by W. E. Gutman
In brief and measured communications with Anderson during my layoff, I’d argued that one of the roles of journalism is to enumerate the threats to peace, social justice, national independence and freedom, and to support the defenders of these principles. An open-minded journalist -- as opposed to a lip-server of government-warmed-over versions of the truth -- must at all times attempt to demystify the manipulative power of the state and expose the collusive docility of the media.
“Is it so unusual for a journalist to turn to activism,” I asked. “We all champion certain causes from time to time. We all have our threshold of tolerance to bullshit. Objectivity in print journalism is a fable. Only the camera’s lens is witness to ironclad reality, if and when it’s allowed to focus, zoom in and pan on the naked truth without editing and photo-shop fudging.”
Anderson, an ex-paratrooper, never quite forgave me for vilifying the U.S. Army School of the Americas and, by extension, the entire U.S. military establishment. In lieu of an answer, he launched one of his famous orations and succeeded, as he was wont to do with a tortuous logic raised to messianic status by his booming basso voice, to drive me to near-numbness. I’d tried to cultivate a dialogue. Instead, I was being filibustered and, in the process, suavely dismissed as a radical, a red.
*
In November, saddened and troubled by the death on October 25 of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, daughter and five other people, I wrote a commentary questioning the preliminary results of the National Transportation and Safety Board investigation.
Defying an injunction that I refrain from submitting anything, I handed the piece, entitled Post-Election Musings: What Killed Paul Wellstone? to the OP/ED page editor, with a copy to Anderson. It read, in part:
Among legislators running for reelection this year, he alone risked the ire of Republican opponents and the disaffection of a faint-hearted, fence-straddling Democratic confederacy. He alone cast the dissenting vote against the resolution granting the U.S. carte blanche to attack Iraq. He voted his conscience, believing his views would bolster his chances for reelection, not weaken it.
The accuracy of his instincts, I went on, was now a matter of conjecture. Predictably, conspiracy theorists, truth-sleuths and iconoclasts would be asking: Was Senator Paul Wellstone’s death an accident?
There may yet emerge a rational explanation for the plane crash. After all, airplanes do fall from the sky from time to time. But nagging questions remain. Both pilots on the ill-fated aircraft were experienced. The captain had an air transport rating. His first officer was a commercial pilot. Equipped with two separate de-icing systems, the plane had been inspected and certified airworthy. Weather conditions were less than perfect -- icing and freezing rain were reported -- but two smaller planes had landed uneventfully at the same Minnesota airport two hours earlier. Visibility was marginal but the runway, under a 700-foot ceiling, was in full view of the crew.
Had the political climate at the time been different, it might have been possible to dismiss the crash as a tragic mishap whose origins could be traced to the complexities of aerodynamics and the vagaries of meteorology. But the death of Paul Wellstone took place at a time when America was veering sharply -- and boastfully -- to the right. It also came two years almost to the day (October 16, 2000) after a similar mishap killed another Democratic Senate hopeful locked in a tight election contest: Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan. The mainstream media promptly noted the “eerie coincidence” but, characteristically, went no further. In hindsight, what I’d written was not so much an account of probable events but, given the political climate at the time and America’s penchant for assassination, a hypothetical reconstruction of what might have happened. I offer no apology for my speculations.
In 2001, two leading Senate Democrats, Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Judiciary Committee Chairman, Patrick Leahy, received letters laced with anthrax. The Justice Department -- headed by conservative John Ashcroft (who lost to the deceased Mel Carnahan in the Missouri contest) failed to apprehend the culprit(s). It is interesting to note that no Republican was the target of such lethal mail.
Wellstone was engrossed in a hotly contested reelection campaign, but polls showed him overtaking his Republican opponent, Norm Coleman. With the Senate controlled by Democrats, the loss of even one seat would shift control [as it did] to the Republicans. The immediate effect of Wellstone’s death, later borne out by the elections, would be to deprive the Democrats of a majority and hand the Republicans the clout they needed to push for legislation that would benefit the wealthy and pamper corporate America. Some suggested this objective more than justified the “neutralization” of pesky adversaries.
The reactionary elements in and around the Republican Party had shown their scorn for democracy, first in the dogged campaign to scuttle the Clinton administration, then in the barefaced piracy of the 2000 presidential election. They were now preparing to sacrifice young American lives -- and tens of thousands of Iraqis -- to grab control of the second largest oil reserves in the world.
Another curious and suggestive detail had emerged: Virtually every day, the administration issued vague warnings of terrorist assaults on domestic infrastructures. Americans were being drilled like Pavlov’s dogs to pin any act of violence on al-Qaida. Yet no one dared suggest that the crash of Wellstone’s plane was the result of terrorism.
In a climate of war, shrinking rights, reactionary gloating and the erosion of democracy, it was not unreasonable to ask whether Wellstone might have been the target of a “purge.” Under the circumstance, I closed,
“… it is tempting to suggest that investigators will conclude that Paul Wellstone was the victim of some inscrutable event -- perhaps an ‘act of God.’ This should give Bible-thumping diehards endless joy.”
