The Bush Administration has become so used to the absence of any serious, sustained oversight that its self-righteous objections to new challenges from the press seem pathetic. The latest uproar has been the Administration’s strong attacks on the New York Times for publishing information on the government’s attempts to track financial transfers of money that could aid terrorists. The attacks were notable not just because they came from the highest levels of government, but also because the information published by the Times had been available for years to any terrorist with an Internet connection and half a brain.
It was also notable that only the New York Times took the major fire, not the Los Angeles Times or the Wall Street Journal, which actually claimed to have scooped the New York Times on the story. Why did the President and the Vice-President single out just the New York Times? Because bashing that paper is throwing red meat to their political base, while bashing the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times would have netted no such political gain. Note that these broadsides against the New York Times were leveled just as Congress was engaged in meaningless posturing on flag burning and gay marriage. In Oz, the machine keeps pouring out smoke and noise.
What does this Administration really want to protect? Do media revelations of illegal wiretapping, sanctioned torture, snooping into private citizens’ reading lists, and secret tracking of bank transfers really endanger national security?
That case is very weak. It’s inconceivable that people smart enough to pull off 9/11 can’t learn of these efforts to thwart them, and at a level at least as detailed as the published accounts. Anyone who’s seen 24 or Mission Impossible knows that even a bush league terrorist uses throwaway cell phones and doesn’t keep his cash in a bank. And it’s hypocritical for the White House to sound the national security trumpet in this case, but then muffle it in its own deliberate outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Clearly what the Bush Administration and its yes-people in Congress want to protect is not just their secrets—it’s the political power those secrets help sustain.
With elections approaching that could seriously weaken its hold on Congress, the last thing this Administration wants or needs is more public accounting of its failures and its assaults on civil liberties. That’s why it’s so unnerved by the press’s new challenges to its national security rationale for secrecy. The political lesson from Hurricane Katrina is clear: with no curtain of national security to hide behind, the awesome incompetence of this Administration was exposed for all to see. That revelation further undermined a key hook in this Administration’s claim to be above the need for oversight—its image of competency.
“National security” has been the curtain that’s hidden the wizard for six years. The press is beginning to tell us that the Administration behind that curtain is just as wrong-headed and inept in its pursuit of the war on Islamist terrorists as it was in dealing with Katrina. It’s real oversight, and it’s long overdue.
