High Alert - Citizenry at Risk!! (Bush the perp - again)
Frank Rich's columns are harder to track down these days than they used to be. That's because he's one of the elite New York Times writers whose work the paper recently decided to include in their program to get on-line users to pay for access. I wouldn't blame him for feeling a bit of a victim in this - as are his fans. The person I have become acquainted with through Rich's columns knows that what he writes is a rarity in the corporate media these days, and he also knows what a potentially important role he plays.
Whatever the Times is selling these days, I'm not paying or buying, especially given the abuse the paper has inflicted on all of us, our Constitution, and ultimately our form of representative government, in the name of "paper of record" over the past oh, say, five years. Seems like a lifetime, doesn't it? My story (and I'm stickin' to it) is that the paper's provision of a boudoir for non-reporter Judith Miller and her best boy Chalabi, the featuring of her non-journalism boosting the necessity of invading Iraq, and ongoing support of her while she covered for the bush administration is by itself worth free access to everything they do for the next decade for every American citizen. I will indulge the naturally generous, tolerant, forgiving aspects of my personality in not exploiting or even naming the paper's other recent scandals (extra points if you can call them out - see "comments" button below).
As an aside, due to lack of regular access to writers like Paul Krugman and Rich my reading of the NYT is down at least 60%. Informal polls suggest I am no dumber nor out-of-touch than before. That's small consolation.
But here's a Rich one for you. The guy does his homework and writes so well. No wonder he's been getting some purple vilification hearts from the sycophant "just-keep-paying-us" right-wing media. In this column he's going to help us with the ongoing fakery over the illegal wiretapping, hence the evocative title: The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight:
Almost two weeks before The New York Times published its scoop about our government's extralegal wiretapping, the cable network Showtime blew the whole top-secret shebang. In its mini-series "Sleeper Cell," about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Los Angeles, the cell's ringleader berates an underling for chatting about an impending operation during a phone conversation with an uncle in Egypt. "We can only pray that the N.S.A. is not listening," the leader yells at the miscreant, who is then stoned for his blabbing.
If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts "our citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't seen "Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.
That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.
[clip]
The warrantless eavesdropping is more of the same incompetence. Like our physical abuse of detainees and our denial of their access to due process, this flouting of the law may yet do as much damage to fighting the war on terrorism as it does to civil liberties. As the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus wrote in The Huffington Post, every defense lawyer representing a terrorism suspect charged in the four years since Mr. Bush's N.S.A. decree can challenge the legality of the prosecution's evidence. "The entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill," Mr. Garbus explains, as the government refuses to give the courts information on national security grounds, inviting the dismissal of entire cases, and judges "up and down the appellate ladder" issue conflicting rulings.
Far from "bringing justice to our enemies," as Mr. Bush is fond of saying, he may once again be helping them escape the way he did at Tora Bora. The president who once promised to bring a "culture of responsibility" to Washington can and will blame The Times and the rest of the press for his failures. But maybe, if only for variety's sake, the moment has come to find a new scapegoat. I nominate Showtime.
Whatever the Times is selling these days, I'm not paying or buying, especially given the abuse the paper has inflicted on all of us, our Constitution, and ultimately our form of representative government, in the name of "paper of record" over the past oh, say, five years. Seems like a lifetime, doesn't it? My story (and I'm stickin' to it) is that the paper's provision of a boudoir for non-reporter Judith Miller and her best boy Chalabi, the featuring of her non-journalism boosting the necessity of invading Iraq, and ongoing support of her while she covered for the bush administration is by itself worth free access to everything they do for the next decade for every American citizen. I will indulge the naturally generous, tolerant, forgiving aspects of my personality in not exploiting or even naming the paper's other recent scandals (extra points if you can call them out - see "comments" button below).
As an aside, due to lack of regular access to writers like Paul Krugman and Rich my reading of the NYT is down at least 60%. Informal polls suggest I am no dumber nor out-of-touch than before. That's small consolation.
But here's a Rich one for you. The guy does his homework and writes so well. No wonder he's been getting some purple vilification hearts from the sycophant "just-keep-paying-us" right-wing media. In this column he's going to help us with the ongoing fakery over the illegal wiretapping, hence the evocative title: The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight:
Almost two weeks before The New York Times published its scoop about our government's extralegal wiretapping, the cable network Showtime blew the whole top-secret shebang. In its mini-series "Sleeper Cell," about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Los Angeles, the cell's ringleader berates an underling for chatting about an impending operation during a phone conversation with an uncle in Egypt. "We can only pray that the N.S.A. is not listening," the leader yells at the miscreant, who is then stoned for his blabbing.
If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts "our citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't seen "Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.
That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.
[clip]
The warrantless eavesdropping is more of the same incompetence. Like our physical abuse of detainees and our denial of their access to due process, this flouting of the law may yet do as much damage to fighting the war on terrorism as it does to civil liberties. As the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus wrote in The Huffington Post, every defense lawyer representing a terrorism suspect charged in the four years since Mr. Bush's N.S.A. decree can challenge the legality of the prosecution's evidence. "The entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill," Mr. Garbus explains, as the government refuses to give the courts information on national security grounds, inviting the dismissal of entire cases, and judges "up and down the appellate ladder" issue conflicting rulings.
Far from "bringing justice to our enemies," as Mr. Bush is fond of saying, he may once again be helping them escape the way he did at Tora Bora. The president who once promised to bring a "culture of responsibility" to Washington can and will blame The Times and the rest of the press for his failures. But maybe, if only for variety's sake, the moment has come to find a new scapegoat. I nominate Showtime.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:57 PM
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