Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

There's a line in an old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie of which I'm especially fond. It often comes to mind when I read the latest news from the White House.

Fred is talking to his best friend, Randolph Scott, who has been behaving boorishly. "Every day you act worse," Fred tells him. "But today you're acting like tomorrow."

At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with each dawn seems to come some new passing perfidy, each day a bump in magnification of the one that went before. Blackwater contractors gunning down civilians in Iraq like the Dalton Gang shooting up Dodge City. The president's veto of increased funding for S-CHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Secret legal opinions essentially endorsing the torture of terrorism suspects.

Monday's New York Times reported, "With only 15 months left in office, President Bush has left whole agencies of the executive branch to be run largely by acting or interim appointees - jobs that would normally be filled by people whose nominations would have been reviewed and confirmed by the Senate... The jobs are filled by people who do not have the clout to make decisions that comes with a permanent appointment endorsed by the Senate, scholars say."

These include three cabinet positions: Justice, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs. In the words of Paul Light, a public service professor at New York University, "You've got more vacancies now than a hotel in hurricane season."

Sort of puts one in mind of that old joke: How many people work in the United States government? About half of them.

Unfortunately, it often feels like even that half ain't working for, but against us, and in ways of staggering incompetence, indifference and hypocrisy that favor expedience over fidelity to any kind of American ideal.

Take the refusal last week of the Supreme Court to hear the appeal of German-Lebanese car dealer Khaled Masri. He alleges in 2003 he was kidnapped in Macedonia and smuggled by American agents to a prison in Afghanistan. There, Masri said he was tortured as a suspected terrorist. After several months, when the CIA realized they had the wrong guy, he was taken to Albania and dumped from a truck on a hillside with no way to get home.

German Chancellor Angela Markel has said the United States admitted the mistake to her government and, in January, Germany issued warrants for the arrest of 13 CIA agents alleged to have been involved.

Nevertheless, the Supremes invoked what's called "the state secrecy privilege," the notion that the government has the right to keep a case from being heard in court if doing so would reveal confidential information essential to national security.

The privilege goes back to the 1953 decision in US v. Reynolds. The widows of three men killed in a B-29 crash sued to get hold of the accident report, but were denied. The Air Force said the plane was testing top-secret electronics equipment. Years later, the report was declassified, revealing there was nothing confidential about the plane's mission; the Air Force had simply sought to cover up shoddy maintenance of the aircraft.

Despite that, the legal precedent stands. The Los Angeles Times described the decision in the Masri case as a victory for the Bush administration. "Civil libertarians said... that the government was using the secrecy defense to cover up its own wrongdoing," the Los Angeles paper reported. "They also said the broad use of this rule was doing further damage to the nation's image, already sullied by international condemnation of its 'extraordinary rendition' program of arresting terrorism suspects and transporting them to foreign countries for interrogation."

The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin points to an article by legal scholar Louis Fisher, who writes, "Allowing the executive branch to treat the [state secrecy] privilege as an absolute bar to judicial review, as the Bush administration is attempting, would be profoundly unwise. It would tilt control over the courtroom to executive power, deny to private litigants any opportunity for justice, and eliminate a vital check on governmental abuse."

But of course, as we've seen in such instances as the Valerie Plame case and others, adherence to strict secrecy only applies to the White House gang when it suits them. Witness last week's news that SITE, a private intelligence company, got hold of the most recent Osama bin Laden video - the first in three years - ahead of its official release by al-Qaeda. They turned it over, in confidence, to White House Counsel Fred Fielding and Michael Leiter, principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Five hours later, it was leaked to Fox News.

The Washington Post quoted Rita Katz, founder of the SITE Intelligence Group, who said, "This premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network."

Katz, a controversial figure whose company sells intelligence on extremist groups to private and government clients, told the Post, "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and useless."

Nice going. In a burst of that old standby, plausible deniability, both the White House counsel's office and the counterterrorism center have said they had nothing to do with the leak, but intelligence officials are said to be investigating.

Worse and worse. Tomorrow is another day. Duck.

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York. This article was previously published by the Messenger Post.

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