Of heroes, secrets, black sites — and us

Part 2 of 2 Last time, I described Jack Goldsmith’s account of the publication of Dana Priest’s explosive article on the CIA black sites around the world, including in Eastern European democracies. This week, I will discuss hugely significant precedents that paved the way for Priest and her editors to publish her information notwithstanding its secrecy and pressure by the CIA and Bush not to do so.As Jack Goldsmith discusses in his new book, “Power and Constraint,” when the government acts out of the public view — in secrecy, that is — it is more prone than usual to mistakes and excesses. In theory, Congress and the courts could help protect against the executive’s self-interested and self-protective tendencies. But too often they do not.That leaves the press. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt, without irony, could call on the “patriotic press” to self-censor military information possibly helpful to the enemy. A turning point came with the May 1960 downing of the U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, when the Eisenhower administration was caught in multiple lies. Then came the Bay of Pigs fiasco, preceded by Kennedy’s pressuring of The New York Times to tone down its reporting on the planned invasion of Cuba. The lesson that the national interest demands honest and independent national security reporting deepened with LBJ’s prevarications on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to convince Congress to approve an expansion of the Vietnam War.The clash between the press and the federal government culminated in the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department study of the Vietnam War that presented a darker picture than the government was peddling to the public. Daniel Ellsberg photocopied the papers and leaked them to The New York Times and later to the Washington Post. The government threatened criminal prosecutions against both papers when it learned they might publish the documents; both defied the threats and published. The government then obtained an injunction from a trial court, but the Supreme Court vacated the injunction and upheld the press’s freedom, and even responsibility, to publish some government secrets free of prior restraint.“And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and from foreign shot and shell,” Justice Black stirringly intoned while concurring.The Pentagon Papers episode, Goldsmith tells us, gave birth to accountability journalism. “The press had placed itself in direct conflict with the government over the highest matters of state despite threats of jail for its editors and possible ruin for the newspaper companies.” And the papers, once published, revealed that the government had been misleading the American people. The Pentagon Papers episode also undermined the legitimacy of the government’s classified information system. Ellsberg revealed what appeared in retrospect to be unnecessary secrets. Subsequently, reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post brought down a president, provided information to the public that motivated Congress and the courts to fulfill their constitutional roles, and solidified the press’s realization that accountability journalism, even of secret government activity, and even if related to national security, was among its highest callings.The press, of course, fell terribly short when Bush, beating the drums to deploy his engine of war to Iraq based on a great lie — that the USA and its allies must prevent Saddam from unleashing his weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) — sent our men and women over there, only to get mired in the violence among the different Muslim sects and tribal leaders that kept them there so long, and with precious little to show for their deaths, maimings and post-traumatic stress syndrome. And all-the-while depleting our nation’s treasury to no account.Accountability journalism “means holding things up to public inspection, and letting the public decide what the consequences ought to be,” said Bill Keller, former executive editor of the Times. And journalists did just that throughout most of the Iraqi war.After the WMDs failure, reporters and editors resumed “holding things up to public inspection,” to great effect. Bob Woodward disclosed that Bush authorized the CIA to go after al-Qaeda with the “most sweeping and lethal covert action since the founding of the Agency in 1947.” In March 2002, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Finn reported how the government since 9/11 had been doing “extraordinary renditions,” transporting dozens of people suspected of links to terrorists to other countries, such as Egypt and Jordan whose intelligence services have close ties to the CIA, where they could be subjected to interrogation tactics — including torture and threats to families — that are illegal in the U.S. Dana Priest and Barton Gellman wrote about the “stress and duress” interrogation techniques in a “brass-knuckled quest for information, often in concert with allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred.” Bob Woodward reported this boast by a senior CIA official: “The gloves are off,” and the CIA can do “whatever is necessary.”But some of these stories, especially the earlier ones when the memory of 9/11 was still fresh, brought only a tepid reaction from the public. As Keller said, “[N]ewspapers are put out by human beings, and the natural human tendency is, if you’re not getting traction, maybe you should try something else.”So a critical prerequisite to heroic journalism is a reading and listening public that demands the best. Ourselves. If we are apathetic, we cannot depend upon journalists always to go it alone. Charles R. Church is an attorney practicing in Salisbury who for years has studied Guantanamo Bay detention, torture, habeas corpus and related issues.