[Mb-civic] Why We Need Leakers - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Why We Need Leakers

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, February 21, 2006; A15

Who is he?

Does he rue the day when he picked up the phone, dialed the number, 
waited a ring or two -- and then quickly hung up. He called later that 
same day, this time getting a voice, and in panic hung up again. He had 
stuff to tell a reporter about how the Bush administration was 
distorting intelligence about Iraq, but he worried: Could the reporter 
protect his identity?

This person of my fervid imagination surely exists. In this country's 
vast intelligence bureaucracy, there had to be more than one person who 
knew the data were being cherry-picked, that conclusions were reached 
ahead of the facts, that the politically dexterous were being praised 
and the honestly skeptical were being ignored. But they kept their 
mouths shut and if they reached for anything, it was for the next file, 
not the phone.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's top 
guy for the Middle East during the run-up to the war in Iraq, speaks 
from retirement to show how the Bush administration selectively used 
intelligence. Among other things, the consensus at the CIA was that 
there was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. And while the 
spooks of Langley more or less concurred that Hussein had weapons of 
mass destruction, they also thought his nuclear program was years away 
from fruition. In short, there was no urgent reason to go to war.

I wish I had known that. I wish, also, that I had known that the CIA had 
sent about 30 Iraqi emigres back to their homeland in the months before 
the war to ask close friends and relatives about Hussein's WMD programs. 
The emigres interviewed weapons scientists. They learned that the WMD 
programs had been abandoned. I know this now from James Risen's book, 
"State of War." I wish I had known it when it really mattered.

The government has a right to its secrets. But the government does not 
have a right to use its secrets to construct a false case for war. That, 
though, is precisely what the Bush administration did. And now the 
administration is pursuing a policy of chasing down leaks by chasing 
down the reporters who get those leaks. The most famous of these cases 
involved Judith Miller of the New York Times -- and leftist critics of 
the war mindlessly cheered on the special prosecutor, thinking (if 
that's the right word) that his investigation would somehow bring down 
the administration. All it did was bring down Miller.

Now the government is looking into other leaks to the Times, as well as 
to The Post. This time, it's conservatives who are cheering. Who told 
the Times about those NSA intercepts? Who told The Post about secret CIA 
prisons? Why is it that the administration can leak classified stuff -- 
Dick Cheney's former aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now confirms this was 
the practice -- and yet the critics cannot? What's secret? Just what 
embarrasses?

It used to be that the government went to some pains to avoid asking a 
journalist about his sources. No more. Now it's the first stop in an 
investigation, a short cut. The result can only be a further sense of 
intimidation -- a message to potential sources that they had better keep 
their mouths shut. Depending on what they have to say, they will get no 
support from the public. The anonymous source, so essential to the 
workings of our wonderfully chaotic democracy, has now taken on the odor 
of the snitch. Conservatives and liberals can now agree on one thing: A 
press that does not tell them what they want to hear is not deserving of 
support.

One way the White House got Congress and the public to support the war 
in Iraq was by monopolizing information. Cheney talked of Iraq's 
"reconstituted" nuclear weapons program. Condi Rice opened her mouth and 
a "mushroom cloud" came out. Such nonsense largely went unrebutted. The 
contrary facts -- no, the real facts -- were known, but the knowers were 
mute.

In his Foreign Affairs article, Pillar mentions "varying degrees of 
private protest" (my emphasis) by CIA analysts and others against the 
administration's manipulation of intelligence, but this was clearly not 
enough. What was needed -- what was urgently required -- was a public 
protest: a leak.

On "Meet the Press" recently, Pillar's article was a topic, and Chairman 
Peter Hoekstra, (R-Mich.), of the House intelligence committee asked, 
"Where was he before we went to war?" Good question, but a better one 
is, "What was he doing before the war?"

Maybe picking up the phone and putting it down.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/20/AR2006022001118.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060221/7969876d/attachment.htm