On July 31, 1973, while the
Vietnam war was still being fought, Representative
Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat,
introduced the first impeachment resolution
against president Richard Nixon. One of the
grounds for the indictment Drinan proposed was the
secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the
president.
To Drinan, now a Jesuit priest,
this was a crime at least as great as the domestic
scandals that had already come to be known as
"Watergate". The 14 months of massive B-52 "carpet
bombings", which killed tens of thousands of
Cambodian villagers and an unknown number of
Vietnamese communist soldiers in border
sanctuaries, were run outside
the military's chain of command. They were also
kept completely secret from Congress and the
public (until exposed by New York Times reporter
William Beecher).
In recently released
transcripts of telephone conversations between
Nixon and his closest aides, the president ordered
"a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using]
anything that flies on anything that moves". (The
transcript then records an unintelligible comment
that "sounded like [General Alexander] Haig
laughing".)
The secret bombing of Cambodia
involved the same abuse of power and political
manipulation of government agencies as Watergate,
but only a few Congressional representatives such
as John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman and Edward
Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article,
which was soundly defeated by the House
impeachment committee 26-12.
There are
many myths about Watergate - among them that
Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein rode into Dodge and rescued the republic
all by themselves, that the impeachment of Nixon
saved American constitutional democracy from
destruction and that the grounds on which Nixon
was impeached were a fair reflection of what he
and "all the president's men" had actually done.
In American mythology, "the system worked".
To most Americans, the slaughter of
millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese and Lao, as
well as the destruction of their countries, seem
unrelated to "Watergate". Henry Kissinger, one of
the architects of the secret bombing of Cambodia,
who had ordered his own dissenting staffers and
several journalists illegally wiretapped to stop
leaks, escaped indictment and would soon after be
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Few now
remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary
of Democratic National Committee headquarters at
the Watergate Complex, that really set Watergate,
the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of
presidential conduct that seems eerily familiar
today. In his 1974 book, Time of Illusion,
Jonathan Schell wrote of "the distortions in the
conduct of the presidency, which deformed national
politics in the Vietnam years - the isolation from
reality, the rage against political opposition,
the hunger for unconstitutional power, the
conspiratorial mindedness, the bent for repressive
action". He concluded that three presidents
"consistently sacrificed the welfare of the nation
at home to what they saw as the demands of foreign
affairs".
To recast an infamous Vietnam
slogan: They had to destroy American democracy at
home in order to save the world for democracy.
In the name of national
security It would seem little has changed.
Rather than "saving the system", Watergate only
slowed for a brief period the increasing
concentration of power in the White House and the
Pentagon, not to speak of its abuse after Ronald
Reagan came to power in the name of national
security.
The now nearly forgotten
Iran-Contra scandal during Reagan's reign revealed
in a stark way the illegal lengths to which that
administration's anti-communist ideologues were
willing to go to defy Congress. Using every
stealth method at their command, top Reagan
officials defied and effectively nullified a
Congressional ban on aid to the "Contras",
right-wing Nicaraguans who were determined to
overthrow the leftist Sandinistas then in power in
their country. White House, CIA, State Department
and Pentagon officials schemed to pass along to
the Contras profits from the illegal sale of
high-tech arms to the fundamentalist Muslim regime
of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. (Iran was in a
desperate war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then
officially supported by the Reagan
administration.)
Now, once again,
ideologues - this time formerly anti-communist
neo-conservatives - have taken America into
another foreign war, whose pretext was as flimsy
as the fabricated North Vietnamese attack on
American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf that led to
Lyndon Johnson's decision to send combat troops to
Vietnam. This latest war is being run by an
administration at least as isolated, enraged,
obsessed with secrecy and abusive of power as
Nixon's. Americans are as obsessed by the
relatively minuscule number of American casualties
in Iraq as they were by the 58,000 Americans who
died in Vietnam and just as blind to the suffering
of Iraqis as they were to the millions of
Indochinese who died.
