Let BushCo get away with it and see what you get...

From Boston Globe via TomPaine.com :

DERRICK Z. JACKSON
The war on free press
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist
May 24, 2006
JOURNALISTS. Get the rack ready! Our attorney general is coming for us, snarling like a guard dog at Abu Ghraib.

On Sunday, Alberto Gonzales told ABC's ``This Week" that he would consider prosecuting reporters who get their hands on classified information and break news about President Bush's terrorist surveillance program. ``There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility, " Gonzales said, adding at one point, ``We have an obligation to enforce those laws."

Asked more specifically if The New York Times should be prosecuted for its initial story on government surveillance without warrants, Gonzales said, ``We are engaged now in an investigation about what would be the appropriate course of action."

It is almost funny to see Gonzales scour the statutes to harass journalists. This is the same administration that cannot spell the word law if you spot it the ``l" and the ``a." It has already set the presidential record in claiming the authority to circumvent the law in more than 750 cases.

Gonzales has been a prime cowboy in circling the wagons against the law. He issued the infamous ``torture memo" that advised President Bush to throw the Geneva Convention into the trash can for detainees in the war on terror.

Because the war ``is not the traditional clash between nations adhering to the laws of war," Gonzales reasoned to Bush, ``in my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, script (i.e. advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms and scientific instruments."

We saw where Gonzales's desire to deny a detainee a trip to the commissary to get a candy bar and some gym clothes got us eventually: Abu Ghraib, the symbol of America's abuse of global statutes.

Gonzales was a prime force in other matters to seal off the Bush White House from accountability when he was White House counsel. He helped the administration block and drag its feet on the release of presidential papers from Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and the papers of John Roberts as he was being considered for the Supreme Court. Gonzales helped to withhold or delay highly classified documents from the president's own 9/11 Commission and from the Government Accountability Office concerning the energy task force of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Bruce Craig, executive director of the National Coalition for History, called the Bush roadblocks on presidential papers ``a disaster for history." Gonzales remains in the lead of this disastrous presidency. A few weeks before it was revealed that the administration's phone-record collecting was domestic as well as international, Gonzales was asked at a House hearing if he thought the administration could monitor domestic calls without warrants. His answer was, ``I wouldn't rule it out."

Now, we have the FBI trying to get the papers of the late columnist Jack Anderson. We already knew what low regard Bush had for the press before he got into the Oval Office. On the 2000 presidential campaign, he told Cheney, ``There's Adam Clymer -- major-league [expletive] from The New York Times." Cheney responded, ``Oh yeah, he is, big time."

Six years later, Gonzales's comment, combined with the past, make you wonder when we are going to hear about a Nixonian enemies list. In Richard Nixon's administration, Watergate masterminds actually thought about killing Anderson with LSD, and Attorney General John Mitchell threatened Katharine Graham, the late Washington Post publisher, by saying she would have her breast caught in a wringer.

We have not heard of anything that incredible yet. But there is nothing to suggest that this administration is going to do anything else but sink deeper into secrecy. On Monday, Bush tried to plug the leaks in his plunging popularity over Iraq by saying ``Freedom is moving, but it's in incremental steps."

It is impossible to take Bush seriously on that concept when, at home, he is attempting to circumvent Congress and prosecuting one of the most important institutions for free speech. Gonzales told ABC, ``I understand very much the role that the press plays in our society, the protection under the First Amendment we want to promote and respect, the right of the press."

The actions of Gonzales show how little the Bush administration promotes the rights of the press. With every pronouncement, freedom is disappearing, in incremental steps.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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