Engelhardt--A Demobilized Press in a Global Free-Fire Zone

[Ms. Clio]

(snip)

Our triumphalist President was thinking big on the day his second term began -- big enough to cause a supporter like former speechwriter Peggy Noonan on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (Way Too Much God) to label his "God-drenched speech," with genuine dismay, as lacking all "moral modesty" and "over the top," our mainstream press, on the whole, was thinking small indeed and cautiously beyond words.

That smallness of thinking was evident last week in the initial news responses to Seymour Hersh's remarkable New Yorker piece "The Coming Wars." The press jumped on his article and ran with it, based on one piece of information in it -- that the Pentagon had reportedly already inserted Special Forces units into Iran as part of a program to defang the Iranian nuclear program. It was thus announced as an "Iranian story" and continued as such. But this was distinctly a lesser aspect of a remarkable tale, clearly leaked to Hersh by embittered CIA sources who knew that they had just lost a long-term intra-bureaucratic struggle with Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon and been sidelined. And the larger story wasn't even that the President had signed a series of orders granting the Pentagon the right to insert Special Forces units into ten countries, or the news ("We're going to be riding with the bad boys") that the Pentagon might officially become a terrorist outfit:

"U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities."

The real story was an accelerating tale of "Pentagon encroachment." (Note, for instance, that a Times front-page piece Sunday, Commandos Get Duty on U.S. Soil, reports another small, war-on-terror Pentagon encroachment, this time on domestic soil -- the positioning of "super-secret commandos… operating under a secret counterterrorism program code-named Power Geyser" as part of Presidential security for the inauguration.) Hersh's news was that "the war on terrorism would be expanded and effectively placed under Pentagon control," and the Pentagon would, as the administration's legal experts saw the matter, be able "to run the operations off the books -- free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A."

Put another way, the legal theory that first came to light in the "torture memos" that emerged from the White House Legal Counsel's office -- that, in his role as commander-in-chief in "wartime," the President was essentially unfettered by Congress or the courts and could act as he wished -- turns out to reach way beyond the issue of torture. Yes, Rumsfeld's Pentagon had trumped the CIA and was once again expanding its turf. It was now to be the armed intelligence and diplomatic spearhead of an ever-more militarized government; but at least as important was the urge that lurked behind this development -- to free the President of all accountability, all democratic fetters, all those balancing powers so familiar to high-school students in any civics class. What this represents is a strikingly expansive imperial definition of "freedom."


http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0125-22.htm