Before submitting the piece, and after much inner debate, I excised a paragraph in which I implied that the timidity and flip-flopping posture of leading Democratic presidential contenders toward the war in Iraq could be reflexive, that they might be fearful for their own political necks. The oft-repeated bromide, “... we shouldn't have gone in but now that we're there, let's finish the job,” I had also put forward, was “odious double-speak and rank hypocrisy designed to protect these legislators’ career -- if not to prevent them from meeting a fate similar to Wellstone’s.” This last-minute redaction had been made in hopes that it might somehow enhance the essay’s chances of being published. My impudence that day was exceeded only by my naiveté. I’d disobeyed orders and aired heretical views. Word came, anonymously, as front-office pronouncements do, that I better cease and desist, this time for good -- or else. Caught between a rock and a hard place, even the OP/ED page editor demurred with an indulgence born of friendship.
“You know, if it were up to me…, but….”
“Say no more. I understand.”
In December, permanently banned from its pages, demoralized, burned out, challenged by a newly installed and unintelligible computer system, and no longer able to weather the grueling evening shift, I resigned from the Antelope Valley Press. I was determined to sing my “own lyrics and tunes,” all of which found a receptive audience in several independent newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. A number of articles would be devoted to the telltale language of (media) silence and the lies it conceals.
A year later, in a moment of extraordinary gallantry and candor, Anderson admitted that “the business side,” resentful of my political views, had steadfastly frustrated any attempt on his part to grant me a more creative voice. Knowing what I knew about the paper’s “business side,” namely that it is wed to ultra-conservative causes, gave Anderson’s belated but welcome apologia the veracity and legitimacy it was meant to convey. Anderson and I have remained on cordial terms -- from a distance. Our mutual goodwill, sustained by an unspoken tolerance for the divergence of our political views, is tempered by the reality of our respective lives. I’m now retired, living in another town, a free agent, at liberty to carp and cavil and heap insults, unafraid
to make enemies along the way. He’s still working for a living. I fear that the “business side,” which had been breathing down his neck during my brief stint at the paper, would find ways to make life difficult for consorting with the likes of me. I’m grateful to Anderson for giving me a job and putting up with the eccentricities of a fractious old man.
*
A new kind of inquisition was now sweeping America. Less grisly but no less ill-omened than the demented witch-hunts that convulsed Medieval Europe for more than two centuries -- and apart from methods and severity of results -- this latter-day pursuit of heretics had put on a fresh visage. Writing in From Dawn to Decadence, historian Jacques Barzun said,
“In the United States at the present time the workings of ‘political correctness’ in universities and the speech police that punishes persons and corporations for words on certain topics quaintly called ‘sensitive’ are manifestations of the permanent spirit of inquisition.”
Liberties relinquished are difficult to reclaim. Vulnerable in times of crisis, they become easy prey when “national security” concerns are invoked. They have since been curtailed. The government now detains immigrants; it spies on electronic communications, invades on-line privacy, regulates media coverage of the news and crushes dissent. In the wake of the September 11 attacks (later deleted from official transcripts) Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer’s admonition that Americans ought to “watch what they say” speaks volumes about the lightning speed with which constitutionally protected dissent suddenly turns into disloyalty and treachery. In California, Representative Barbara Lee, who had voted against congressional authorization for retaliatory military action, was the subject of death threats and had to retain the services of a security detail. Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA), a vocal critic of American foreign policy in Latin America -- I’d interviewed him in Guatemala in 1994 -- has repeatedly come under fire for advocating restraint and expressing strong reservations about America’s military adventurism. Academics, students, labor leaders, members of clergy, journalists had also come under attack for questioning the need and wisdom of war. TV talk-show host Bill Maher and critic Susan Sontag were excoriated for their humanist views. The Dixie Chicks, probably one of the most “down-home” American country music groups, were reviled and boycotted by rubes bloating with patriotism.
Humor was being greeted with the same clodhopping sanctimony when the cartoon, Boondocks, by Aaron McGruder, was yanked from syndication for accurately suggesting that the CIA had helped train Afghan rebels, including Osama bin Laden, and that the U.S. had funded the Taliban when they were fighting the Soviets. Everyone knew that the U.S. had engineered Saddam Hussein’s rise to power. And everyone knew that the U.S. was aware of the atrocities committed by Saddam’s troops in Iran -- when it was strategically expedient to play one thug against another. Saying so out loud, however, was now being deemed unpatriotic, if not treasonous.
At California State University, Chico, students heckled a professor who criticized U.S. foreign policy. News coverage of the event unleashed a barrage of hate mail from around the country. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robin Wilson and Ana Marie Cox reminded readers that during the “Red Scare” of the 1950s and during the Vietnam War, tenured professors had been dismissed and even jailed for espousing views many considered anti-American. The authors bleakly observed that,
“The current test of academic freedom emerges in what some have called a culture formed around the notion that no one should have to listen to ideas or even facts that upset them.”
Inflexible convictions render men blind, arrogant and, carried to the extreme, insane.
