Thinking About the Unthinkable

...The Credit Mobilier scandal during Ulysses S. Grant's Administration in 1869 involved corruption in the completion of the transcontinental railroad...

...The most productive investigations have focused on financial abuses...

...An investigation of Wall Street financial manipulation led, in 1934, to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission...

...Loud laughter all around...

...The GAO effort to find out about the energy task force headed by Cheney started last April, long before Enron's collapse...

...Long gone are the days when Bill Paley of CBS, David Sarnoff of NBC and Leonard Goldenson of ABC indulged their money-losing news stars to take the curse off the quiz show scandals, and when one-time Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton N. Minow called TV "the vast wasteland...

...Maybe it is the corporate tycoons of television who are making themselves irrelevant...

...A classic piece of CIA disinformation was a pornographic movie made in the 1960s with an actor pretending to be President Sukarno of Indonesia...

...And if you'll pardon an aside, those hearings yielded the historic photo of banker J. P. Morgan with a midget in his lap...

...Indeed, the GAO suit is not only about Enron...

...On Saturday, Powell opposed the Pentagon's proposal to attack Iraq...

...It was aimed at destabilizing Libya's Colonel Muammar Qaddaf i by planting false reports in the foreign press about an impending conflict between the two countries...

...Colin Powell reminds me of General George C. Marshall, the soldier who gave diplomacy a good name...

...is taking military positions in countries in Russia's backyard, like Georgia and Uzbekistan...

...American power is being projected to some unlikely places...

...Look at the world today and the need of Americans to have it all explained...

...But in a battle against a shadowy terror network, how does one locate the targets...

...Until now the Kremlin has been restrained in its criticism of the Bush Administration...

...The issue that led the GAO to initiate an unprecedented suit against the White House has a more specific aspect...

...There would be no daylight between him and the White House...

...The office had been circulating classified proposals for aggressive campaigns using the foreign media to improve America's standing abroad...

...Letterman decided to stay put at CBS...

...It is about whether well-heeled lobbies can work behind the scenes with official Presidential bodies to help fashion Federal policy...

...Am I possibly biased...

...He has also indicated his willingness to take on the regimes of the "Axis of Evil" countries...

...President, don't break down...

...The United States has never been willing to make a no-first-nuclear-strike pledge...

...The test, he stressed, is whether it produces vital reforms or provides a platform for demagogues...

...The lawmakers ended up blaming the War Department...

...When she was finally forced to go public, some embarrassing facts were uncovered, such as $100,000 consulting fees to Clinton cronies...

...In the past, Congress has tended to reflect public outrage...

...He warned that America might be encouraging nuclear proliferation and was in danger of setting off a new arms race...

...The President, who usually ends his speeches with "God bless America," closed on March 11 with "May God bless our coalition...

...to secure records in order to hound a targeted Army officer...

...Whether the multicommittee approach to the Enron scandal can do what welltargeted single committees have done in the past remains to be seen...

...All this while Powell tries to keep up with tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, India and Pakistan, and the other hot spots bubbling up around the world...

...Russia's worst suspicions about why the U.S...

...The coalition partners are all with you," he said, "but they will go away if you hit Iraq...

...They generally agreed on the objective of reducing nuclear stockpiles by about twothirds...

...This recalls previous confrontations over the Executive Branch's refusal to yield to Congressional demands for information...

...Powell Behind the Scenes Colin L. Powell could have run for President...

...Senator Sam Ervin(D.-N.C), who headed the 1973 Watergate Committee, said, "The Congressional investigation can be an instrument of freedom, or it can be freedom's scourge...

...Would AI Qaeda have been deterred from its lethal plans by fear of a nuclear bomb...

...A 1972 law, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, holds that when the Executive Branch consults outside experts and advisers, it must do so in public to avoid a suspicion of favoring special interests...

...In his memoirs Nixon wrote wryly, "I was the first President to test the principle of Executive privilege in the Supreme Court, and by testing it on such weak ground...

...Russia, where a recent poll showed 71 per cent of the people do not regard America as a friendly state, has crossed swords with the Bush Administration on several fronts...

...It said the law should not be literally interpreted, because that might prevent the President from getting advice from a group of two or more persons...

...But, then, how do we know...

...But he did not respond when Ivanov said deactivated warheads would eventually "have to be destroyed...

...The Russians are also acutely sensitive to the fact that the U.S...

