The Scandal of Our Age

[Geee]

PJMedia:

Like Nothing Before

In the Watergate scandal, no one died, at least that we know of. Richard Nixon tried systematically to subvert institutions. Yet most of his unconstitutional efforts were domestic in nature — and an adversarial press soon went to war against his abuses and won, as Congress held impeachment hearings.

As far as national security went, Nixon’s crimes were in part culpable for destroying the political consensus that he had won in 1972, at a critical time when the Vietnam War to save the south was all but over, and had been acknowledged as such at the Paris Peace Talks. But Watergate and the destruction of Nixon’s foreign policy spurred congressional cutbacks of aid to South Vietnam and eroded all support for the administration’s promised efforts to ensure that North Vietnam kept to its treaty obligations.

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Iran-Contra was as serious because there was a veritable war inside the Reagan administration over helping insurgents with covert cash that had in part been obtained by, despite denials, selling arms to enemy Iran to free hostages — all against U.S. laws and therefore off the radar. The Reagan administration was left looking weak, hypocritical, incompetent, and amoral — and never quite recovered. Yet even here the media soon covered the story in detail, and their disclosures led to several resignations and full congressional hearings.

Quite Different

What I call “Securitygate” — the release of the most intricate details about the cyber war against Iran, the revelations about a Yemeni double-agent, disclosures about covert operations in and against Pakistan, intimate details about the Osama bin Laden raid and the trove of information taken from his compound, and the Predator drone assassination list and the president’s methodology in selecting targets — is far more serious than either prior scandal. David Sanger and others claim that all this was sort of in the public domain anyway; well, “sort of” covers a lot of ground. We sort of knew about the cyber war against Iran, but not to the detail that Sanger provides and not through the direct agency of the Obama administration itself.

Here is the crux of the scandal: Obama is formulating a new policy of avoiding overt unpopular engagements, while waging an unprecedented covert war across the world. He’s afraid that the American people do not fully appreciate these once-secret efforts and might in 2012 look only at his mishaps in Afghanistan or his public confusion over Islamic terror. Ergo, feed information to a Sanger or Ignatius so that they can skillfully inform us, albeit with a bit of dramatic “shock” and “surprise,” just how tough, brutal, and deadly Barack Obama really is.

Yet these disclosures will endanger our national security, especially in the case of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. They will probably get people killed or tortured, and they will weaken America’s ability for years to work covertly with allies. Our state-to-state relations will be altered, and perhaps even the techniques and technology of our cyber and special operations wars dispersed into the wrong hands. There is nothing in the recent “exclusive” writings of David Sanger or David Ignatius that was necessary for the American people to know at this stage, unless one thinks that we had a right to the full story of the Doolittle Raid in 1942, or that Americans by July 1944 needed an insider account of the date and planning of D-Day, or that we should have been apprised about what was really going on in New Mexico in 1944.

Here is why Securitygate is a national outrage and goes to the heart of a free and civil society.

[Valin]

Watergate, 40 Years Later

Steven Hayward

6/19/12

 

So we’re up to another decadal anniversary of Watergate, with most of the usual themes being reprised, though with a few modifications from the last decadal reminiscence. First, we finally learned the identity of “Deep Throat” a few years ago—FBI agent Mark Felt—and that his motives were not so noble. Felt was a frustrated climber who was angry that Nixon passed him over to be FBI director, and thus sought revenge by leaking to Woodstein at the Post. There’s also been some great stories over the last week debunking what I’ve always called “the Standard Heroic Account” that places Woodward and Bernstein at the center of the story: without their intrepid reporting, Nixon might have got away with it! It turns out the sensational Woodstein stories advanced the investigation very little. The FBI was generally several steps ahead of the media in unraveling the story.

 

Watergate remains the Jack the Ripper of political scandals, with many unanswered questions and inexplicable anomalies—and a pattern of anomalies, as my late great teacher Harold Rood taught us, usually add up to something that is not random. Above all, just what the heck were the burglar/buggers after? The infamous *“call girl ring” story remains alive, though the favorite theory is still that the Nixon campaign wanted to see what information Democratic National Committee chairman Lawrence O’Brien might have had about Nixon, and particularly Nixon’s connections to Howard Hughes or to a Greek tycoon, Thomas Pappas, whose secret contributions to Nixon’s campaign would have been embarrassing if publicly revealed. Maybe so, but here’s one of the anomalies: According to some accounts, O’Brien’s office was never bugged (other accounts say a bug was planted, but didn’t work), and the burglars were caught far from O’Brien’s office on that fateful night. The original bug the burglars thought had malfunctioned—but which had in fact been removed—had been placed in the office of a low-level subordinate employee who was seldom at the office. Maybe the burglar/buggers were just incompetent? Perhaps. After all, why did veteran CIA agent James McCord do something as stupid as tape a door open a second time, which would be an obvious tip off to Watergate security? This has always unfolded onto a Hollywood-like conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the whole thing, because The Compnay thought Nixon was trying to exert too much control over the agency, which Nixon disliked. A faction of the military is also alleged to have helped exploit Watergate as a means to derail Nixon’s arms control efforts. (This was, coincidentally, the line the Soviet press adopted.) “If we didn’t know better,” Nixon remarked on one of the famous tapes, “[we] would have thought it was deliberately botched.”

 

(Snip)

 

On the lighter side, I can’t conclude without recalling the views of my mentor M. Stanton Evans, who quipped that a true conservative was someone who didn’t support Nixon until after Watergate. Evans had been a sharp critic of Nixon from the right—he said in 1970 that “There’s only two things I don’t like about President Nixon: his domestic policy, and his foreign policy.” But of Watergate, he said, “After wage and price controls, Watergate was like a breath of fresh air.” He supposedly called over to the White House in the midst of their agony and said, “Gosh—if only I’d known you guys were doing all of this neat stuff, I wouldn’t have been so hard on you.”

 

 

* See ]Silent Coup: The Removal of a President