Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
Sunday, May 14th, 2006 by billFrom NY Times
By Frank Rich
When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we’ve more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.
This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration’s die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.’s secret “black site” Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a “shameful act” that is “helping the enemy.” Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It’s the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press’s exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That’s where the buck stops, and if there’s to be a witch hunt for traitors, that’s where it should begin.
Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention “secrets” secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees “to countries that routinely use torture.” Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that “plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes’ movements.” These articles, capped by Ms. Priest’s, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can’t afford to lose.
The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved “thousands of lives.” The White House’s journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé “may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs.”
Surely they jest. If this is one of our “most effective” programs, we’re in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring “traitors” like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.
Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It’s often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.
Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In “Breakdown,” a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee’s “investigation” of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.
Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate “poker parties” swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn’t play games with the nation’s defense during wartime.
Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss’s only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. “There’s a leak every day in the paper,” he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because “that’s all we’d do.”
What prompted Mr. Goss’s about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work.” His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of “Jawbreaker,” the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen’s account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen’s team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss’s management disasters.
Soon to come are the Senate’s hearings on Mr. Goss’s successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He’s “the right man” to lead the C.I.A. “at this critical moment in our nation’s history.” That’s not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss’s appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they’ll fail to investigate the nominee’s record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — “Tomorrow is zero hour” for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden’s N.S.A. also failed to recognize that “some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose,” as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and “for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores.”
If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.
[...] Frank Rich’s column for tomorrow’s New York Times is up behind the firewall, and it’s a doozy. Raw Story has excerpts. It might turn up at True Blue Liberal some time in the next few hours. [Update: Yep; here it is.] Here’s a bit not quoted on Raw Story: This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss’s appointment in the autumn of 2004. [...]
It is about time more of the MSM starts telling the truth now about this dangerously out of control NeoCON cabal in the White House, Congress, Defense Departmnent and media that is destroying America’s military, CIA, FBI, NSA and more – let alone America. Thank you for being a true patriot Frank Rich! I hope it gives courage to other reporters who have been COWARDS in both ignoring and supporting traitors in both major parties. I hope we can prevent an attack/war with Iran for the further benefit of Israel and American Oil companies whose interests are put ahead of America and its citizens by these traitors.
Quite true, but where were the lapdog MSM and it’s crew up until recently? All this and tons more has been uncovered and published on numerous (non-MSM) internet blogs for years, but they were all decried (by your cronies) as “conspiricy nuts”. Now, as these so-called “conspiricies” are proven true (one by one) the lapdog MSM comes out from hiding to take credit. Better late than never, but the least you could do is credit the REAL sources, as opposed to the MSM, who, as usual are waiting in the wings to take credit for someone elses work.
Now, it’s time for you to admit the above to your readers. And ….. to borrow a line from the Who: ” don’t be fooled again!”
You neglected to mention that the NY times sat on the NSA story for 18 months before finally publishing it. (as personal favor to lord Bush no less)
Personally I relish being a witness to the MSM running themselves out of the public trust and therefor out of business.
Long live the internets!
[...] thing ok Frank Rich’s anti-Bush rant, “Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?” Permalink| [...]
They are spying on ordinary Americans, torturing unjudged prisoners. What a waste of time and money! I think this administration should be spied on and questioned on 911. People like Larry Silverstein, Marvin Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Dubya himself. Use torture if need be, show em that we are not weak. I’m sure we will get answers.
**Way to go frank***Get yourself a extra helping of rasin pie on me..Now if only every-else—would get down to walmart and buy some BALLS=–perhaps we might be able to get this ASSCLOWN & HIS POSIE–out of town—-ALITTLE SOONER-,.Nah-wishful thinking.*********KEEP SHARING THE HALLMARK LOVE–FRANK—-your on a roll ….nuff-said**
There appears to be alot of ongoing traitorous, thuggish activity extending far beyond the scope of this article going on since day one of this administration’s takeover of the White House. The first point being that Bush was not honestly elected in the first place. One could continue with government involvement in 9/11, The President seeming to think he is above the law, above so many laws, the continuing chemtrailing of the US population that according to chemtrail researchers has included everything from the mass drugging of the populace through the aerosol operations to the dessiminiation of toxic EDB, barium and aluminum. Most frightening of all genetic markers, red blood cells and fibers with microscopic fluid filled sacs have been found in the chem trails. The constitution has been trampled on, people getting arrested just for expressing a negative opinion of Bush or being denied jobs because of books they have checked out at the library, trillions of dollars from the defense dept budget that can’t be accounted for, and nobody seems to even care. This country is being run like a third rate, corrupt banana republic. I hate it and I am sick of it. I want my country back, the one described in the original constitution.
Restore the constitution and all of the rights guaranteed by it .