Just as during
Watergate and Iran-Contragate, the machinations of
Beltway leakers - in this case in the Plame affair
(in which Valerie Plame's CIA identity was
revealed) - carry more weight politically than
life-and-death issues such as the legalization of
torture, the creation of secret, offshore CIA
"black" prisons, the administration's campaign to
suspend the constitutional rights of defendants
and the protections of the Geneva Conventions, not
to speak of the administration's drive to create a
presidency of unfettered power.
Revelations of war crimes by American GIs
and CIA operatives have been quickly dismissed by
picking a few low-ranking scapegoats such as
Lyndie England (an army reservist convicted of
abusing prisoners in Iraq) while higher ups go
unpunished, just as the chain of responsibility
for the My Lai massacres in Vietnam stopped with
Lieutenant William Calley. Secret agent Valerie
Plame in her Jackie O shades, posing for Vanity
Fair with her whistle-blowing husband Joe Wilson,
becomes the celebrity du jour standing in for
Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers,
the secret history of the Vietnam war, who was
photographed by the radically chic Richard Avedon.
The genuine articles But are
things simply the same as in the 1970s (and again
the Reagan era) or is our present situation
actually "worse than Watergate", as former Nixon
White House counsel John Dean, who turned on the
president and his comrades to save himself, argued
in his prescient 2004 book of that title?
The articles of impeachment Congress
eventually framed to indict Nixon make interesting
reading these days. The first article had at its
heart the Watergate break-in and the elaborate
cover-up that followed, including "making false or
misleading statements to lawfully authorized
investigative officers and employees of the United
States", "endeavoring to misuse the Central
Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United
States", and "making or causing to be made false
or misleading public statements for the purpose of
deceiving the people of the United States into
believing that a thorough and complete
investigation had been conducted with respect to
allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel
of the executive branch of the United States ..."
Article 2 was a catch-all indictment of
all the violations of Americans' rights ordered by
the White House, including the political use of
the IRS, CIA, Secret Service, Justice Department
and FBI as well as wiretapping, surveillance, and
burglaries against those on Nixon's notorious
"enemies list". In all such acts, "national
security" was the justification given.
The
facts may be different, but do the charges
themselves sound familiar?
Article 3
concerned the White House's refusal to honor
Congressional subpoenas for the infamous tapes
secretly recorded by the president and various
papers relevant to the Watergate investigation.
"In refusing to produce these papers and things
Richard M Nixon, substituting his judgment as to
what materials were necessary for the inquiry,
interposed the powers of the presidency against
the ... House of Representatives."
No one
would expect history simply to repeat itself,
especially since memories of Watergate (and myths
about it) have affected presidential actions ever
since. Reagan and his handlers, faced with
Iran/Contragate, certainly remembered how Nixon's
cover-up came to seem more egregious than the
actions it sought to conceal.
Reagan
immediately fired Oliver North, the National
Security Council staffer who masterminded the
scheme, and sent his national security adviser,
Admiral John M Poindexter, packing (if only for a
trip back to the navy). He then appointed the
Tower Commission and a special prosecutor to
investigate, appearing to cooperate with
Congressional investigations even while
undermining them. In his comprehensive and
fascinating book, The Wars of Watergate,
historian Stanley I Kutler points out how much
cleverer the Reaganites were than Nixon's men in
leaving no documents or tapes to be seized.
George W Bush and his associates must have
remarkably short memories. While he has been
careful to mouth words of cooperation in the
Plamegate case, he has depended on the Republican
control of Congress to stonewall on just about
every egregious misdeed that has seen the light of
day, blocking public hearings into the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal, the treatment of prisoners at the
American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the CIA
secret prison system, faux intelligence on Iraq
and Plamegate itself.
