http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/062406D.shtml
White House, GOP Leaders Plan All-Out Assault on Federal Protections
BushGreenwatch.org
Friday 23 June 2006
Apparently rushing to lock in a long-sought goal before the fall
elections, GOP congressional leaders may bring to a vote within weeks a
proposal that could literally wipe out any federal program that protects
public health or the environment - or for that matter civil rights, poverty
programs, auto safety, education, affordable housing, Head Start, workplace
safety or any other activity targeted by anti-regulatory forces.
With strong support from the Bush White House and the Republican Study
Committee, the proposal would create a "sunset commission" - an unelected
body with the power to recommend whether a program lives or dies, and then
move its recommendations through Congress on a fast-track basis with limited
debate and no amendments.
Three leading proposals have been introduced and are being winnowed into
a final version. They would give the White House some - or total - authority
to nominate members to the commission. House Majority Leader John Boehner
(R-OH) has confirmed that his office is coordinating development of a final
version for prompt floor action.
Sunset commissions have been proposed, and defeated, before. But public
interest veterans say the current situation is unlike any in the past,
because the House Republican Study Committee, which includes some of the
most anti-regulatory members of Congress, has secured guaranteed floor
consideration of a sunset bill.
If such a bill should become law, the sunset commission could be packed
with industry lobbyists and representatives from industry-funded think
tanks, and could conduct its business in secrecy. Two of the sunset
proposals under consideration would mandate that programs die after they are
reviewed, unless Congress takes action to save them.
Several environmental programs have been targeted during past sunset
attempts. Experts predict those would be among the first a sunset commission
would review. Among them: the Energy Star Program; federal support for mass
transit; the State Energy Program, which supports numerous state and local
energy renewable efficiency programs; the Clean School Bus Program; the Land
and Water Conservation Fund; federal grants for Wastewater infrastructure; a
national children's health study that examines factors leading to such
problems as premature birth, autism, obesity, asthma, and exposures to
pesticides, mercury and other toxic chemicals.
A coalition of public interest groups is fighting to block enactment of
a sunset commission. Information is available through the Sunset Commission
Action Center at OMB Watch.
***
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/06/16/targeting_journalists.php
Targeting Journalists
John Prados
June 16, 2006
John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in
Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How
Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is as assiduous a pursuer of leaks as
any plumber.
In May, Gonzales startled the public when he said in an interview that
"there are some statutes on the books " that provide government the legal
authority to prosecute journalists for publishing articles containing
classified information. He was referring to the Espionage Act of 1917, under
which Gonzales is attempting to create a precedent by trying two policy
analysts of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee accused of leaking
national security information to a journalist and a diplomat.
In April, a month before the Gonzales appearance on the Sunday talk shows,
it became known that the FBI had attempted to gain entry into the private
papers of deceased journalist Jack Anderson, who for years wrote a
nationally-syndicated column that laid bare a multiplicity of closely-held
government secrets. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on June 6
to illuminate the entire question of the Bush administration's pursuit of
leakers. There, Deputy U.S. Attorney Matthew W. Friedrich refused to explain
the FBI's action against Anderson, but affirmed that the government can
prosecute "anyone"-including journalists-for making known classified
information.
The case of Jack Anderson sheds light on the government's own practice of
leaking classified information-at times to achieve political advantage. As a
war correspondent for The Army Times and for radio during the Second World
War, Anderson managed to find his way to one of the more hush- hush
operations of the CIA of that day, the Office of Strategic Services. Their
Detachment 101 ran guerrilla bands against the Japanese in the Burmese
jungle. Asked what he was doing there, Anderson replied, "I'm here to make
you famous."
On returning, Anderson paired with columnist Drew Pearson, working at Parade
magazine, then took over the Pearson column in his own right for decades,
regularly reporting on national security issues. Anderson got his
information from both friends and enemies, some of them quite highly placed.
Among his sources were Pentagon generals, Senator Joe McCarthy (who later
became an enemy), William Rogers (Attorney General in Eisenhower's
administration and Secretary of State in Nixon's), John F. Kennedy, Lyndon
B. Johnson, Hubert H. Humphrey, Nixon political aide Murray Chotiner, Mafia
capo Johnny Rosselli and many more.