When will mainstream media finally begin to cover the Chemtrails? Ongoing globally since 1997 these aerosol operations, illegal under EPA regulations are the largest air operation in history.
http://imageevent.com/firesat/strangedaysstrangeskies
I want my country back too, but when the major news networks continue to portray the recently released, jerky video of something hitting the Pentagon on 9/11 as Flight 77, we’ve still got a long, long way to go — there’s nothing to see except an explosion! As for the [al]“Qaeda cell that hijacked Flight 77,” of the five alleged hijackers, it has been reported by the news media that Khalid Almihdhar and Salem Alhazmi are still alive and that Hani Hanjour lacked alleged flying ability. Furthermore, there is evidence that Flight 77 did not exist at all on 9/11. All of this continuing military psy-ops is meant to cut off inquiry of the 9/11 truth movement at a time of lagging support for the president’s and vice-president’s war of terror against Iraq, Iran and the world. I’m much more inclined to believe what hit the Pentagon was a missile fired from a drone jet fighter. The NSA spying is just the tip of the iceberg. The major crimes of this administration (fraudulent election of 2000 and 2004, 9/11, and the Iraq War) will not come to light by a subservient press, and the neocons will continue to strike back like a snake to further cover-up their criminal conspiracy against America and the world.
Those people who believe in democracy, the Constitution, free speech, civil rights, dignity for all, etc, must investigate on their own these crimes for themselves and report, as many have done, their findings on the Internet. Don’t expect another Congressional so-called investigation to get to the truth. It’s too late for that! Impeachment of the president, his cabinet, and the neocons is what is needed. How many more troops and innocent civilians in Iraq have to die in this illegal war? Now it’s on to Iran!
Great [as well as appropriately scathing] Argument, Mr. Rich!! Whilst I’m “Rebuplican” by registry [as though party affiliation means a whit anymore--DIVIDED houses NEVER stand--only fall apart---let those opposed to true Christianity refute that Wisdom[not right-wing "take america back" pat robertson/TBN silliness claptrap---Jude mentions their future anyway]]I respect the man/woman, not the political party…Unfortunately,most if not all of the Legislative/Executive [and probably Judicial, given the Eminent Domain Marxist-Leninist turnaround rule of 2005] sold us all out whilst keeping this nation distracted from these dangers at hand…like a magician’s slieght-of-hand…Blinding us to the Tyranny of Evil for American Idol,”Immigration” to create FURTHER boiling division among Americans; as if they [these powerbrokers] WANT to start riots,dissent,and ethnic violence!! God forbid it ever happen!!..for it would make the blood and crud our fathers spilled from Bunker Hill,Antietam,San Juan,Somme, Iwo,Utah,Chosin,Ia Drang,and Iraq,quite possibly for naught…and my great Uncle[SSG] Rex Stone WAS at Utah Beach…My Granddad Alvin L.Cowan, became the FIRST Sgt.Major/E-9 in Oklahoma 31 Oct 63, retiring 1964 after 33 years of service to his country…y’all probably have similar stories of your families’ own…So to read these accounts in both mainstream and alternate press is vexing and depressing… It’s not just grossly incompetent;it’s RAPE… Rape and dishonor to every man and woman who gave up their hopes and futures for a plot of dirt in a battlefield or ocean,while our leaders who were sworn to uphold their duty to us;morever them,piss on their memory,surely as Cain did Abel, and Peter denied Jesus…after swearing an oath also…but at least Peter remembered!!! Our “aopstles”–these reps/senators forget, and let their flocks back home [the states] get eaten by immigrant wolves,taxed with bloodticks, and fall off the cliffs of treasonous sell-outs…So in the midst of this mess, how can one truly “take back America?”…Especially when our Prez. has created himself a “mini-cult of personality”troupe..and addresses his nation not just with silly,”Nacht und Nebel” cirucumspectness but talking down as though his fellow Americans have not the wit to BS from chocolate cake!! Even the most blind,chauvinistic hardliner left-wing Democrat i’ve overheard talking never talked down in a debate,not like our Prez did!! [and i'm Republican by vote!]…I don’t think this process can be halted…things are in motion…but it CAN be delayed and slowed…but first We, the People–Americans, as possible can and quickly, gotta work together…NO MORE STUPID LAWS,COMMITTES..time is too short…dump congress this fall..somehow, vote “none of the above”—wouldn’t that be ironic??–Abe Lincoln would spin laughing at THAT one!! I’d stand if someone would stand with me—help with these traitorous acts the best we can…our votes and voices FIRST, exposures and constant media next…dump career politicians—4 years only…6 senate—no second chances—Ted Kennedy–piss off–go dive into chappaquiddick ya traitor…anyone willing to stand and help clean this divided,dirty house of secrets too?? I am tho’ im sick and disabled…Like the movie quote from Network [1976], “I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE THIS ANYMORE!!” Great Article/Argument, Mr. Rich, and Kudos to all other comment submitters…thanx 4 reading mine 2!!!
Thanks for your comments Gene. I’m all for “none of the above.”
[...] Last week conventional wisdom said that Hayden was chosen as the nominee because Karl Rove wanted a public fight on the NSA. Frank Rich wrote, This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss’s appointment in the autumn of 2004. [...]