That felicitous
Watergate phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors"
and the word "impeachment" are now heard in
circles on the left, with the legal grounds for
impeachment being explored by lawyers such as
Elizabeth de la Vega in the Nation magazine and at
Tomdispatch. But what special counsel Patrick
Fitzgerald may still lack to crack open the case
for a White House-led conspiracy to manipulate
intelligence, destroy the Wilsons (Plame and her
husband), and get back at the CIA is a
whistle-blower such as John ("there's a cancer on
the presidency") Dean or even Jeb Magruder, the
top Republican campaign aide who helped plan the
Watergate break-in and cover-up, only to finally
cop a plea.
Now that I Lewis "Scooter"
Libby and New York Times reporter Judy Miller,
thick as thieves - "entanglement" was the word
that paper's executive editor Bill Keller used -
before the vice presidential chief of staff's
indictment, have been designated the fall folks in
Plamegate and the administration's rush to war in
Iraq, the question is: could resentment for
shouldering the blame alone (so far) lead Libby to
disloyal testimony against his higher-ups as
happened in Watergate?
Unlike in the
Watergate years, however, most of the legal action
that might just dent the Bush administration's
imperial armor is happening abroad. Just as the
most revelatory reports about American abuses of
power and war-making - from the Italian newspaper
La Repubblica's three-part series on the yellow
cake forgery to the recent Italian TV film on the
American use of white phosphorus against civilians
in Fallujah - have surfaced abroad, so the only
real court actions against American abuses of
power are taking place in Europe.
There,
an Italian court has indicted CIA agents for
"extraordinary rendition" kidnapping operations on
the streets of Milan. Spanish courts - which
sought to try Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet
for torture - are now pursuing American violations
of national sovereignty because CIA planes
ferrying detainees to secret "black sites" used
airports in the Azores and the Canary Islands.
Both the United Nations and the European Union are
investigating the CIA use of secret European
prisons and airfields in their "rendition"
operations. If Congress won't act to punish Bush
administration officials who enacted a torture
policy, perhaps the Europeans will.
Plamegate, after all, is no more just an
odious but simple case of Beltway character
assassination than the plumbers' break-in at
Democratic Party headquarters was just a burglary.
Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein now argues
that just as the Watergate break-in was the key
that opened a strongbox of ugly facts about the
Nixon administration's unbridled abuse of power,
so might the Plame affair break open the Bush
administration's imperial modus operandi.
The politics of impeachment Will
Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush
presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the
end, matters less of legality than politics,
consciousness, and conscience. A
Republican-dominated Congress impeached president
Bill Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex
with a White House intern, while Bush remains free
even from hearings, let alone legal action, on his
administration's many Watergate-like excesses. Now
that's politics!
What makes the Plame
affair so odd, however, is this: unlike Watergate
or the Iran-Contra revelations, it doesn't really
tell us anything we didn't know (or at least that
we couldn't have known) before the Iraq War was
launched. The neo-conservatives' long-standing
plans to invade Iraq, the administration's blanket
policy of secrecy and the lies it told Congress
and the public, the political manipulation of the
intelligence community including the CIA, FBI, and
the military - all rivaling in scope any similar
Nixonian schemes - were in plain sight for those
who cared to look during the run-up to the war.
Even the Downing Street memo, the now
infamous secret minutes of a meeting of Prime
Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and
security officials, describing the White House's
commitment to invade Iraq at a time when it was
telling Americans it had no plans to do so, had
little, if anything, new in it. (At least, its
exposure in the British media, as with the latest
reporting on Plame affair revelations, helped chip
away at what had once been a well-armored
administration.)
In fact, one of the most
revelatory pieces of reporting on the whole pre
and post-invasion period could be found not in the
American media but in an extraordinary three-part
series in the leftist Italian newspaper La
Repubblica, articles which have received only a
few skeptical references buried in the back pages
of our major papers (while being headline news in
the online world of political websites and blogs).
