Sunday, March 05, 2006

Plugging leaks: drying up accountability

In the wake of recent and high-profile leaks concerning the Bush administration’s alleged (and undenied) operation of secret and illegal prisons and its authorization of the NSA domestic wiretapping program, the administration has now evidently declared war against open government and accountability by issuing threats against both potential whistleblowers in government (more on this below) and against the press for reporting on such important issues as these gross and unrepentant violations of human rights and civil liberties by the U.S. government. Already, employees at the FBI, CIA, and Justice Departments have been issued gag orders not to speak about even unclassified elements of the NSA spying program, and newspapers like the Sacramento Bee have been threatened with legal recrimination for serving their basic function in a democracy, which is as a source of independent political information and therefore as a check upon the abuse of power by government. From today’s story in the Star Tribune:

“There’s a tone of gleeful relish in the way they talk about dragging reporters before grand juries, their appetite for withholding information and the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public's business risk being branded traitors,” said New York Times executive editor Bill Keller in a statement responding to questions from the Washington Post. “I don’t know how far action will follow rhetoric, but some days it sounds like the administration is declaring war at home on the values it professes to be promoting abroad.”

The parallels to the self-destructive paranoia of the Nixon administration – in which the government’s “enemies list” eventually grew to include the whole of the independent media (and, by extension, the unvarnished truth) – have been aptly noted. Given that this administration has long shown a contempt for openness and accountability, and now that many of the more unseemly secrets of its official business have become known to the public (many as a result of such leaks), the response could have been to come clean about its more insidious programs and to combat its negative public image by finally accepting some modicum of public accountability (acknowledging the truth rather than hiding from it and threatening those who might reveal it) and by finally acknowledging that it, too, is subject to the rule of law. Such a public relations strategy would be consistent with the themes of repentance and forgiveness that Bush opportunistically invokes elsewhere, and would seem likewise to offer a more promising remedy to its flagging popular support and mounting legal and ethics troubles than its chosen course. Unfortunately, it has done precisely the opposite: threatening the very foundations of democracy in an ongoing and (hopefully) futile effort to maintain its standard operating procedures of lawlessness and secrecy.

All of this has important implications for the need to protect government whistleblowers (a topic on which I have commented before). Given these ramped up threats against those courageous public employees that are now forced to risk their own freedom (and not just their employment) in order to help ensure government accountability and to safeguard the rule of law, how can this vital truth-telling function be preserved? Do we need some kind of system of protection akin to that offered through the federal witness protection program, in order to keep the government from retaliating against its more heroic citizens for doing their civic duty? Should foreign governments offer potential whistleblowers some kind of amnesty, or might some domestic governmental accountability fund need to be established in order to provide a safety net for potential whistleblowers that are now being threatened with termination (or worse)? Does the U.S. press need to locate offices overseas so that they can freely print stories that are critical of their own government, in order to distance themselves from fear of the sort of recrimination that is now threatened against several domestic newspapers, and for acts that are not only plainly within the law but also part and parcel of their basic civic responsibilities? None of these questions is easily answered, but it is deeply unfortunate that they need even be asked.

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