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Secrets
for release 06-30-06
Washington D.C.
I was re-reading Bill Moyers' excellent speech before the Society of Professional Journalists. It had particular resonance in light of the recent brouhaha over the NYT disclosure of government snooping of our bank records and fund transfers. It seems that our government is fonder of secrets than the Kremlin.
I was a young journalist once. I don't know if it's harder to believe that I was once young or once a journalist.
But as a young journalist, I met Bill Moyers. He was a young journalist too, but not as young as I. I was sixteen and he was in his late twenties. This was just before Moyers became LBJ's press secretary. I was very impressed then, as I have remained through the years, with his journalistic integrity. It is the reporter's duty to tell the story as he observes it.
Now we hear talk of charging the NYT with treason for giving the 'enemy' 'secrets' that they already knew. The NYT was just doing its job.
OK children, I'm going to walk you through this one more time.
There is no such thing as a 'war on terror.' It's a fiction, a brand name. It's a slogan. It isn't real. We are at war with nobody that has a country, an army or an objective. It is an excuse to spend your money and usurp your rights and privacy. The so-called 'war on terror' is just a political fiction, but it has become so much a part of our public vocabulary that we assume it is real. It's not real. It's a slogan. If anything it is a war OF terror and the threat of terror is being used as a political fear weapon. There is no war and there should be no 'war powers.'
Karl Rove and George Bush and Dick Cheney are all Texans just like I am. We Texans have a knack for grasping the fundamentals of a situation. And we have a habit of going for the kernel. Bush, Cheney and Rove seized on the obvious and time-tested political fact that people who are scared will give their government wider latitude and ask fewer questions. The political suits and heads have been very successful at selling us the fake notion that we are at war. Republicrats and Demicons alike see the whole ruse as the gold mine that it is. Fear pays.
Let's get back to basics. We have this crumpled little document called The Constitution. The very first amendment to this constitution guarantees the right to a free press. And the Fourth Amendment guarantees the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
BushCo is perfectly happy to praise and laud this Constitution unless it interferes with whatever they want to do. Then they simply ignore it. The habit of this administration is to outsource any activities that are blatantly unconstitutional or illegal. In the case that the NYT story 'exposed,' the government bought your financial records from an international co-op called SWIFT that handles banking exchange systems.
This is what has happened: The House of Bush has established a program of warrant-less searches. They listen to our phone calls and peek into our emails. And now, thanks to the NYT, we find out that they are snooping on our banking records too, totally ignoring the Fourth Amendment.
All the top brass at BushCo have been feigning outrage at the NYT for 'exposing' a spy program that the president himself trumpeted just days after 9-11. When the Times printed this story, it was exercising its constitutional right under the First Amendment. Also, it was doing its job.
What is going to happen when Bushco sends its thugs down to 43rd Street to put a padlock on the door of Big Grey? And The Wall Street Journal and the LA Times? Will The Drudgery Report and the Daily Koz and The Huffington Post be far behind? Will the tiny points of light called blogs begin to suspiciously twinkle out?
The Poet's Eye hates to look at this subject because it is such a disgrace. Never in my lifetime have I seen such an extreme example of government jawboning of the press. The only thing that will doom a free government is secrecy. A free government can survive stupidity, corruption, incompetence, fraud, greed, cronyism and all manner of other scullduggery, but it can't survive secrecy.
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality -- one nation, indivisible -- or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
--Bill Moyers
