Protecting The Village

by digby

Glenn Greenwald writes today about what in past years would be a jarring and dissonant newspaper editorial extolling the virtues of government secrecy — Fred Hiatt’s latest apologia for the Bush administration. It’s hard to believe that a newspaperman would think government secrecy is a good idea, if only our of self interest, but there you have it. In The Village, the press and the government have the same interest — The Village. The rest of us are on our own.

For instance, here’s a little story from Hiatt’s own paper that apparently doesn’t give him any pause:

An independent oversight board created to identify intelligence abuses after the CIA scandals of the 1970s did not send any reports to the attorney general of legal violations during the first 5 1/2 years of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort, the Justice Department has told Congress. Although the FBI told the board of a few hundred legal or rules violations by its own agents after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the board did not identify which of them were indeed legal violations. This spring, it forwarded reports of violations in 2006, officials said. The President’s Intelligence Oversight Board — the principal civilian watchdog of the intelligence community — is obligated under a 26-year-old executive order to tell the attorney general and the president about any intelligence activities it believes “may be unlawful.” The board was vacant for the first two years of the Bush administration. The FBI sent copies of its violation reports directly to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. But the board’s mandate was to provide independent oversight, so the absence of such communications has prompted critics to question whether the board was doing its job. “It’s now apparent that the IOB was not actively employed in the early part of the administration. And it was a crucial period when its counsel would seem to have been needed the most,” said Anthony Harrington, who served as the board’s chairman for most of the Clinton administration. “The White House counsel’s office and the attorney general should have known and been concerned if they did not detect an active and effective IOB,” Harrington said. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., added: “It is deeply disturbing that this administration seems to spend so much of its energy and resources trying to find ways to ignore any check and balance on its authority and avoid accountability to Congress and the American public.” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Friday that “the president expects every single person working in counterterrorism and intelligence strictly to follow the law — and if there are instances where that has not occurred, either intentionally or non-intentionally, he expects it promptly to be corrected.” She said the White House was relying on the presidentially appointed director of national intelligence to monitor problems. Through five previous administrations, members of the board — all civilians not employed by the government — have been privy to some of America’s most secret intelligence operations and have served as a private watchdog against unpublicized abuses. The subjects of their investigations and the resulting reports are nearly all classified. The Bush administration first appointed board members in 2003. Since then, the CIA and the National Security Agency have been caught up in controversy over interrogation tactics at secret prisons, the transfer of prisoners to countries that use torture, and domestic wiretapping not reviewed by federal courts. Until recently, the board had not told the attorney general about any wrongdoing. “The Attorney General has no record of receiving reports from the IOB regarding intelligence activities alleged to be potentially unlawful or contrary to Executive Order or Presidential directive,” the Justice Department told the House Judiciary Committee in a May 9 letter. White House officials said the board began forwarding reports of problems shortly thereafter. White House officials declined to discuss the board’s interactions with President Bush, and said its members could not be interviewed for this report. President Gerald R. Ford created the board in the mid-1970s after the Church Committee identified numerous abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies. President Ronald Reagan made the board permanent with an executive order in 1981 and gave it the mission to identify legal violations. Harrington said that under President Clinton, the board sent reports of legal violations by intelligence agencies promptly to the attorney general. Officials said it concluded that the administration showed poor judgment in supporting Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia, and it complained about the CIA’s policy of employing known torturers or killers as informants in Latin America. Perino said that during the first two years of the Bush administration, a career intelligence officer at the White House collected and reviewed reports in which the FBI and other intelligence agencies self-disclosed violations of civil liberties and privacy safeguards.

Well ok, then. As long as they assure us that they followed all the rules, that’s all I need to know.

Hiatt apparently thinks this kind of thing is just fine. And while it’s very nice that they actually published the story, I have to wonder why the Washington Post thinks it’s ok for the white house to instruct them that the members of this board could not be interviewed. Certainly, one would think this unusual order would be in the lede, not perfunctorily noted in the body of the article. I’m unaware of any precedent for the white house directing a newspaper not to interview certain people and I’m not sure why any newspaper would simply note it as if it were a common order that they don’t find unusual. The article certainly does not indicate that the reporter tried to interview the board members anyway and they refused, which would be the obvious response. It’s not like he didn’t know who they are. After all, the article names them.

Evidently, this is another of the new Village edicts — the president tells the press and the congress whom they may or may not speak to. If he withholds his permission, then that’s that. And it looks as though the press and the congress are inclined to go along, which one would normally think is counter to their own interests. But it isn’t. Their interests are in keeping the Village secure, not in keeping our democracy secure. So naturally they are more worried about outsiders trashing the place than they are about insiders trashing the constitution.

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