Jack Anderson used his information to report a wide variety of stories, from
Joe McCarthy's peccadilloes to the excesses of presidents, from sloppy spy
work to misguided weapons programs. His articles got under the skin of
many-generals, spooks, quite a few presidents and top Washington pooh- bahs.
His columns revealed CIA efforts to use the Mafia to assassinate Fidel
Castro, Nixon administration cooperation with corporate giant International
Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) on the 1972 Republican nominating convention,
Nixon collaboration with ITT on CIA covert operations against Chile, Nixon
and Kissinger machinations against India, flaws in Reagan administration
military development programs, shortcomings in CIA analyses of the Soviet
Union, and much much more.
In his wide-ranging memoir, Jack Anderson writes (with some satisfaction) of
the FBI's compiling a massive file on him, being put under surveillance by
the CIA and of at least 11 leak investigations conducted by the Pentagon
following stories of his.
Consider this example from recently declassified National Security Agency
documents related to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which sparked Johnson
administration escalation of the Vietnam War. That event began with a battle
between a U.S. warship and North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 2, 1964.
Two weeks later Jack Anderson published a column recounting that the
American vessel had advance warning of the attack. Within days the NSA and
the management board of the U.S. intelligence community considered whether
to attempt to prosecute Anderson under the Espionage Act. But the NSA's top
lawyer could not argue that the Anderson article violated the law-he
deferred to the judgment of the Attorney General on that issue-and
maintained that a connection between NSA intercepts and the article would be
difficult to prove. The spooks ultimately did nothing.
We know from declassified documents already in the public domain that the
NSA intercepts had been sent to the White House in the immediate aftermath
of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and from the Anderson memoir that President
Johnson often flashed secret documents before the journalist when they met
at the White House. At the moment of this episode, Johnson was anxious to
refute charges from Republican candidate Barry Goldwater that the president
had authorized the use of atomic weapons during the incident. Showing that
the destroyer knew what was happening would have served to demonstrate that
Johnson had no reason to overreact. Did LBJ himself give Anderson the
material for that column? A second confirmation was already available:
Senate floor debate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had included the basic
fact of the prior warning-one of the reasons the NSA lawyers had advised
against opening any criminal investigation.
This episode illustrates quite clearly the basic dynamic that exists between
the executive branch and the press. Presidents want and need the press to
put out the messages they want. If Lyndon Johnson did indeed leak the NSA
Gulf of Tonkin intercepts, that is no different in principle from Vice
President Dick Cheney instructing his former chief of staff, Scooter Libby,
to leak the 2002 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate. These are political
actions taken for political purposes. The same was true of a host of other
Bush administration leaks: the notorious Iraq aluminum tubes story, excerpts
from U.S. interrogations with captured al-Qaida terrorists Abu Zubaida and
others, data alleging "bulletproof" links between Saddam Hussein and al-
Qaida, the report of a Pentagon intelligence unit on that very subject and
many more.
In contrast to Alberto Gonzales's statement that "we have an obligation to
enforce the law and to prosecute those who engage in criminal activity," not
one of those leaks was investigated. The issue only arises when leaks
contain information an administration does not want to see in the media.
That is not enforcing the law.
In fact, the legislative history of the Espionage Act shows the opposite of
what the Bush people claim. During congressional action on that bill,
President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to enact censorship provisions and
include penalties for journalists. Led by Republican senators, Congress
refused. As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who headed a 1990s
Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy and researched this
history, wrote in his book Secrecy , "the Espionage Act did not contain the
censorship provision." Indeed, the Moynihan Commission's own report found
that in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, a secrecy board recommended
legislative provisions for powers of the type Alberto Gonzales now claims
already exist, and the Eisenhower administration could not gain any traction
for them. The Espionage Act aims specifically at the leaker (President
Johnson, Vice President Cheney) not the journalist, and it criminalizes
action in behalf of a foreign government, not the news media.
Targeting journalists under law that does not exist is not admissible. Far
from protecting national security, this poses a direct threat to American
democracy.
"Chill your mouth," says my younger daughter when she wants to stop the
conversation. It is the latest entry in the lexicon of youth, and it is
oddly resonant. That is exactly what the Bush administration is saying, and
it is chilling.
***
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