Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up? - New York Times
The New York Times

May 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
By
FRANK RICH

WHEN America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward,
we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal,
the
legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon
administration
to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam
War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered
American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover
up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of
course,
that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon
documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned
on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to
deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are
The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of
exposing
warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times)
and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post).
Aping
the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from
publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the
leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping
the enemy."
Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a
Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives
and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were
awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by
bloviator
in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917
Espionage Act.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who
bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught
them
in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both
the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise
about
unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking
of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude.
It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure
of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and
potentially
sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to
be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last
November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret.
Having obtained
flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that
the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use
torture."
Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that
"plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries
have tracked
the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's,
do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the
administration,
by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American
jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.

The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric
Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest
otherwise and
cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the
program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic
mouthpiece,
the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé "may
have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."

Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in
worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on
its
own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law
the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is
almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A.
program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of
data
wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while
uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A.
database
on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA
Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like
reporters
and leakers than with tracking terrorists.

Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are
easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the
accusations
we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example,
should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an
overzealous
witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.

Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In
"Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the
conservative
journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional
oversight
of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists
plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what
went
wrong was notoriously toothless.

Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other
Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed
cronies
and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the
home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in
the
Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies
pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman
Randy (Duke)
Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about
prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren
Harding-like
tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the
nation's defense during wartime.

Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence
and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only
other
apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous
leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every
day in
the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the
officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no
point
in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."

What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo
instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies
in our work."
His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of
administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House
ignored
accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A.
lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former
clandestine
officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin
Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in
December
2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no
access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably
a witness to her boss's management disasters.

Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael
Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week,
Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had
bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this
critical moment
in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.

This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush
opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security
move.
It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war
resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the
autumn
of 2004.

Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy
soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the
nominee's record?
It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz,
that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 -
"Tomorrow
is zero hour" for one - and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That
same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that
"some
of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the
national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in
2002. The
Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was
based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the
terrorists
and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs
and shopped in the same grocery stores."

If Democrats - and, for that matter, Republicans - let a president with a
Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet
another
security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge
those senators with treason, too.

Posted by Miriam V.