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Stung by Harper's In a Web Of
DeceitJune 25, 2007, Washington
Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/24/AR2007062401677.html
Ken
Silverstein says he lied, deceived and fabricated to get the story. But
it
was worth it, he insists. Those on the receiving end don't agree. As
Washington editor of Harper's magazine, Silverstein posed as Kenneth
Case,
a London-based executive with the fictional Maldon Group, claiming to
represent the government of Turkmenistan. He had fake business cards
printed, bought a London cellphone number and created a bogus Web site --
all to persuade Beltway lobbying firms to pitch him on representing
Turkmenistan. "For me to deny, or try to shade the fact that I tricked
them would be stupid," Silverstein says. "Obviously we did. If our
readers
feel uncomfortable, they're free to dismiss the findings of the story."
Says Harper's Editor Roger Hodge: "The big question in our mind was
whether anybody was going to fall for it." They did. According to
Harper's, executives at the Washington firm APCO Worldwide laid out a
communications plan that included lobbying policymakers -- possibly
including a trip for members of Congress -- and generating "news items."
Senior Vice President Barry Schumacher told Silverstein the firm could
drum up positive op-ed pieces by utilizing certain think tank experts.
The
proposed fee: $40,000 a month. Another Washington firm, Cassidy &
Associates, asked for at least $1.2 million a year and touted a proposed
trip to Turkmenistan for journalists and think tank analysts.
Hodge says the caper is part of "a long history of sting
operations" by journalists. But that undercover tradition has faded in
recent years. No newspaper today would do what the Chicago Sun-Times did
in the 1970s, setting up a bar to entrap crooked politicians.Fewer television programs are doing what ABC did in the 1990s, having
producers lie to get jobs at a supermarket chain to expose unsanitary
practices.
Note:To read the hard-hitting, in-depth article in
Harper's magazine,
click here.
White House of
MirrorsJune 24, 2007, New York
Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/opinion/24sun1.html
President
Bush has turned the executive branch into a two-way mirror. They get to
see
everything Americans do: our telephone calls, e-mail, and all manner of
personal information. And we get to see nothing about what they do.
Everyone knows this administration has disdained openness and
accountability since its first days. That is about the only thing it does
not hide. But recent weeks have produced disturbing disclosures about
just
how far Mr. Bush’s team is willing to go to keep lawmakers and the public
in the dark.
That applies to big issues — like the C.I.A.’s secret prisons — and to
things that would seem too small-bore to order up a cover-up. Vice
President Dick Cheney sets the gold standard, placing himself not just
above Congress and the courts but above Mr. Bush himself.
For the
last four years, he has been defying a presidential order requiring
executive branch agencies to account for the classified information they
handle. When the agency that enforces this rule tried to do its job, Mr.
Cheney proposed abolishing the agency. Since the 9/11 attacks,
Mr. Bush has tried to excuse his administration’s obsession with secrecy
by saying that dangerous times require greater discretion. He rammed the
Patriot Act through Congress with a promise that national security
agencies would make sure the new powers were not abused. But on June 14,
The Washington Post reported that the [FBI] potentially broke the law or
its own rules several thousand times over the past five years when it
used
the Patriot Act to snoop on domestic phone calls, e-mail and financial
transactions of ordinary Americans.
When Computers AttackJune 24, 2007, New York
Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/weekinreview/24schwartz.html
Anyone
who follows technology or military affairs has heard the predictions for
more than a decade. Cyberwar is coming. Although the long-announced,
long-awaited computer-based conflict has yet to occur, the forecast grows
more ominous with every telling: an onslaught is brought by a warring
nation, backed by its brains and computing resources; banks and other
businesses in the enemy states are destroyed; governments grind to a
halt;
telephones disconnect. Industrial remote-control technologies known as
Scada systems, for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition ... allow
remote monitoring and control of operations like manufacturing production
lines and civil works projects like dams. So security experts envision
terrorists at a keyboard remotely shutting down factory floors or opening
a dam’s floodgates to devastate cities downstream.
But how bad would a cyberwar really be — especially when compared
with the blood-and-guts genuine article? And is there really a chance it
would happen at all? Whatever the answer, governments are
readying themselves for the Big One. The United States is arming up.
Robert Elder, commander of the Air Force Cyberspace Command, told
reporters ... that his newly formed command, which defends military data,
communications and control networks, is learning how to disable an
opponent’s computer networks and crash its databases. “We want to go in
and knock them out in the first round,” he said, as reported on
Military.com.
White House Defends Cheney's Refusal of
OversightJune 23, 2007, Washington
Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/AR2007062201809.html
The
White
House defended Vice President Cheney yesterday in a dispute over his
office's refusal to comply with an executive order regulating the
handling
of classified information as Democrats and other critics assailed him for
disregarding rules that others follow. White House spokeswoman Dana
Perino
said Cheney is not obligated to submit to oversight by an office that
safeguards classified information, as other members and parts of the
executive branch are. Cheney's office has contended that it does not have
to comply because the vice president serves as president of the Senate,
which means that his office is not an "entity within the executive
branch." Cheney is not subject to the executive order, she said,
"because
the president gets to decide whether or not he should be treated
separately, and he's decided that he should." Democratic critics said
Cheney is distorting the plain meaning of the executive order.
"Vice President Cheney is expanding the administration's policy on
torture
to include tortured logic," said Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin
(D-Ill.). "In the end, neither Mr. Cheney or his staff is above the law
or
the Constitution." The dispute stems from an executive order ...
establishing a uniform, government-wide system for protecting classified
information. Cheney's office, like its predecessor, filed reports about
its handling of classified information to the National Archives and
Records Administration oversight office in 2001 and 2002 but has refused
to do so since. His office also blocked an on-site inspection to examine
its handling of classified data.
Bush claims oversight exemption too
June 23, 2007, Los Angeles
Timeshttp://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-cheney23jun23,0,4570067.story
The
White
House said ... that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President
Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee
its handling of classified national security information. An executive
order that Bush issued in March 2003 ... requires all government agencies
that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it
doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the
vice president's office or the president's office, a White House
spokesman
said. From the start, Bush considered his office and Cheney's exempt from
the reporting requirements, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. Those
two offices have access to the most highly classified information. Fratto
conceded that the lengthy directive, technically an amendment to an
existing executive order, did not specifically exempt the president's or
vice president's offices. Instead, it refers to "agencies" as being
subject to the requirements, which Fratto said did not include the two
executive offices. "It does take a little bit of inference," Fratto said.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists'
government secrecy project, disputed the White House explanation of the
executive order.
He noted that the order defines "agency" as any
executive agency, military department and "any other entity within the
executive branch that comes into the possession of classified
information"
— which, he said, includes Bush's and Cheney's offices. CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry
June 22, 2007, Washington
Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/21/AR2007062102434.html
The CIA
will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some
of
the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family
jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts,
domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups ... CIA
Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday. The documents ... also include
accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to
and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of
journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians,
including the use of drugs. The documents have been sought for decades by
historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the
subject
of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests. In anticipation of
the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington
University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January
1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those
documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of
President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby
called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news
accounts. "It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright
line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S.
Blanton.
"But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into
the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton
said, "are pretty resonant today."
Accueil 
