THE SCHORR WITCHHUNT

...Will the Republic really collapse, indeed might it not be strengthened, if its defenders, among whom I count Mr...

...And yet, and yet . . . for every zig in this column there is a zag, for every zag a zig...

...And finally, should Schorr or other newsmen have conscientiously decided, either as reporters or citizens, that the public was owed some information still being withheld by the White House and Congress, the option of releasing the report would have always remained as a last resort...

...The CIA has been the executive's personal legion, executing foreign policy and conducting war outside of Congress's ken...

...policy to performing LSD experiments on its employes without . their knowledge, from arranging Mafia contracts on the lives of foreign leaders to tampering in numerous free elections overseas, from failing to provide effective intelligence to playing with the lives of thousands of Kurds as a presidential favor for the Shah of Iran...

...If the House intends to investigate its own ethical shortcomings, let it begin with its failure to carry out its constitutional duties...

...the lead item in an "ACLU Plan" to control intelligence agencies is: "Abolish all clandestine activities in foreign countries during peacetime...

...in that context, the question of leaks would find an imporant but subordinate place.ubordinate place...

...For that central issue is congressional scrutiny of intelligence operations...

...If the White House should bowdlerize the report so as to reduce its essential value- and given its previous record of non-cooperation with the Committee, this is a real likelihood-then the House of Representatives would still be able to publish the original rather than the "sanitized" version...

...See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil will be erected into a national policy...

...One might suggest certain basic principles...

...Example: Our chronic recession and debilitating unemployment have so far only profited those presidential candidates who promise to do least about the economic institutions which have produced these conditions...

...Perhaps the most important sentence in the House Select Committee's report is this one: "All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs...

...Schorr, make a few distinctions...

...THE SCHORR WITCHHUNT PETER STEINELS I would have preferred to say so several weeks ago, before CBS half disowned him and a Congressional committee was threatening to run him to earth, but Daniel Schorr should not have done it...

...I do not think it has been demonstrated that clandestine activity per se, of all sorts and including the gathering of intelligence data, is the problem, and that abolishing it would bring us closer to peace rather than to war...

...Public disgust with corporative power runs higher man ever, but big business appears to be waging a successful offensive, increasing its hold on political institutions and its grasp of public subsidies, freeing itself of recent environmental regulations, and perhaps even rolling back the minimal social Services of the welfare state...

...Fourteen Points," to "open covenants . . . openly arrived at" and diplomacy which "shall proceed always frankly and in the public view...

...Leaks are but the consequence of the failure of Congress to use its proper powers of oversight- it has long been lax and complicit in...

...Meanwhile, knowledge that the unexpurgated report was available to the press- Schorr had displayed his copy on television-might have somewhat stayed the hands of the executive censors...

...That is, unless one is an unreconstructed Wil-sonian holding, as did the first of the (Continued on page 220) Steinfels (Cont...

...It is to tasks like this one that the House of Representatives ought to be bending its efforts, not to baiting the media...

...Bringing the CIA and other intelligence operations under congressional control demands, however, a congressional capacity for secrecy...

...Despite the possibility that the House investigation of leaks may be only another shameful diversion, one cannot deny that the question of Congress's ability to keep secrets is part of the central issue...

...That being said, it is nonetheless distressing to observe the House of Representatives' sudden enthusiasm for investigating leaks rather than bringing to any resolution the problem which the leaks were about in the first place...

...Though obviously not all the facts are known about Schorr's decision, what he did looks like a reflex...

...Every case of government wrongdoing must now be a Vietnam or a Watergate, every set of unpublished and revealing documents must be the Pentagon Papers or the Nixon Tapes...

...failure to control and a necessary resort to publicity, on the other...

...This is evidently the view of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...A pattern is emerging in which widespread public dissatisfaction or shocking revelations are channeled, as though by an iron law, into support for the very forces at the source of the troubles...

...As John le Carre writes in a fundamentally sympathetic review of Roosevelt's efforts to work with British agents behind Congress's back, from the first the American "intelligence fraternity's inner circle paid not the smallest regard to the formal institutions of American democracy...

...Keep them, and be trusted to keep them- which implies mechanisms of enforcement with teeth in them...

...The point-and this is my final zag-is that the whole problem hangs together: control and a capacity for secrecy, on the one hand...

...The only tangible result of these revelations to date has been President Ford's (a) appointment of another panel of distinguished foxes to guard the chicken coop and (b) proposal of legislation which would keep citizens from finding out these things in the future...

...Example: The CIA has been caught out at everything from secreting away germ warfare materials against announced U.S...

...Indeed this was the original sin the CIA inherited from its predecessor the OSS, itself born out of Franklin Roosevelt's secret dealings with British intelligence...

...As a corollary, and one not observed in previous flings at congressional control, such a small group of individuals should be neither permanent nor self-perpetuating...

...Bad habits die hard...

...Keep them, furthermore, not just most of the time but virtually all of the time...

...It is simply a difficult but not impossible task...

...for example, that oversight of intelligence operations should be delegated to a limited number of individuals who can therefore be held accountable both for failure to control and for failure to maintain secrecy...

...It is a contradiction in terms, in fact, less than its opposite...

...A sense of proportion, as well as a capacity for distinctions, is required...

...there was little danger of its sinking into obscurity...

...The arrangement he made for publication in the Village Voice of a major section of the House Select Committee's report on intelligence operations was precipitous and unnecessary...

...The full House of Representatives had voted not to release the report until the executive branch had an opportunity to censor it...

...allowing the growth of the executive's private legion...

...To devise a system which can effectively control intelligence agencies and yet maintain secrecy may strike some observers as a contradiction in terms...

...and the problem of leaks is a mote compared to the beam of extra-constitutional foreign policy and overseas intervention which the House committee's investigation revealed...

...On the contrary, were the CIA and the other intelligence agencies to improve on the weak record of performance documented by the House Select Committee, they could not do so without at least some clandestine activities...

...However one looks at it, that was a democratic decision, representing as best we know how the will of the people...

...For those of us persuaded first, that a degree of secrecy is unavoidable in international politics and, second, that congressional oversight of intelligence operations is a necessity, the conclusion follows that Congress must be able to keep some secrets...

...Major parts of the report had already been leaked to the media...