The Italian investigative reporters do
tell us something new - exactly how two of the key
administration arguments for war in Iraq were
concocted and known to be bogus by Italian
intelligence and discredited by the CIA, the
Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department
officials until Vice President Dick Cheney pounded
CIA director George Tenet and then-secretary of
state Colin Powell into submission.
According to La Repubblica, the yellow
cake story (in which columnist Robert Novak
revealed Plame's identity after her husband,
ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush
administration of twisting intelligence about
Iraq's efforts to buy uranium yellowcake in Niger)
and the forged documents that were its source were
cooked up by a bottom-feeding double agent who
needed the money. (He's Plamegate's most colorful
character, rivaling G Gordon Liddy, Watergate's
handlebar-mustachioed, gun-loving CIA operative).
And Italian intelligence knew that the infamous
aluminum tubes purchased by Saddam Hussein's
regime were for rockets, not centrifuges in a
nuclear-weapons program, because the Italian
military had once equipped the Iraqis with that
make of rocket.
High-level Italian spies
are quoted in the piece as being well aware that
they needed to hook up with the rogue Cheney/
Rumsfeld back-channel intelligence operation -
running counter to CIA analysis - in order to keep
their hand in with the White House. (Where is this
era's James McCord, the Watergate burglar and CIA
loyalist who told all because he feared the White
House sought political control over the CIA?)
Pre-war, the aluminum tubes were also
roundly dismissed as evidence for an Iraqi nuclear
weapons program by the UN's nuclear-weapons
inspectors as well as recent Nobel Prize winner
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International
Atomic Energy Agency. Wilson was only the last in
a long line to discredit Cheney's zealotry about
Saddam's nonexistent nuclear program.
As
for the Bush administration's insistence that
Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, last
week the Los Angeles Times, in a stunning expose,
documented how German intelligence had repeatedly
warned the CIA that an Iraqi defector dubbed
"Curveball", who was the sole source for these
claims, was a con artist who cooked up his story
to get a German visa. But the CIA went right
ahead, funneling "Curveball's" phony info into
Powell's UN rush-to-war speech and other
presidential and vice presidential
saber-rattlings.
Even the weak-kneed
Senate Intelligence Committee has revealed how
analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and
the CIA among others, discredited the
administration's assertions that al-Qaeda
operatives were in league with the Iraqis and gave
the infamous Ahmed Chalabi network of Iraqi
defectors (the main source for Judy Miller's
"scoops") zero marks for credibility.
It's
often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to
get traction as a political juggernaut. The
initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and
Bernstein on the Watergate burglary were printed
before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was
reelected. (The two reporters had not then traced
Liddy, McCord and the other Nixon "plumbers" back
to the Committee to Reelect the President and the
White House). Three decades later, much more was
known about the Bush administration's excesses
before the 2004 election. But times are very
different. The young investigative reporter of
Watergate morphed over those three decades into
insider icon Bob Woodward, the "stenographer for
the White House" who managed not to report on, no
less mention to his editors, his all-too-close
relationship to the Plame affair, while publicly
disparaging its importance.
In the early
1970s, however - skeptical Americans were about
Washington after more than eight years of the war
in Vietnam under both Democratic and Republican
war-makers - some hope of political change still
smoldered. Cold War paranoia was ebbing, the
horrors of September 11 yet unimagined. Government
was still a bipartisan concept; corporate money
had yet to completely dominate elections; the
media was still diverse, independent of the
Republican attack machine, and skeptical of the
powers-that-be. It was still imaginable that
classic American checks and balances might right
the ship of state.
Now, when the president
waves the September 11 voodoo doll, Congress, the
media and the public flinch. With both houses of
Congress under Republican domination and both
parties beholden to corporate America but not
voting citizens, there have been no
Watergate-style hearings, no impeachment hearings,
no public investigations at all of Guantanamo, Abu
Ghraib, torture and secret prisons, war
profiteering or the lies told in the rush to war.
The Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives
unblinkingly willing to put into the presidency a
man whose party may well have stolen elections in
Florida and Ohio.
