Watergate. Irangate. Enrongate?
SCHORR, DANLEL
Washingnot Notebook By Daniel Schorr Watergate. Irangate. Enrongate? In the wake of the Enron Corporation's crash, arguably the biggest bankruptcy in history, Federal agencies...
...That President Bush called Kenneth Lay "Kenny Boy" was not a scandal...
...The prime suppression, of course, was the mysterious erasure of 18.5 minutes from a subpoenaed White House tape in which Nixon and Chief of Staff H.R...
...We may never know why he turned his back on our country and our values,' says Attorney General John Ashcroft...
...Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White had been an Enron executive...
...Nixon, however, believed he was Deep Throat...
...Needed: A Culture of Service President Bush is into cultures lately...
...Mark Felt...
...Cheney and Lay had an unusual one-on-one meeting, and then the Enron staff stayed in touch with the commission staff...
...In 1980, he was convicted of authorizing illegal break-ins on members of the radical Weather Underground and fined $5,000...
...The actions of spies like Aldrich H. Ames and Robert P. Hanssen, who mainly out of greed send American agents to their death, are shockers and then thrillers...
...The "Unabomber," Ted Kaczynski, is explained as a mental case of rebellion against technology...
...Ashcroft is so far not asking the death penalty for Walker, nor for Zacarias Moussaoui, facing trial in the same Northern Virginia Federal court...
...The Air Force has issued something called a "stop-loss" order, which is keeping on duty 11,500 personnel who have completed their terms of voluntary enlistment...
...Haldeman went in to see Nixon in his hideaway in the Executive Office Building and told him it had been ascertained that most of the leaks were coming from the FBI...
...What's the conveyor belt for Felt...
...If we move on him, he'll go out and unload everything...
...Some of it has now been returned by embarrassed lawmakers...
...Conscription would be for 18 months, with a choice of military or civilian service...
...Betrayal" is better understood...
...That may happen in the Senate...
...The next morning, as we subsequently learned, the manager of the burglary and bugging enterprise, G. Gordon Liddy, drove to his office at the Committee to Re-Elect the President and started shredding everything connected with the project, even $ 100 bills from illegal campaign funds...
...Rather, chatting with reporters in a Crawford, Texas, restaurant on New Year's Eve, he designated three new cultures born since September 11: the "culture of compassion," an "FBI culture" that has "changed for the better," and a "new culture" of being vigilant...
...So much influence did Enron wield with the Bush Administration that Lay could tell Curtis L. Herbert Jr., chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, that he would be reappointed if he changed his views on electricity regulation...
...He denies having befrayed Watergate secrets to the press...
...Yet to be identified is a culture of national service...
...But, mind you, McCain is not advocating the draft...
...It's pretty high up," Haldeman said...
...In the same month the same pledge was made to France to gain the extradition of James Charles Kopp, wanted for the 1998 killing of an upstate New York abortion doctor...
...The most damning part of the young defector's story is that early in June, three months before September 11, he heard from an instructor in the al-Farooq training camp that Osama bin Laden had sent people to the United States to carry out suicide missions, and he did nothing about it...
...North's secretary, Fawn Hall, spirited some particularly sensitive documents out of the White House in her clothes...
...customarily conscripts its young to fight its big wars, but one doesn't hear much about how to enlist young people for the current war the President says may go on for years...
...To paraphrase John N. Mitchell, President Richard M. Nixon's Attorney General and a Watergate figure, "When the going gets tough, the tough start shredding...
...He lived first in a middle-class suburb of Washington, where his father worked for the Justice Department, and then in an affluent suburb of San Francisco...
...The Riddle of John Walker "Treason" is a legal concept...
...Mark Felt was No...
...Felt retired from the Bureau in 1973, shortly after the appointment of William D. Ruckelshaus as director...
...Henry A. Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, has written the Vice President saying that "continued secrecy from the White House will only compound public concerns...
...The Attorney General is an ardent supporter of the death penalty, it must have been a wrench to forgo it...
...Britain is holding Lotf i Raissi, suspected of organizing pilot training for hijackers...
...3 in the FBI hierarchy, the deputy associate director...
...the President asked...
...It is not why Walker would want to convert to Islam, not why he would embrace a culture so alien to his upbringing, not even why he would want to fight in a faraway Central Asian war...
...and others in the Senate and the House have put forward a bill that would expand the AmeriCorps volunteer program...
...Speaking of Watergate, it is amazing that after almost three decades there is still wonderment about the identity of Deep Throat, the anonymous high-level source who helped destroy President Nixon and helped make Bob Woodward of the Washington Posi...
...J. Edgar Hoover had died and Patrick Gray, the acting director, was never confirmed...
...Members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission were chosen with Lay's endorsement...
...French Minister of Justice Marylise Lebranchu said, "We do not accept the death penalty...
...Not as in "drug culture" or "pop culture...
...But that is not likely to meet the swelling needs abroad and for homeland security...
...Other suspects remain to be extradited...
...For those who believe in capital punishment as fervently as many countries despise it, agreeing to spare the lives of mass murderers is a tough call to make...
...Read: To whom was he leaking...
...At age 16 he converted to Islam and went off to Yemen to study the Koran...
...Now we know, at least, who Nixon thought the leaker was, thanks to tape recordings exhumed by Richard Reeves for his book, President Nixon: Alone in the White House...
...On October 19, 1972, with stories of White House Watergate connections breaking in the Post, Chief of Staff H.R...
...The Post" said Haldeman...
...Congress was not left untainted...
...Gray took the material home and burned it...
...The General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, has threatened an unprecedented lawsuit to force disclosure...
