Deep Throat, Bush, and the Downing Street Memo

A great deal of ink, both real and virtual, is being spent today on the revelation that Mark Felt is Deep Throat. It's interesting, historically and in it's relevance to current discussions on the use of anonymous sources. It's also interesting to see parallels between then and now, although I'm not suggesting that the Bush administration is morally bankrupt like the Nixon administration was. I don't think the Bush team lacks morals - I disagree with how they prioritize them. They seem to put loyalty ahead of truth, to put ideological purity ahead of competence. That leads them in directions that I find immoral - like the invasion of Iraq.

Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post had an interesting quote:

It's very hard to stand up to the government which is saying that publication will threaten national security. People don't seem to realize that reporters and editors know something about national security and care deeply about it. I spent almost four years on a destroyer in the Pacific ocean during World War II and it makes my blood boil when some guy who maybe ran an insurance company in the Midwest becomes an assistant secretary of this or that and tells me about national security.

It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth. Remember that Nixon's first comment about Watergate claimed that he was going to be unable to answer questions about Watergate because Watergate involved "matters of national security." That was baloney and Nixon knew it, but the charge convinced some people otherwise. Too bad.

There's been a long-held suspicion by many on the left that the constant Republican references to national security are "part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth" or a distraction from things that warrant our attention. That's why the timing of terror alerts garnered so much attention during the last election cycle. And why the remarkable increase in secrecy - or rather a decrease in transparency - in the Bush administration is the focus of so much discussion.

I know that I earnestly wanted to trust my government after 9/11, to trust that of course they couldn't share everything they knew but that they would do the right thing. That trust eroded over time as the Bush team used 9/11 as an excuse for every ideological policy they promoted. I lost my trust that the government would do the right thing. And I lost my trust that when they talked about national security the topic at hand really was relevant to our safety as a nation.

I believe that our government cynically uses the 9/11 attacks to pursue their own conservative ideological agenda. I think that's clear in the Downing Street Memo, which documents the British government's understanding that while Bush was still calling for Saddam to let inspectors do their jobs, while he was still telling us that war was a last resort and he hadn't decided on military action, before Congress authorized any military action, Bush was already committed to going to war with Iraq. The memo doesn't tell us why Bush was so committed to war in Iraq, but it does tell us how he planned to justify it:

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD."

Mix a little post-9/11 fear of terrorism with the specter of WMD and, voila, you have an argument for war. And that's exactly the argument Bush made while claiming that war wasn't inevitable. It was a false argument given that Iraq had a much weaker connection to terrorism than other countries like Iran and Syria. It was a false argument given that Iraq had no stockpiles of WMD, while other countries like Iran and N. Korea were developing nuclear weapons. But he made that false argument, under the banner of national security. I suspect that Bush believed that going into Iraq was the right thing to do and he's clearly been successful in rationalizing the decision to mislead the nation in order to garner the support he needed to invade Iraq. But I'm not an "end justifies the means" kind of girl, and the bottom line is that Bush and his team lied to us and took us to war based on falsehoods and manipulated intelligence.

The lessons of Watergate and Deep Throat are manifold - but one lesson is that government functions best when it's transparent. When the government shrouds it actions in secrecy and hides it's intentions in lies, then we need the Deep Throats of today to speak up. And we need a press that is willing to listen to them and tell the truth. I'm not sure we have the courage we need in our government workers or the press to tell the truth. Certainly, the lack of attention to the Downing Street Memo doesn't bode well. But I'm not giving up hope. I still believe in the goodness of Americans and trust that goodness to win out in the end.