I’m not sure why but I get the distinct feeling that I’ve heard about this plot before; a couple of years ago, I think. Either that or I’m just so used to the evildoers in the White House attempting to usurp more power while abrogating the constitutional rights of everyday Americans, that it all seems like one ongoing scheme to bring this country down. I really don’t know which it is but I suspect the latter. I’ll admit, my mind’s been in a whir the past few years, all jumbled up trying to figure out complex legal stuff from a layman’s point of view. Just the myriad of illegalities committed by the Bush administration and what effects they’ll have on America is enough to keep my mind in a perpetual state of boggled'ness.
Anyway, if there’s one good thing I’ve seen come from the Bush era it is that people like me, everyday people like me -- couple of years of college but slept through civics class back in high school – now pay more attention to the election process overall, and have begun to take an interest in government sausage making.
But I digress.
This is bad, folks.
In June, a case is slated to go to trial in Northern Virginia that portends the onslaught of total destruction of the U.S. Constitution – or, at least a major step upon that proverbial slippery slope. If successful, the aforementioned case will effectively silence press coverage of national security issues. Who would attempt such an egregious and far-reaching abrogation, you ask?
To answer that question one needn’t go any further than look at who from the administration in particular has been languishing in the headlines of late. Yep, you guessed it, Abu Gonzalez. This time he’s teaming up with his trusty deputy Paul McNulty; yep, the same guy Gonzo was willing to throw under the bus to save his own job. Evidently, McNulty’s enough of a Bush/Cheney sycophant to forgive all. Whatever the case, Gonzo and McNutty are proving to be quite an effective if not diabolical team. By all estimations, this may be the most malicious, most audacious usurpation of the people’s power yet.
So far, this has garnered little attention or understanding and that’s truly unfortunate. This is something every American needs to know, regardless of political persuasion.
This from Harper’s Magazine:
In the summer of 2005, Alberto Gonzales paid a visit to British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith. A British civil servant who attended told me "it was quite amazing really. Gonzales was obsessed with the Official Secrets Act. In particular, he wanted to know exactly how it was used to block newspapers and broadcasters from running news stories derived from official secrets and how it could be used to criminalize persons who had no formal duty to maintain secrets. He saw it as a panacea for his problems: silence the press. Then you can torture and abuse prisoners and what you will—without fear of political repercussions. It was the easy route to dealing with the Guantánamo dilemma. Don't close down Guantánamo. Close down the press.
"We were appalled by it. Appalled," he added, "... but not surprised."
Britain has of course never had a media with the freedom of the American press. John Milton railed against the abusive requirements of licensing without making headway. Britain had the tradition of Royal Prerogative, a tradition of branding political rabble-rousers with the mark "SL" for "seditious libeler." Of course, many of those seditious libelers emigrated to America, which helps explain why this was an issue contributing to a revolution that broke out in 1776. The erstwhile colonists heard Milton's appeal and followed it, producing a decisive parting of the ways in the English-speaking world. But that's all very inconvenient history, which is certain soon to be expunged from the history books. After all, those who control the present, control the past. And Gonzales had come down with a very bad case of Official Secrets envy.
Gonzo appeared on ABC’s "This Week" in May 2006, bristling with confidence that he had found a British solution to his American problem. But could the United States government really gag the media to stop publication of classified information?
"It depends on the circumstances." Gonzales explained, "There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility. That's a policy judgment by the Congress in passing that kind of legislation. We have an obligation to enforce those laws."
Remember now, this is the same Gonzo who sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told a skeptical Chairman Arlen Specter that even if the right of habeas corpus cannot be taken away from U.S. citizens; the U.S. Constitution doesn’t guarantee it in the first place. I’ll never forget the deer-in-the-headlights- look on Specter’s face. It was classic.
Gonzalez is a strange creature. He appears to be knowledgeable but perhaps, because of his inner circle position in the administration, seems to think he’s above reproach. Maybe it’s a delusional thing, or the ongoing affects of a contagion liberally passed around the White House in a pitcher of Kool-Aid every morning. Like the entire Bush administration, apparently, Gonzalez possesses a completely different copy of the U.S. Constitution than the one ratified back in 1789 and was amended to include the Bill of Rights in 1791.
And, since Gonzo comes armed with his own version of the Constitution, he’s entitled to a completely new set of rules. Rules such as hiding the fact that he’s about to Americanize the British Official Secrets Act.
More from the article:
Rather than approach Congress with a proposal to enact the British Official Secrets Act—a proposal which would certainly be defeated even in the prior Republican-led Congress—Gonzales decided to spin it from whole cloth. He would reconstrue the Espionage Act of 1917 to include the essence of the Official Secrets Act, and he would try to get this interpretation ratified in the Bush Administration's "vest pocket" judicial districts—the Eastern District of Virginia and the Fourth Circuit. The key man for this project was to be Paul J. McNulty, the man he soon picked as his deputy.
In May 2005, they had found the perfect case. Lawrence Franklin, a key aide to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, passed a classified policy memorandum to two employees of AIPAC, a lobbying group geared to advocate Israeli interests with the U.S. Government. It seems clear that Franklin and the two AIPAC employees had a common object, which was to invite critical public attention to U.S. policy towards Iran.
The case was passed to Paul J. McNulty while he was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Even at that point, Virginia's Eastern District had a well-established reputation as the most political U.S. attorney's office in the country. Among McNulty's key cases had been the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh and the mentally unhinged Moroccan "twentieth hijacker" from 9/11, Zararias Moussaoui. Both cases had been sensationalized in the media. Less well known were the dozen odd cases of contractor abuse emerging from the Abu Ghraib scandal, investigated by the Pentagon's CID, and referred to McNulty. Nothing ever came of those cases; indeed, McNulty made sure of that.
For the Gonzalez project, McNulty surmised that the AIPAC case provided the best chance for his boss’s project to work. All he had to do was convert the homespun Espionage Act into an equivalent of the Brit’s Official Secrets Act. McNulty summed it up in his own words, the subject of a recent brief.
The government respectfully submits that an 'ordinary person exercising ordinary common sense' [...] would know that foreign officials, journalists and other persons with no current affiliation with the United States government would not be entitled to receive information related to our national defense.
By this theory, any receipt by an unauthorized person of classified information and correspondence concerning it is converted into an act of espionage, and thus made prosecutable.
The object of this exercise has been broadly misunderstood by many who have followed it—and particularly by Iraq War critics who delight in a perceived slap down of AIPAC. But this is tragically shortsighted. If the prosecution succeeds, the Bush Administration will have converted the Espionage Act of 1917 into something it was never intended to be: an American copy of the British Official Secrets Act. It is likely to lead quickly to efforts to criminalize journalists dealing with sensitive information in the national security sector, as well as their sources.
Now, just think how it would be in America with the Gonzo-McNutty project in full swing.
• We’d never have found out about the Bush administration’s embrace of torture as a tactic in the war on terror.
• We wouldn’t know to this day about their "torture-by-proxy" system with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other so-called allies.
• We still wouldn’t know that the administration was violating the FISA statute with impunity.
• It’s most likely that the NSA surveillance program would have stayed hidden.
And, as Donald Rumsfeld would probably add:
Those are just the known unknowns.
We have to stop this!