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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - October 21, 2010
Leakers, Beware the Corporate Media
by Ray McGovern
Antiwar Forum
The following is a Code-Orange Advisory to patriotic truth-
tellers, sometimes called whistleblowers or leakers: It is
anachronistically naïve to expect the New York Times or
other organs of today?s Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to
publish classified material like the Pentagon Papers with-
out their first clearing it with the government.
What brings this issue to the fore is the powerful, Academy
Award-finalist documentary, "The Most Dangerous Man in
America," which paints a profile in courage by (1) Daniel
Ellsberg, who risked serving life in prison by copying
classified material exposing the lies behind the Vietnam
War, and (2) the New York Times, which dared to publish
reams of Ellsberg's material in June 1971.
It's a gripping, suspenseful story ? even for those of us
with some gray in our hair who remember the Times of those
times as well as how the drama played out. It is also an
unusual story for today, inasmuch as it depicts a victory
of inspiring courage over disheartening treachery. We see
a brave devotion to the Constitution and democratic values
not only by Ellsberg and the Times but by the U.S. Supreme
Court, too.
If there is a downside to the documentary's appearance now,
it would be the temptation that government insiders might
feel to reach the naïve conclusion that the Times of today
is the same Times that risked the wrath of a vindictive
Richard Nixon to help end a bloody war while also winning
a landmark Supreme Court decision that fortified the
protections of the First Amendment.
O Tempora, O Mores!
Sadly, those times ? and that Times ? are over. Potential
whistleblowers disregard this new reality at their own
peril.
The good news is that, with the demise of the Fourth
Estate, there is now a Fifth Estate offering unprecedented
opportunity to those who feel a need ? and have the
courage ? to get the truth out quickly and confidentially.
The Web site WikiLeaks offers one such avenue, but there
are myriad other ways to exploit the Web ? to use the
censorship-immune (so far, at least) ether ? to expose
information the world needs to know.
And so, note well, patriotic truth-tellers: if you have
access to documents that, let's say, show planning for
another unnecessary war or that expose the self-defeating
nature of wars already under way, and if you have the
courage of a Dan Ellsberg, don't bother the folks at the
New York Times with it.
They are likely to regard it as a nuisance that will
require them to devise some twisted excuse for why they
must sit on the story. Worse still, as recent examples
suggest, they are likely to go to the White House for
guidance ? whether they really need to or not.
Their behavior in the years since their finest hour in
publishing the Pentagon Papers has made it abundantly
clear that they are convinced that they ? and their
friends in high places ? know best what?s good for the
country.
They have become well accustomed to suppressing explosive
information that they decide the rest of us don't really
need to know ? little things like illegal wiretapping by
President George W. Bush.
Ellsberg and the Times
Daniel Ellsberg visited New York last month to mark the TV
debut of "The Most Dangerous Man in America" ? the title
of the documentary derived from the epithet thrown at him
by then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger following
release of the Pentagon Papers.
For the first time in the 39 years since the Pentagon
Papers' publication, the New York Times decided to invite
Dan into the inner sanctum.
On Sept. 13, the Times used its large, posh auditorium at
the TimesCenter to host an affair honoring Dan, the film,
and, of course, the Times.
Featured was a discussion moderated by Times' Managing
Editor, Jill Abramson, with panelists Ellsberg, Max
Frankel (Times' Washington Bureau Chief when Ellsberg
delivered the documents, later the paper's Executive
Editor, and now retired), and Adam Liptak, the Times'
reporter on the Supreme Court. (Dan succeeded in getting
several friends, including me, invited.)
The tone, understandably, was self-congratulatory, and,
to her credit, with some notable exceptions Abramson
generally avoided shutting off real discussion of
sensitive issues. But I almost jumped out of my seat
when she gratuitously mentioned that, after 9/11:
"The Times and other publications were the recipients of
requests from the Bush White House to occasionally with-
hold publication of stories that involved secrets and
national security issues. Probably the most famous one
involved our publication of the story about the NSA's
eavesdropping program."
Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhh, said I to myself.
That's the affair in which the Times' own reporter, James
Risen, a couple of months before the general election of
2004, unearthed hard evidence that the Bush/Cheney
administration was in flagrant violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
It was the same kind of crime/impeachable offence for which
the House Judiciary Committee voted an article of impeach-
ment against Richard Nixon in 1974.
But the Times didn't make sure that this important fact was
shared with American voters before they headed off to the
polls in November 2004. Instead, the Times brass acquiesced
to White House protests that publication wouldn't be good
for the country.
So, the Times sat on the story for more than a year,
until December 2005 when Risen's book, which included
this disclosure, was in galleys and the Times faced the
potential embarrassment of being scooped on its own story
by its own reporter, no less.
If Risen's book had appeared before the Times ran the
story, there were sure to be pointed questions about
whether the Times had become a mere propaganda arm of
the U.S. government, especially on the heels of theTimes'
misreporting about Iraq's non-existent nuclear weapons
program in 2002.
On hearing the Times' managing editor gloss over the real
history of Risen's scoop, I thought of Harry Truman's
aphorism: Does she "think we were born yesterday?" If Jill
Abramson perhaps thought Dan Ellsberg would be awed by the
opulent surroundings so as to be slow on the uptake, she
was dead wrong.
Just as I was about to disrupt the dignified proceedings,
Dan took the mike and replied:
"By the way, as the only non-Times person up here, I
shouldn't refrain from saying, I?ve been very publicly
very critical of the Times' decision to withhold the NSA
wiretap story ? not only for a whole year, but, very
critically, past the election of 2004. I think it quite
possible that the revelation that the President had, for
three years, been blatantly violating the law..."