*
Then came the Patriot Act, a sinister piece of legislation hastily enacted 45 days after the September 11 assault on America. Giving the president broad powers to fight terrorism and rammed through with virtually no debate, the Act rescinds checks and balances on law enforcement and threatens the very rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. The FBI, without warrant or probable cause, now has the power to snoop on private medical records, library files and student transcripts. The Act also puts the CIA back in the business of spying on Americans. Once gleaned, the information can be shared without a court order.
To fully grasp the wickedness of the Patriot Act, it is useful to recall one of the most shameful chapters in recent history that led to restrictions on the CIA. Until the mid-1970s, both the CIA and the National Security Agency secretly and illegally eavesdropped on Americans. The emergence of a New Left, perceived to be, no less, “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist in structure and objective,” fueled Cold War paranoia and resulted, as early as 1970 in the formulation, by Nixon administration insiders, of a cabal reminiscent in concept and scope of the Patriot Act. A secret memo approved by Richard Nixon recommended increased domestic electronic surveillance, monitoring of international communications by Americans, and relaxation of restrictions on mail interception and “surreptitious entry.” The memo also advocated planting informants on college campuses, and the creation of an “Interagency Group on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security” to be controlled from the White House. An addendum recommended that the Internal Revenue Service be enlisted to spy on and harass think tanks and other tax-exempt organizations considered hostile by the Nixon White House -- among them the Brookings Institution and the Ford Foundation. Most of these schemes were appendages of government activity conceived during World War II but gradually rescinded in the postwar years.
Despite the statutory provision in its charter prohibiting the CIA from taking part in law enforcement of internal security activities, the CIA spied on as many as 10,000 Americans. Dubbed Operation Chaos, these activities involved surveilling people who opposed the Vietnam War, student activists and militant African Americans. Operation Chaos orchestrated a massive information-sharing program between the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. The FBI turned over all of its intelligence on the peace movement -- 1,000 documents per month by June 1970, according to a report issued by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Also known as the [Sen. Frank] Church Committee Report, the dossier revealed how simple passive information-sharing from other agencies to the CIA turned to sanctioned spying on lawful political activity protected by the First Amendment. The report stated that,
“The mechanics of Chaos, both in performing the mission undertaken by the CIA and in servicing the FBI’s needs, involved the establishment of files and retention of information on thousands of Americans. To the extent that information related to domestic activity, its maintenance by the CIA, although perhaps not itself the performance of an internal security function, is a step toward the dangers of a domestic secret police against which the prohibition of the charter sought to guard.”
It was only after these abuses were exposed that the CIA’s domestic surveillance and data collection activities were curtailed but never suspended.
The Patriot Act, which exempts the government from scrutiny, also helps shroud in absolute secrecy the proceedings of military tribunals where defendants can be gagged and the press shut out. When a defendant and his accusers are gagged during covert hearings, the public is denied the right to know what the government is doing and why. First Amendment attorney Charles Sims observed:
“Secret trials have no place in a free society. Secret justice is no justice at all.”
In a New York Times editorial dated November 16, 2001 responding to a government tightening of freedom of information rights, historian Richard Reeves wrote:
“With a stroke of a pen on November 1, President George W. Bush stabbed history in the back and blocked Americans’ right to know how presidents (and vice presidents) have made decisions. Executive Order 13223 ended more than 30 years of increasing openness in government. From now on, scholars, journalists and other citizens will have to show a demonstrated, specific ‘need to know’ in requesting documents from the Reagan, Clinton and two
Bush presidencies -- and all others to come. And if someone asks to see records never made public during a presidency but deposited in the National Archives by a former president, the requester will now have to receive the permission of both the former president and the current one….”
The inmates have since taken over the asylum. First we learned that literary selections in the New York English Language Art Regents exam were being routinely censored. Works by Isaac Asimov, David McCullough, Annie Dillard, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Howard Zinn and Anton Chekhov, among others, were butchered to launder or altogether extirpate passages deemed “unfit” by the Regents.
Infringements on academic freedom and intellectual honesty would soon find new life in an Orwellian program cooked up by Vice Admiral John Poindexter for the Defense Department. Known as Total Information Awareness (TIA) electronic “data mining” would allow the government to harvest and scrutinize private information on virtually every person in the U.S. Alarm bells began to ring among civil libertarians over the program’s inquisitorial nature, its potential for abuse and its ability to freeze speech. Journalists and legislators questioned the integrity and suitability of its architect, a man who had played a dominant role in the murky Iran-Contra Affair.
Adm. Poindexter would be indicted in 1988 on seven federal felony charges stemming from an arms-deal scandal. Counts included participation in a criminal conspiracy with Col. Oliver North, Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim; conspiring to obstruct official inquiries and proceedings; two counts of obstructing Congress; and two counts of lying to Congress. Poindexter and his accomplices were convicted on all five counts in 1990. The retired admiral was sentenced to six months in prison on each count -- to be served concurrently. In the fall of 1991, a three-judge appeals panel overturned Poindexter’s convictions on the grounds that his testimony before Congress -- which was given under immunity -- may have influenced the testimony of prosecution witnesses. The decision was appealed but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Poindexter rationalized his actions with chilling self-justification: