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CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
gives us the "New China" without illusions: from the
"millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes
to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn
on What's wrong with the U.S. left.
They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies
about 9/11; they're blogging; they're confusing a medium with
a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq.
John Ross
takes us along the stormy trail of the Mexican election. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
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Both President Bush and Vice-President
Cheney all but accused the New York Times of treason last
month when the Times and two other papers published an
account of a secret government program to track bank transfers
that might involve terrorist groups. Was their ire justified?
At the height of the Cold War,
I was a member of NATO's Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), a top
secret organization you never heard of that planned for nuclear
war in Europe. I had a security clearance so high I couldn't
even tell anyone I had it. If I'd leaked information from the
NPG, I would and should have been jailed, because such information
might have aided Soviet war planners then targeting American
cities.
So I understand the need for
government secrecy in national security. Especially in wartime,
there should be clear limits on what the press can release without
jeopardizing national security, and there must be enough of a
dialogue between government and the press so that those limits
are respected.
But the bar-the standard for
what information, if leaked, would endanger the nation -is high.
In the past it has focused on whether or not lives were at stake
(for example, revealing the names and locations of secret operatives)
or situations in which the leaked information (such as NATO war
plans) would give a clear, significant advantage to an enemy
or potential enemy.
A major reason that bar is
high is because of the necessary balance between secrecy and
oversight. The more secrets the Executive Branch is allowed to
keep to itself, the less subject it is to legitimate oversight
by the other branches of government, by the press, and ultimately
by the people. The less oversight, the more likely that the party
in power will abuse that power and the nation will suffer for
it.
The situation is made worse
by this Administration, which has relentlessly pushed
for broad expansions of executive power, expansions granted by
a compliant Congress. The new powers have been justified to the
electorate by Administration statements that have successfully
focused the nation, post-9/11, on real or contrived threats that
demand "strong leadership" from the Oval Office-and
a willingness on the part of fearful citizens to accept a false
tradeoff between security and freedom.
It's dangerous enough when
a presidency conflates the national interest with its own partisan
interests. It's doubly dangerous when that presidency consistently
gets away with using "national security" as a curtain
to hide mistakes and excesses that would never otherwise stand
the light of day. America is becoming Oz, the place where unaccountable
power rules by fear from behind a curtain, emitting smoke and
noise.
The few tepid Congressional
hearings held this year on national security issues only underscore
the failure of this Congress to even try to balance the powers
given a wartime President against its own duty to oversee those
powers. That failure has led to unparalleled assaults on civil
liberties, a dangerous erosion of Constitutional checks-and-balances
and a near absence-certainly in the majority party-of any serious
efforts to question the wisdom of policies developed by small,
closed coteries in the Executive Branch. Examples are the unauthorized
wiretaps program, an energy "policy" guided in secret
by oil execs, the "national security letters" that
allow the FBI to pry into personal information such as what books
you read, the tortures conducted in your name at Guantanamo or
secret "rendition" centers overseas-and the war in
Iraq.
With Congress on leave from
its Constitutional responsibilities, the only oversight left
comes from the press, which has finally begun to wake from its
own long and unprincipled sleep.
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.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