Abramson cut Ellsberg off at this point. She then added:
"The thing is when the government says ? you know, by
publishing a story you're harming the national security,
you're helping the terrorists. I mean there are still
people today who argue that the NSA program was the crown
jewel, the most valuable anti-terrorism program that the
Bush administration had going, and that it was terribly
wrong of the Times to... publish.
"In the end, we did go ahead. But I'm saying these are not
cavalier decisions."
Plain-speaking Max Frankel, no doubt in deference to the
current Times management, let a few minutes go by before
offering a pithy comment ? out of his "old Times"
experience ? on the "heavy burden" of secrecy:
"The heavy burden you have to hear in your inner ear in
this business perfectly decent people saying, 'Who elected
you to decide what's in the national interest?'"
Scotty Reston
That, of course, is what the Times' highly respected elder
statesman, the late James Reston ? also one-time Washington
Bureau Chief and then executive editor ? would have said.
At times he, too, found it in the national interest to
work closely with government officials to address their
legitimate concerns. Although Reston broke many stories
as a reporter, he recognized there could be times when
discretion was required. He knew about the U-2 flights
over the U.S.S.R., but refrained from writing about them
until one of the plans went down in 1960.
On the other hand, Reston viewed issues of government
abuse of power ? like whether or not to publish the
Pentagon Papers (and, he surely would have included the
illegal wiretapping story in this category) ? not at all
complicated.
According to his Times colleague Anthony Lewis, James
Reston said at one meeting, "If the Times did not
publish the Pentagon Papers, he would publish them in
the Vineyard Gazette," the Martha's Vineyard weekly
that he owned.
While the Bush administration and many in the U.S. news
media are fond of saying that "9/11 changed everything,"
the truth is that the New York Times and the Washington
Post had changed before 9/11. This came through very
clearly at a National Press Club affair on June 5, 2001,
marking the 30th anniversary of the publication of the
Pentagon Papers.
It was like old-home week, in more ways than one. My former
responsibilities as a CIA analyst writing about Soviet
policy toward Vietnam got me invited. Many old hands were
there, including Hedrick Smith of the Times, and its gutsy
former general counsel James Goodale, as well as Don
Oberdorfer and William Glendon from the Post.
The nostalgia was thick and the stories almost uniformly of
the patting-our-backs kind. (See the excellent account of
the anniversary proceedings in Inside the Pentagon Papers,
edited by John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter.)
Goodale had made it clear that he saw no legal impediment
to publishing the Pentagon Papers and that he would quit
the Times if they did not publish Ellsberg's documents.
The same was true of other major U.S. newspapers. Old-pro
Vietnam reporter for the Washington Post, Chalmers Roberts,
who was approaching retirement, was quoted as telling Post
management:
"If you withhold this [the Ellsberg papers], I'm not
retiring; I'm quitting. And I'm going to tell the whole
world why."
Skunk at the Picnic
The scene was effusive and edifying ? that is, until a
woman in the back posed the $64 question about the state
of the news media in 2001: "Gentlemen," she asked, "suppose
someone were to give to your former newspapers today
documents equivalent to the Pentagon Papers. Would the
Times and Post publish them?"
There was a very prolonged, awkward silence, after which
the panelists went down the line, starting with Rick Smith,
who expressed some serious doubt that they would. By the
time they got down to the panelist on the end, the answer
was pretty much, "No way would our papers publish that kind
of 'leak' today."
I looked on in some awe. There it was, right before me. The
new Times and the new Post. Perhaps what struck me most was
that, even though there must have been some residual
inclination to paint their former employers in a favorable
light, none of that came through. Indeed, none of that,
apparently, seemed necessary.
There was not the slightest tinge of regret or even
embarrassment in the answers. The attitude was (to me
painfully) clear: That's just the way it is today.
And it was more than three months before 9/11.
Back at the TimesCenter
The New York Times/Ellsberg affair on Sept. 13 was supposed
to run for two hours, but moderator Abramson closed it off
after a little more than a half hour. Still, to her credit,
she did honor an earlier promise to carve out some time for
questions.
Veteran investigative journalist Robert Parry's article of
two days before, "NYT Pushes Confrontation With Iran," was
fresh in my mind.
Observing that the Times was slipping into the same kind
of hysteria as it did before the 2003 attack on Iraq,
Parry pointed to the Times lead editorial of Sept. 9,
which concluded with this judgment:
"Tehran, predictably, insists it is not building a
[nuclear] weapon. Its refusal to halt enrichment and
cooperate with the I.A.E.A. [International Atomic Energy
Agency] makes that ever more impossible to believe."
Parry's piece, and the many uncertainties attending the
long-delayed update of the U.S. intelligence estimate on
Iran's nuclear program, brought me to the microphone:
"My question... has to do with Iran's nuclear program. The
facts are that 16 intelligence agencies of this government
decided unanimously, with high confidence, in November
2007, that Iran stopped working on the nuclear weapons
part of its nuclear program in the fall of 2003.
"We have a new intelligence director. Let's say he comes
in and says, 'We're going to change that estimate. We're
going to fix it around the policy. We're going to change
the final draft already agreed to [the draft of the
updated estimate due this year] and we're going to say
that Iran presents a major danger and it's imminent.'
"Now, what should an analyst who participated in this very
honest process, as happened in November of 2007 ?
[NYT managing editor Jill Abramson interrupts with an
"Okay."]
"What should he do? Should he go to the New York Times?
Or should he go to WikiLeaks? If he goes to the New York
Times there is going to be considerable delay, maybe 14
months delay."
Got to give them credit: very quick, these New York Times
people. Abramson ducked the question by turning to
Ellsberg: "What should an analyst do? And since you were
an analyst, why don't you take a cut at it," she asked
Dan.
Oh well. I guess it's clear enough. Once again, you truth-
tellers out there, don't waste your truth on the New York
Times. Sadly, that time has passed.
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