...And, with no effort by the White House to steer it away from the phony story, the Journal headlined that Libya and the United States were on a collision course...

...wants to hold on to deactivated weapons seemed to be confirmed when the leaked Pentagon nuclear policy review listed it as one of the seven countries that, in certain contingencies, could be targeted for a nuclear strike...

...At a joint news conference with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, Ivanov called for a "legally binding document" on weapons reduction...

...The Limits of Executive Privilege Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO) is suing Vice President Dick Cheney for records of the energy task force that came up with deregulation policies friendly to Enron...

...imposition of tariffs on steel imports...

...But the way things are going the next Bush-Putin summit, scheduled for May in Moscow, may be less exuberant than their previous meetings...

...The subject came up when it was learned that disinformation was one of the tools being considered by the Pentagon's new Office of Strategic Influence...

...The most serious breach between Moscow and Washington concerns nuclear arms reduction, an issue on which Bush and Putin deadlocked at their Crawford, Texas, summit last November...

...I probably ensured the defeat of my cause...

...The programming chief, played by Faye Dunaway, has her psychotic anchorman shot on camera...

...He would have been a shoo-in for Vice President...

...the News On the subject of ABC bumping Ted Koppel's Nightline to make room for David Letterman—first, the full disclosure...

...Satire, mind you, a little ahead of its time...

...In the Senate there have been the Truman hearings on arms profiteering, the Kefauver hearings on organized crime and, of course, the McCarthy hearings on Communist influence...

...Rumsfeld said "some sort of document of that type is certainly a likelihood...

...Powell passed him a note, cautioning against being too emotional...

...Mickey Mouse Bookkeeping vs...

...I thought that Paddy Chayefsky foretold the decline of television journalism 25 years ago in his brilliant movie satire Network...

...Powell operates mostly out of the spotlight...

...The Secretary's influence behind the scenes can be tracked in the comprehensive eight-part Washington Post series detailing 10 days of White House deliberations, starting on September 11...

...I worked in television journalism for 30 years...

...You bet...

...Bush ruled that the Geneva Convention would be applied to Taliban but not to AI Qaeda prisoners...

...But profitably...

...It is what television owes for the free use of the public airwaves...

...In the latest case the unfavorable publicity spelled the death of the Office of Strategic Influence...

...On Friday, preparing to speak at the National Cathedral, the President choked up at a meeting with advisers...

...But First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton ran into that law in 1993 after she tried to keep confidential the working of her task force on health care reform that brought together Cabinet members, outside experts and lobbyists...

...As networks get swallowed by conglomerates, which in turn get swallowed by bigger conglomerates, news comes to occupy a small comer of a vast entertainment stage...

...The first Congressional investigation occurred in 1792, when a House Select Committee probed the Indian massacre of troops sent into the Ohio territory...

...has been running into problems...

...In 1986 National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter wrote a disinformation program for President Ronald Reagan...

...Some of our regulatory agencies were products of Congressional intervention...

...At a meeting of a half-dozen principal advisers on Wednesday, September 12, Powell laid down the line that the target wouldbe "terrorism in its broadest sense...

...Soon the Poindexter memo was revealed in the Washington Post, and in the ensuing flap about a policy of lies, Bernard Kalb resigned as Assistant Secretary of State...

...Reflecting the views of America's allies, he asked the President to reconsider a decision to refuse prisoner of war status to the Afghan captives being held in Guantânamo...

...The revelation greeted Russian Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov, who arrived here on a previously scheduled trip...

...But soldier Powell preferred to serve in appointive office, so he now works at the sometimes thankless job of Secretary of State...

...Maintenance of the "mighty coalition," as he likes to call it...

...Or when the Pentagon invites ABC Entertainment, not News, to produce a 13-part series about American forces in action...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Thinking About the Unthinkable More than a decade after the collapse of Communism, the United States was still looking for an organizing principle to replace the stark simplicity of the Cold War and nuclear stalemate...

...So you know what is happening when Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio is assigned by ABC to interview President Bill Clinton about the environment...

...Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, on his tour of Britain and the Middle East, heard the anticipated objections to an attack on Iraq...

...It was meant to undermine Sukarno with Muslims...

...President Dwight D. Eisenhower asserted Executive privilege and prevailed when he turned down an attempt by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R.-Wis...

...An investigation of the meat packing industry, sparked by the shocking revelations in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, led to the establishment of a meat inspection system in 1906 and, later, the Food and Drug Administration...

