The new McCarthyism

[struggle4progress]

Bush tries to scare the wits out of whistle blowers — and the press

... Consider the sequence of events. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker captures international headlines with the news that Bush is contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s fledgling nuclear-weapons effort; Dana Priest of the Washington Post wins a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the news that Bush maintains a secret network of overseas prisons; James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times win a Pulitzer Prize for their exposé of Bush’s warrantless domestic wiretapping; the highly political CIA director Porter Goss dismisses McCarthy; the news is leaked to MSNBC; over the weekend, newspapers nationwide carry reports of McCarthy’s dismissal for her presumed leak to Priest. Bingo. Scapegoat found. The message is loud and clear: leakers will be punished — unless they are the president and the vice-president, of course ...

As Senator Kerry, drawing a parallel between McCarthy’s situation and the Plame case, said: “You have someone being fired from the CIA for allegedly telling the truth, and you have no one fired from the White House for revealing a CIA agent in order to support a lie. That’s what’s really wrong in Washington" ...

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers, he revealed the lies with which the Johnson administration prosecuted the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration, which had its own lies to worry about, tried but failed to put him in jail.

Those who blow the whistle during the Bush administration may not be so lucky. And this time, there is no reason to believe that those who do the leaking will be the only ones to face imprisonment. The press is the next logical target. Bush will stop at nothing, unless the nation makes it clear that it won’t tolerate him. But so great is this man’s arrogance that he seems unrestrained by the latest polls, which show that only 32 percent of the nation endorses his rule while 60 percent disapproves of it ...

http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid10735.aspx