We have no Senator Sam
Ervin, the avuncular constitutionalist and
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee whose
Watergate hearings educated Americans about the
uses and abuses of government; no Representative
Peter Rodino, who ably and calmly chaired the
House impeachment inquiry; not even a Republican
such as Senator Howard Baker, who began by
defending the White House and came to understand
during the Watergate hearings that loyalty to
country was more important than the survival of a
corrupt president.
Congressional critics
have no forum such as the Watergate hearings and
are dependent on the jaded Beltway media to get
the word out. But in recent weeks, moderate
Republicans and John McCain, one of the few
politicians still willing to fight for those
quaint, old-fashioned things called "principles",
are gaining traction. And liberal Democrats have
new allies in the antiwar fight, most notably
conservative Vietnam veteran Representative John P
Murtha, who recently leapt over gutless wonders
such as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton to demand
the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
White House attempts to tar critics with
treason have met their match in retired colonel
Murtha who sarcastically said he "liked guys who
got five deferments and [have] never been there
and send people to war and then don't like to hear
suggestions about what needs to be done". (During
Vietnam, Cheney received five deferments and never
served in the military.)
We now have
something close to one-party government in this
country, an idea still so fantastic to Americans
and their media that the most serious, in depth,
and credible exploration of the 2000 and 2004
election fraud by any journalist - the book
Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten
History of Democracy in America - has been
done by an Englishman, Andrew Gumbel of the
British newspaper The Independent. He's now been
joined by American professor Mark Crispin Miller,
whose new book Fooled Again: How the Right
Stole the 2004 Elections and Why They May Steal
the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) digs
into the subject as well.
And instead of
the Woodward/Bernstein team, we have Judy Miller
(and the reborn Woodward). Only a tiny handful of
reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post
and Los Angeles Times (all with sinking
circulations), 60 Minutes and almost uniquely the
New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have been doing the
kind of serious, in-depth investigative journalism
that was done by many in the Watergate era.
Online reporters, able to circulate a
single story at lightening speed around the world,
are fueled by the same obsessive zeal as their age
of Watergate print compatriots but have radically
less money to support investigations of any sort.
As Carl Bernstein pointed out recently in Vanity
Fair, the Bush administration, as with Nixon's,
has succeeded only too well "in making the conduct
of the press the issue - again in wartime with
false claims and smears directed at political
opponents, reporters, newspapers, magazines and
broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining
national security". If only the media of our era
had actually justified such attacks.
John
Dean was indeed right. The Bush administration's
excesses are "worse than Watergate", in part
because the power that has congealed in
presidential hands is much greater than Nixon's
imperial presidency held in the early 1970s. As a
result, its zealotry, secrecy, deceit and abuses
of power are more akin to the secret bombing of
Cambodia or the Iran-Contra affair - scandals that
did not unseat presidents - than Watergate itself.
In both the bombing of Cambodia and
Iran-Contragate, a power-hungry White House kept
secret foreign policies that it knew neither
Congress, the courts nor the public would be
likely to approve - even though Americans have
traditionally been only too eager to give the
White House a blank check on national security. No
one was indicted for the secret bombing of
Cambodia.
In Iran-Contragate, 11 top
administration officials, including two national
security advisers and an under secretary of state
were finally convicted, but the first president
George Bush rushed to pardon four of them as well
as defense secretary Caspar Weinberger (even
before he could be indicted). The specter of this
resolution of the Libby case recently prompted
Democrats and then a group of CIA officials - to
little media attention - to write the president
demanding that he go on record indicating there
will be no pardons in the Plame affair. They
received no reply.
Judith Coburn
has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina,
Central America and the Middle East for the
Village Voice, Pacifica Radio, the Far Eastern
Economic Review, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles
Times, the New York Times and the San Francisco
Chronicle, among others. She co-anchored (with
David Gelber) Pacifica Radio's live,
gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings.
