.
The federal government paid Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the Bush approach to marriage, and another conservative columnist was paid $10,000 to do the same. The use of taxpayer money for political purposes was nearly a non-issue in the public and political forums. In a related matter, private corporations began to provide local television stations with video news releases, which the stations presented as ordinary news. Sometimes the releases had political content and other times they were more commercial in nature.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
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