The Schoolyard Bullies are
really MAD! The Grownups are trying to spoil their Fun -
AGAIN!
The New York Times's recent story about government spying on international banking transactions has got the Schoolyard Bullies in the Bush administration all in a kerfuffle. The Bullies once again have resorted to name-calling, saying that the Times editors and reporters are traitors and MUST BE STOPPED! WAAAHHHHH!
Awww, too bad. Seems the Bullies are upset that once again, someone acting like an Adult has found out about their Bullying Ways, and has dragged them by the ear in front of the court of public opinion, to stop them from beating up on the individual liberties of The Other Kids In The Schoolyard. And all the while they are being dragged by the ear, they're squealing, "National security! National security!" like the nasty little piggies they are.
(Cross-posted at My Left Wing)
Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney don't like being held to account for their Bullying Ways. The roots of their bullying go back to the early 1970s. Rumsfeld and Cheney are Machiavellian manipulators
par excellence who cut their political vampires' teeth long, long ago. Both rose to executive power during the Nixon administration, an administration immersed in dirty tricks and corruption.
See, back in the 1970s, Rumsfeld was Nixon's special adviser (ironically, an adviser who urged the president to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam). He was ambitious and ruthless. PBS's "Frontline" did a profile on Rumsfeld in which it recounted some of the Oval Office exchanges between Rumsfeld and Nixon:
One conversation in particular records an ambitious Rumsfeld soliciting better positions within the Administration for everything from special envoy to Vietnam to secretary of commerce. He even suggests to Nixon that he might make a popular replacement for Vice President Spiro Agnew on the 1974 [sic] Republican ticket. [snip] Ironically, Nixon muses that the only cabinet job he doesn't think Rumsfeld is fit for is secretary of defense. [emphasis added]
It was only after Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, however, that Rumsfeld and Cheney really came into their own, under President Gerald Ford. From "The Long March of Dick Cheney,", by Sidney Blumenthal:
Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal thwarted his designs for an unchecked imperial presidency. It was in that White House that Cheney gained his formative experience as the assistant to Nixon's counselor, Donald Rumsfeld. When Gerald Ford acceded to the presidency, he summoned Rumsfeld from his posting as NATO ambassador to become his chief of staff. Rumsfeld, in turn, brought back his former deputy, Cheney. [emphasis added]
The two got busy plotting. Soon, Rumsfeld engineered his master stroke. From Frontline:
[In] October 1975, in what comes to be known as the "Halloween Massacre," Ford announces a shake up inside his administration: Rumsfeld becomes secretary of defense, Cheney becomes White House chief of staff, and Kissinger loses the job of national security adviser to his deputy, Brent Scowcroft.
Blumenthal:
As part of the Halloween massacre Rumsfeld and Cheney pushed out CIA director William Colby and replaced him with George H.W. Bush, then the U.S. plenipotentiary to China. The CIA had been uncooperative with the Rumsfeld/Cheney anti-détente campaign. Instead of producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications. Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the conservative point of view, the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas.
The new CIA director was prompted to authorize an alternative unit outside the CIA to challenge the agency's intelligence on Soviet intentions. Bush was more compliant in the political winds than his predecessor. Consisting of a host of conservatives, the unit was called Team B. A young aide from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, was selected to represent Rumsfeld's interest and served as coauthor of Team B's report. The report was single-minded in its conclusion about the Soviet buildup and cleansed of contrary intelligence. It was fundamentally a political tool in the struggle for control of the Republican Party, intended to destroy détente and aimed particularly at Kissinger. Both Ford and Kissinger took pains to dismiss Team B and its effort. (Later, Team B's report was revealed to be wildly off the mark about the scope and capability of the Soviet military.) [emphasis added]
Hmmmm . . . Intelligence about a supposed threat posed by an enemy state, packaged to fit an ideology, that later proves to be "wildly off the mark." Now, where have I heard that before? Hmmm . . .
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a mounting pile of evidence came to light through various sources about illegal spying and other un-American activities being carried out by the White House under the pretense of "national security." The release of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg and The New York Times, the FBI files stolen from the Media, Pennsylvania field office that detailed the workings of COINTELPRO, the unraveling of the Watergate affair and all of the Nixon administration's attendant malfeasance - these and other revelations showed the American people that executive power had run amok, and that abuses were occurring regularly. Something had to be done.
In response, the Senate convened the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, more popularly known as the Church Committee, so named for its chairman, Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee found evidence of abusive practices within the intelligence organizations of the U.S., and helped put into place reforms that would keep those organizations performing their duties properly within the context of a constitutional democratic republic. One of those reforms was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Rumsfeld and Cheney did not like the Church Committee, or indeed the idea of any oversight over intelligence activity. From Blumenthal:
From Nixon, they learned the application of ruthlessness and the harsh lesson of failure. Under Ford, Rumsfeld designated Cheney as his surrogate on intelligence matters. During the immediate aftermath of Watergate, Congress investigated past CIA abuses, and the press was filled with revelations. In May 1975, Seymour Hersh reported in the New York Times on how the CIA had sought to recover a sunken Soviet submarine with a deep-sea mining vessel called the Glomar Explorer, built by Howard Hughes. When Hersh's article appeared, Cheney wrote memos laying out options ranging from indicting Hersh or getting a search warrant for Hersh's apartment to suing the Times and pressuring its owners "to discourage the NYT and other publications from similar action." "In the end," writes James Mann, in his indispensable book, "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," "Cheney and the White House decided to back off after the intelligence community decided its work had not been significantly damaged. [emphasis added]
Hmmm . . . Let's attack The New York Times and its writers for publishing an article that, we will squeal very loudly, "threatens national security" - even though it really doesn't. Has a sort of ring to it, doesn't it?
Eventually, in the 1976 elections, the miscreants in the Republican White House were tossed out, but Cheney deftly tacked. From Blumenthal:
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, Cheney became the Republican leader on the House Intelligence Committee, where he consistently fought congressional oversight and limits on presidential authority. When Congress investigated the Iran-Contra scandal (the creation of an illegal, privately funded, offshore U.S. foreign policy initiative), Cheney was the crucial administration defender. At every turn, he blocked the Democrats and prevented them from questioning Vice President Bush. Under his leadership, not a single House Republican signed the special investigating committee's final report charging "secrecy, deception and disdain for law." Instead, the Republicans issued their own report claiming there had been no major wrongdoing. [emphasis added]
And what of Team B?
With Ford's defeat [in the 1976 presidential election], Team B became the kernel of the Committee on the Present Danger, a conservative group that attacked President Carter for weakness on the Soviet threat. The growing strength of the right thwarted ratification of SALT II, setting the stage for Reagan's nomination and election.
- and also the ideological forebear of the Project for a New American Century.
So here we are today. The Republicans hate accountability. They curse the bright light of day like the blood-sucking vampires they are. They do everything in their power to kill the messenger, the truth-teller who carries only unvarnished facts about the Republicans' true activities - because they know that those truths are so ugly, so abhorrent to the American people and the American way of life, that to expose them is to expose the Republicans' true intentions, their true values.
And those values are not those of a free, democratic United States of America. They are, instead, the values and intentions of a small group of bullies who count on fear and intimidation to get their way, just as they did 30 years ago.