Richard Nixon & Barack Obama
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1
When we analyze a crime, the first thing we look for is patterns. The same is true when we focus on the actions of law enforcement officials and government institutions.
For example, when we studied the trials of the West Memphis Three in Arkansas and Amanda Knox in Italy, what we saw was a wide-scale and pervasive breakdown of all reasonable standards of law and techniques of investigation in favor of prejudice, confirmation bias and prosecutorial venality. This all resulted in the false conviction and imprisonment of innocent people.
And that is why recent actions involving the current administration are so disturbing. The activities of the Internal Revenue Service with regard to Tea Party and other right-wing groups, together with the Justice Department’s assault on the Associated Press’s news-gathering activities, signal a reprehensible and dangerous pattern of conduct.
What’s the relationship between the WM3 and Knox trials and the current issues with the IRS and Justice Department?
Well, for starters, they all undermine our basic faith in the institutions we depend on to maintain a just society. In other words, they violate the inherent social contract.
I began my professional journalistic career at the Washington Bureau of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch during the Watergate era. And two of the offenses that got the Nixon administration in the most trouble and headed it on the inexorable path to destruction were the attempt to use the IRS to intimidate the President’s foes, and the notorious “Enemies List” of journalists whom the White House considered dangerous.
Today, whether Section 501(c)[4] of the U.S. Tax Code should or should not be applied to largely political institutions is not the issue. The issue is that it was applied unevenly – setting up roadblocks in the way of conservative groups but not liberal ones.
Current Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed that the reason his people needed to seize phone records from Associated Press reporters was to find out who was leaking information that compromised national security. This is exactly the same logic by which the Nixon gang established the “Plumbers” (set up to plug leaks) and tried to enjoin The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the “Pentagon Papers.” The Supreme Court didn’t think much of that move.
What is particularly disturbing about Holder’s response is his apparent tone deafness to what this all signifies. Together with his clumsy flip-flop on trying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a Manhattan civilian courtroom with the assurance that if the jury found him innocent, they’d bring him right back to Gitmo, you have to wonder if maybe the AG just “doesn’t get it.”
And contrary to what many Republicans think, our contacts in the media assure us that the Obama White House is far from warm and fuzzy with reporters of any stripe, liberal or conservative. Its skin is just as thin as every other administration’s.
For the record, the AP has stated that with the story in question, it waited to publish until authorities had assured them there was no national security threat or danger to the lives of American or allied operatives. Administrations always fall back on national security for anything they don’t want the public to know.
We’ve talked a lot lately on this website about confirmation bias. Okay, well here’s mine: The First Amendment is the bedrock of everything it means to be free in this country, and if you are going to infringe it in any way, you’d better have a pretty damned compelling reason. Child pornography, falsely yelling “Fire” in a public space and publishing the next day’s battle plans are about the only three I can think of.
I can think of no better sum-up to the threat at hand than something my late friend and mentor Rod Serling said in a speech he gave at the Library of Congress when I was still in high school, years before Watergate:
“So long as men and women write what they want, then all of the other freedoms – all of them – will remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an act of conscience, an article of faith.”
It has always been thus and always will be. And anyone who disputes this immediately goes on my personal enemies list.
Hey, for what it’s worth, a strange coincidence involving IRS just happened to me that may have been retaliation. I work at a place where we retrieve records for legal purposes, including IRS records. When they had not responded by a year after the deadline of the legal request, a day or two before a litigation date, my supervisor had another staff member call them several times in one day trying to get them to produce the records. I didn’t know who she was talking to at the time, but she was rude to them and saying she was going to keep calling until she got the records.
The next day, this IRS call came up in my routine call rotation, and I unwittingly stepped into the hornet’s nest she created. It seemed that the agent I was talking to was cooperative, but she did take my full name, etc. She said we could pick the records up later, and we agreed to call back at a certain time. She gave me a certain number and fax number to use for that callback. When I called back, an attorney’s office answered the phone. I said “wrong number” and hung up and just called the other number I’d been using. But then the other woman who had called and harassed them the day before called that number (which was in the notes) and kept talking to the attorney’s office, not knowing she had the wrong number. Well, it turned out the IRS had given us our own client’s number and set us up to call and embarrass ourselves with our own client. They never did produce the records.
I don’t believe in haranguing people like the supervisor had that staff member do, and I am the best at being polite and working things out that way, so I was not happy about this. I put a cartoon on my desk that said, “Don’t hand me the wet cat,” and about a month later, my supervisor got me out of her department.
Two weeks ago, I got a letter from the IRS, the first time ever in 20 years of being self-employed (I have 2 jobs), and it was telling me I owed a certain amount of money. It was focused on one amount I got from one of my 4 clients, and I quickly called the national number (the one I’d been talking to for work was a local branch) and she had me send in my proof.
All I’m saying is it’s quite a coincidence that a couple of weeks after a local branch screwed me over just for the fun of it, I also got a letter, which the best I can tell had no basis in fact.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Government power and journalistic freedom have never mixed well and never will.
This site shows the war between government and media that takes place every day around world.
http://www.cpj.org/
As Americans we must not take for granted the freedom of speech and journalism that is supposed to be the bedrock of our constitution.
Sadly, you lose me on this one. There is an even larger, and far more disturbing pattern here, but it is one that you – and many other otherwise Obama supporting folks are failing to see – and that is that the furor over the Benghazi attack, the AP phone snooping, and the IRS ‘scandal,’ are part of a continuing right-wing plot, and I use the word advisedly, to drive Barack Obama from the White House. Benghazi? Give me a break – how many Americans were killed, how many American facilities were attacked, on George Bush’s watch, as compared to how many have occurred during the Obama Presidency? The AP snooping? This is NOT Watergate, or anything like it. This is not illegal wire taping or snooping on journalists. Chilling? Definitely. So if you’re chilled, go after the Republican – and Democratic, Senators and Representatives who, under George Bush, gave the Executive Branch the power to do this. I don’t disagree with you that this should be stopped, and stopped cold. In fact, the entire “Patriot Act” should be repealed. But this is not some Nixonian misbehavior on the part of the Obama White House. Eric Holder is no John Mitchell. And as to the IRS mess, read Jeffery Toobin in yesterday’s New Yorker.
Yes, there’s a pattern here, but the pattern is made up of the birther nonsense, the baldfaced lies about Healthcare reform, the death panels tripe, the lies about Obama’s plan to “take away our guns,” and every other Republican Big Lie. Before you know it, you’re going to see this President impeached. And then what?
I certainly agree with you on Benghazi, but this particular action has nothing to do with the far right’s stupid and counterproductive attacks on Obama or any moral relativism between this administration and the previous one. It is about the attempted suppression of news and free expression, plain and simple. And wherever we see that starting to take place, we have to be vigilant and call them out on it. The simple fact is that this administration doesn’t really like the press any better than any previous one does, so on this issue, they do not get a pass.
And for those readers who do not know who BD Colen is, he is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist currently working at Harvard. He is one of the best in the business. I just don’t happen to see eye-to-eye with him on this issue.