...Fast-forward to 1986 and the explosive revelation that President Ronald Reagan's Administration was dealing with Iran, selling antitank missiles in return for help recovering Americans held hostage in Lebanon...
...In some cases, though, the U. S. does not have total control...
...There lies the deeper mystery...
...Watergate, Irangate, and now Enrongate...
...Now there is John Walker, who as far as is known had no personal experience of poverty or oppression...
...Moussaoui, the first person charged in the United States in the September 11 terrorist plot, was indicted on six counts, four of which carry a possible death sentence...
...Lawrence B. Lindsey, the President's economic adviser, had served on an Enron advisory board for pay...
...What remains to be investigated is the deeper issue of Enron's close ties to the Bush Administration, and how they may have influenced national energy policy to the company's benefit...
...It has long been evident that Enron— whose officers and employees have given almost $2 million to the Bush cause since 1993—was close to this Administration, and that now ex-CEO Kenneth L. Lay personally was close to President George W. Bush...
...In the wake of the Enron Corporation's crash, arguably the biggest bankruptcy in history, Federal agencies and Congress have begun probing the company's dealings with auditors, bankers and stockholders...
...Hearing that masses of electronic andpaper files were being deleted and shredded by the Arthur Andersen Company, accountants for Enron, I scented a whiff of Watergate...
...I think he wants to be in the top spot,'" the Chief of Staff replied...
...It took me back to June 1972, and the breakin at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office building...
...More than two-thirds of the Senate and 40 per cent of the House benefited—if that's the word—from Enron money...
...Senator McCain, who wants expanded volunteer service, says he believes every American should serve their country...
...But the Moroccan Moussaoui is a French citizen and France, like all of the European Union, has abolished the death penalty...
...PatrickGray, the acting FBI director, was called to the White House and told by Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman to "deepsix" the contents of Watergate operative Howard Hunt's safe...
...Haldeman warned Nixon against trying to strike back at Felt...
...not, he says, until Deep Throat dies...
...Haldeman discussed who had ordered the break-in and why...
...Now why the hell would he do that...
...When Cheney filed his report, the company's hometown newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, said he unveiled "a national energy strategy very much to Enron's liking...
...Seeking favorable regulatory policies, Enron found an open door when Vice President Dick Cheney was named to lead the President's task force on energy policy...
...The $5.8 million in campaign donations since 1989 from Enron sources appears to have been a good investment...
...The U.S...
...There has to be a discussion with the United States...
...Last July Ashcroft joined Pennsylvania state authorities in a nocapital-punishment guarantee to meet the French condition for the extradition of Ira Einhorn, a counterculture figure wanted on a murder charge dating back to 1977...
...He adds that "when only certain Americans serve in the military, I am worried about two different cultures arising in American society...
...Woodward won't tell...
...A weeklaterL...
...It could be safely assumed that as President he would seek the ultimate penalty for terrorists convicted of murdering Americans...
...And of all the recent cases of betrayal of America by Americans, that of John Walker Lindh—who adopted an Islamic name and elected to fight on the side of America's enemies—is the most baffling and the most troubling...
...Spain is holding eight men it will not turn over to American justice unless assured they will not be subject to capital punishment...
...Actually, although it may have gone unnoticed, we already have a minidraft...
...Harder to grasp is Timothy McVeigh, whose Army service and early life near Buffalo were hardly predictors for the bombing of a Federal building in Oklahoma City...
...Herbert didn't, and he wasn't...
...But House Democrats, as a minority, do not have the power to schedule hearings or issue subpoenas...
...Had that been all, he would have been simply a curiosity to most Americans...
...Although he says he declined an offer to join in operations outside Afghanistan against the United States and Israel, he did sign up for combat against the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance...
...What happened in all those close encounters Cheney will not say...
...Since the United States abolished the draft in 1973, it is now engaged in its first global war without any conscription system...
...When the machine jammed, he ran down the hall looking for another one...
...They are, for all practical purposes, drafted...
...Several White House officials owned Enron stock, which ironically they were obliged to dispose of before the house fell in to avoid a potential conflict of interest...
...There are precedents for waiving application of the death penalty as a price for extradition...
...Senator John S. McCain (R-Ariz...
...His plan would start with universal registration for men and women aged 18 to 24...
...What was a scandal was that Enron profited from a climate of regulatory laxity that it helped to dictate...
...He apparently did not know the substance of the hijacking plan, but he could have helped to avert disaster for his country...
...But it is a call that may have to be made if some of these murderers are to face justice...
...Not only the hospital and emergency volunteers that Bush talked about in his Atlanta speech last November 8, but service commensurate with the needs of a country facing a deadly foe...
...In his last year as the governor of Texas, Bush presided over 40 of the nation's 85 executions...
...He was pardoned by President Reagan...
...Most baffling is why he would care so little about the people of his country, a country that had treated him pretty well...
...Felt currently lives with his daughter in California...
...There would be no student deferments...
...Itwould trade educational benefits for 18 months of active service and 18 months of reserve service...
...The Cheney task force recommendations for "reforming" the utility regulation law to provide "greater regulatory certainty" (read: "deregulation") could have been written by Enron...
...As Congress prepared to investigate, National Security Council staffer Oliver L. North started shredding huge piles of documents...
...As a senior Gatekeeper, I say when you hear the shredder at work, it's time to take notice...
...The tax rebate provision of the Housepassed economic stimulus package alone would have given Enron $254 million...
...It helped to create what some called a regulatory "black hole...
...asked Nixon...
...But his path led to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan...
...There is that phrase few politicians dare to breathe: "the draft...
...Charles C. Moskos, a Northwestern University professor of sociology, has long advocated a new draft...
Vol. 85 • January 2002 • No. 1
