Posted: 05/14/2013 8:46 am
Spoiler alert: That day was May 7, 2012... but first a quick history lesson.
Okay, I'm one of those folks
who obsesses
about the late 1960s and early 1970s, but this time it's really
important. Because today that is the rallying cry for any presidential
scandal, that this one is "
worse than Watergate." But the Watergate break-in happened 41 years ago, which means that
more than half
of all Americans weren't even born yet, so you can't blame a lot of
voters if they don't know much about what Watergate and the related
scandals of Richard Milhous Nixon were all about.
One of the biggest drivers of Watergate was the seemingly unending
war in Vietnam. As opposition increased to a foreign war that ultimately
killed 58,000 Americans, for goals that were murky at best, so did
government paranoia. At the core of Watergate was a team of shady
operatives that were nicknamed "
the White House Plumbers"
-- because they went after news leaks... get it? In May 1969, after
news reports about U.S. bombing activities in Cambodia, Nixon and his
then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger
enlisted J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to wiretap journalists and national security aides.
Later,
one of the worst
governmental abuses occurred after whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked
the massive Pentagon Papers that exposed governmental lies about the
conduct of the war in Vietnam. Nixon's "Plumbers" broke into the office
of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to dig up dirt to discredit him. Here is what
one of Nixon's former aides, Egil Krogh, wrote about it in 2007:
The premise of our action was the strongly held view within
certain precincts of the White House that the president and those
functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if
they were convinced that the nation's security demanded it. As President
Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later,
"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." To this day
the implications of this statement are staggering.
No doubt. Luckily for America, not everyone agreed. Over the next
couple of years, criminal charges against Ellsberg were tossed because
of the government's misconduct, and Nixon resigned facing certain
impeachment over the activities of his Plumbers and the ensuing,
elaborate cover-up. The nation mostly rejoiced. The system worked... for
a while.
Flash forward to 2012. America had at that point been in an undefined
"war on terror" for 11 years -- the same amount of time from the 1964
Gulf of Tonkin incident that greatly expanded the Vietnam War to the
1975 fall of Saigon. Just as during the 1960s and early 1970s, this
terror war had provided government with an excuse
to greatly expand
its domestic spying on American citizens -- some of that through a law
called the Patriot Act and some of it even more dubious,
constitutionally.
Then, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press
published
an article about the Obama administration's conduct of its war in a
country that we'd never declared war on (it was Cambodia in 1969, but
Yemen in 2012) and Obama's Justice Department -- for reasons not yet
fully known -- went crazy over the leak. This, then, is a reminder of
why history matters so much.
Because if we're not careful...
it repeats:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department secretly obtained
two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The
Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a
"massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather
the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls
for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for
general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn.,
and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press
gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the
records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.
In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate
telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of
2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during
that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the
offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories
about government and other matters.
The AP's CEO said last night that "[t]here can be no possible
justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone
communications of The Associated Press and its reporters" -- and I could
not agree with him more. This revelation is deeply troubling -- and has
the makings of a major scandal. Sure, you could try to mitigate it by
noting, fairly, that accessing these phone records isn't as bad as
wiretapping. But that is small solace, indeed. There's every reason to
believe that Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on this unwarranted
assault on the First Amendment, and if so, he ought to be canned
(hasn't he overstayed his welcome, anyway?). Also, you might try to
excuse this as a one-off, an ill-advised but isolated incident.
Except that it's not.
Since the day he took office, the Obama administration has undertaken
an assault on government whistleblowers -- people informing citizens of
what their government doesn't want them to know -- that surpasses
anything that Nixon or any other president has done. Since 2009, the
Obama administration has brought espionage charges against
six whistleblowers.
And most of these whistleblowers have been criticizing that way that
America conducts its neverending war of the 21st century. One, Thomas
Drake, blew the whistle on the illegal warrantless wiretapping that
began under George W. Bush. John Kiriakou dropped the dime on illegal
U.S. torture -- and was sent away to prison, even as the perpetrators of
torture from Dick Cheney to John Yoo continue to walk freely among us.
Nixon had Daniel Ellsberg, and Obama has Bradley Manning of
Wikileaks. Okay, so they didn't break into the office of Manning's
psychiatrist, but they have detained Manning in a solitary confinement
that a UN torture expert called "
cruel, inhuman and degrading."
Do you feel better about that? Because I don't. The war on
whistleblowers, the treatment of Manning, and now this investigation of
journalists are all hallmarks of a White House that promised
transparency but has been one of the most secretive -- all to the
detriment of the public's right to know.
Let's be clear -- this is about Obama... and it is about much, much more than Obama. It is yet another example of how
the national security state
that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted
the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia's own Benjamin
Franklin tried to warn us about -- trading liberty for security, and
geting neither. To the conservatives reading this, who warn so much
about big government running amok...here it is. To the liberals reading
this, who thought that one man named Barack Obama could change the
system, he couldn't. Only we, the citizens, can truly change things.
Let's work together. Let's start by
repealing
the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Force, declare victory in what was
formerly known as the war on terror, and resolve that never again will
this nation enter into a perpetual and constitutionally dubious war.
Let's
repeal
the most egregious aspects of the USA Patriot Act, hold public hearings
on the true extent that the U.S. government has spied on citizens
without warrants -- and then bring those practices to an end.
And as
today's events made crystal clear, let's make America a nation where
journalists and other truth-tellers can write stories or reveal
information that the government might not like...without fear of
intrusion or reprisal. Ironically, many of those type of changes were
supposed to happen after Nixon, after Vietnam But they either didn't
last, or they didn't come at all.
If greater liberty comes from the latest revelations, Obama's sins --
however bad or not bad they may turn out to be -- will not make things
worse than Watergate. This time, it -- the aftermath, anyway -- will be
better than Watergate.