...In the war against terrorism and renegade states with weapons of mass destruction, however, nuclear weapons are becoming thinkable...

...But the September 11 terrorist attacks have put the Bush Administration on the road to a new paradigm that has antiterrorism filling the role of anti-Communism...

...On March 10, President Vladimir V Putin's government banned the import of American chickens, the top American export to Russia, while denying that this was in retaliation for the U.S...

...Also, Ted Koppel is a friend of mine...

...Since then government by investigation, although not explicitly provided for in the Constitution, has become a feature of American life...

...But Mr...

...Maybe that rules out disinformation...

...Planting Pentagon Propaganda There must have been some amusement in the Kremlin when the Pentagon toyed with the idea of a disinformation campaign—a KGB invention...

...Particularly noteworthy is the Pentagon's contemplating the use of nuclear weapons against nations not known to have them...

...A 1988 Supreme Court decision allowed exceptions to this rule...

...The new approach is reflected in the latest Pentagon review of nuclear policy, leaked to the press early in March...

...It had the UBS network, owned by a distant conglomerate, turning over news programming to the entertainment department to raise ratings and profits...

...It had been slipped there by a circus agent as a stunt...

...North Korea, Iran and Iraq, to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction...

...What's wrong with bottom-line thinking is that news was not meant to compete forprofits...

...Disinformation goes beyond misinformation to planting stories, with sources concealed, that pretend to be truthful...

...She also makes a deal with a band of urban guerrillas to tape their crime of the week...

...The Teapot Dome scandal during Warren G. Harding's Administration involved the private sale of naval oil reserves...

...History teaches, though, that black propaganda cannot be confined to the foreign media...

...Bush would not sign a binding document to that effect, and he proposed to store rather than destroy the excess warheads...

...All in all, Russia must feel like something less than a full partner in America's mighty coalition against terrorism...

...Tuesday, September 18, the President's advisers reviewed a draft of his speech to Congress...

...The law says that television will operate in the "public interest, convenience and necessity...

...Nevertheless, for a half century the use of nuclear weapons has been considered almost unthinkable, a deterrent, an option of last resort...

...Although the antiterrorist paradigm is still a work in progress, it makes one almost nostalgic for the simplicity of the Cold War...

...Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said the Pentagon is not issuing disinformation to the foreign press or any other press, and he gave assurance that what the public is being told is accurate and correct...

...Bush held it up and toldthe others that it said, "Dear Mr...

...But from the Reagan Administration to the second Bush Administration, that has become a regulatory dead letter...

...Powell suggested that the line serving notice on states that have supported terrorism be amended to read, "States that continue to support terrorism," thus making a distinction between past and future behavior...

...President Richard M. Nixon asserted Executive privilege and did not prevail when he fought all the way up to the Supreme Court to withhold his tapes from the Senate Watergate Committee...

...President George W. Bush, in his March 11 speech marking the six-month anniversary of 9/11, ticked off the Philippines, Georgia and Yemen among the venues where the American military is involved in supporting existing governments...

...On Thursday, the Secretary reported to the National Security Council that Pakistan was on board, and the President said that this was the State Department at its best...

...The way the task force recommendations on deregulation seemed to track Enron policy was clearly of interest, and so was a recommendation for oil and gas production in India that Enron was involved in...

...The bellicose Axis of Evil warning by President Bush in his State of the Union address did not go down well in the State Department, but Powell told his subordinates to stick by the letter and spirit of Bush's words...

...But the false information reached an American newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, a phenomenon known in the trade as "blowback...

...Or, coming back to where we started, when the Mickey Mouse empire, looking for an audience of younger consumers, wants to install a funny man in Ted Koppel's place...

...This foresees the possible employment of nuclear weapons against the Axis of Evil, along with Libya, Syria, Russia, and China, to avert or to counter chemical or biological attacks...

...In contrast to Communism, terrorism has no borders...

...But bitterly remembered is the anonymous corporate executive who told the New York Times that Nightline had lost its relevance...

...No longer could foreign policy be based on determining where the Soviets stood from Angola to Nicaragua, and then almost reflexively backing the other side...

...I'm way at the upper end of the demographic scale that so preoccupies corporate executives...

...Reform Through Investigation If history is any guide, the current orgy of Congressional investigations of the Enron disaster could yield sweeping reforms in corporate transparency and accounting ethics...