After D-Day in D.C.
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr After D-Day in D.C. D-Day-Deep Throat Day-has come and gone; slowly the capital is adjusting itself to life without its longest-running mystery. President...
...It found that some 3.1 million children under 18 receive benefits because a parent has died or become disabled...
...The National Coalition on Health Care, consisting of 90 organizations ranging from AARP to AT&T, has issued a report laying down principles to guide insurance coverage for all Americans...
...Army criminal investigation of the brutal torture and killing of two detainees in Afghanistan...
...We seem to be in one of those recurrent periods of leak-bashing...
...It's about time...
...In many cases Social Security is the primary if not the only source of support preventing low-income families from falling into poverty...
...As a measure to reduce illegal immigration the requirement may be more effective, by discouraging some aliens from entering the United States...
...Leaks are sometimes a form of whistle-blowing meant to expose official misconduct...
...Maybe it is time for Congress to face up to the question of a national identity card...
...These memos, first reported in the London Sunday Times on May 1, created a great stir in Britain, perhaps because they appeared to support attacks on Prime Minister Blair as a "lap dog" for President Bush at the height of the British election campaign...
...But whatever they may say in journalism class about the ethics of insiders spilling secrets, the Nixon era officials who saw their careers derailed mostly seem to have their minds made up: Felt was a traitor to Nixon-and to them...
...The Real ID program is supposed to prevent intended hijackers from using driver's licenses for identity in boarding planes, as some of the 9/11 hijackers did...
...officials: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude...
...Real ID" the initiative is called, and how "real" it is remains to be seen...
...The third modern President to suffer because of a leak was Bill Clinton...
...indicated he would use a filibuster to block passage of the bill in the Senate...
...But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy...
...Another briefing paper for the Downing Street meeting referred back to the prime minister's visit with Bush on April 9 in Crawford, Texas...
...For aliens, licenses would expire when their visas do...
...On another medical front there are stirrings as well...
...But on the other side of the equation stood the universally respected Nancy Reagan, whose husband suffered from Alzheimer's disease...
...Rarely has the culture-of-life movement come up against so powerful a culture of science...
...And Republican Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri told of the young man, paralyzed in an automobile accident when he was 16 years old, who asked her to back the bill...
...The Iran-contra scandal that put a blotch on Ronald Reagan's Presidency originated with a leak in 1986-of all things, to a Lebanese newspaper with sources in Tehran...
...Another 2.2 million children live in households where at least one adult receives Social Security benefits...
...According to one document, which has not been disavowed by the British government, Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, Britain's intelligence service, visited Washington in July 2002 to ascertain American intentions...
...The United States took its plunge into the spy business first with William J. Donovan's Office of Strategic Services in 1942, and then with the Central Intelligence Agency created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947...
...The invasion decision, he said, was made only after Iraq refused to comply with international obligations...
...A Matter of Identity One of the less attractive features of our legislative system is the way Congress can, without hearings or extended debate, introduce a controversial new program by sneaking it into a bill that must pass...
...While the magazine was still checking the story, Internet gossipmonger Matt Drudge found out what Newsweek was working on (a secondary leak...
...President Richard M. Nixon's special counsel, Leonard Garment, who had speculated incorrectly about the identity of Deep Throat, said, "Every good secret is entitled to a decent burial...
...USA Today took the occasion to announce that it has cut the use of information from unnamed sources by 75 per cent...
...Beyond that, it represents a step toward the oft-discussed national identity card...
...In my pre-pundit years I relied heavily on unofficial information, sometimes called "background," sometimes "deep background...
...military involvement in Iraq could last for many years...
...Meanwhile premiums for the insured continue to rise, partly to help pay for the uninsured...
...And, irony of ironies-Senator Sam Brownback (R.-Kan...
...In the aftermath of 9/11, most of the children who lost a parent, and surviving parents who stayed home to care for children, qualified for Social Security benefits along with workers who were disabled on that day...
...How the gap between private plans and government financing will be bridged is not clear...
...Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson said in 1929, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail...
...Pearl Harbor ended that...
...It quoted Dearlove reporting what he had learned from unnamed U.S...
...But it may not do more than have terrorists make certain that their visas are up to date...
...It remains to be seen how John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, will treat those suggestions in carrying out his mission to exercise more central control over today's 15 intelligence agencies...
...The second group, working independently, includes 24 industrial and health care representatives ranging from the liberal Families USA to the conservative Heritage Foundation...
...The number of uninsured people continues to rise-45 million in 2003, according to the Census Bureau...
...Charles W. Colson, Nixon's chief counsel, who runs a religious prison fellowship, said he was "really shocked" that a "consummate professional" acted that way...
...The exposure of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq started from information-and picturesobtained by CBS and investigative reporter Seymour Hersh...
...As one who was the target of a White House-ordered FBI investigation, I venture to say that Mark Felt is my hero-whatever the reasons for his wanting to bring down the Nixon Administration...
...Newsweek obtained information suggesting that the President was carrying on with a White House intern...
...Undoubtedly, too, Felt saw the prestige of the FBI at stake in a coverup designed to defeat the investigation of Watergate...
...Tim Golden of the New York Times obtained the 2,000page confidential file of a U.S...
...A representative of the National Association of Manufacturers, Neil Trautwein, said the group is "not biased in favor of big government solutions...
...White House Press Secretary Scott McCIellan has denounced this as "flat out wrong...
...The intelligence community has since been saddled with enough blame to last a while-initially by Congress, next by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, and of late by President Bush's own commission...
...Since the Clinton comprehensive health insurance program went up in flames, fueled by industry's clever Harry and Louise ads, no serious government effort has been made to deal with the rising costs of health care...
...She was on the phone with Republican legislators urging support of research that might someday address such diseases...
...Social Security is, actually, the largest children's program America has, even if hardly anyone seems to want to talk about that...
...Military action was now seen as inevitable...
...The father of all leaks, of course, is Deep Throat...
...A lot of suspected Deep Throats-John W. Dean, Alexander M. Haig, Henry A. Kissinger, to name a few-will have to be content with other forms of notoriety...
...Because the heated exchanges about the need to reform Social Security tend to be couched almost entirely in terms of individual retirees-as though they have no spouses or children or grandchildren-both sides lose sight of the fact that it was designed as a family insurance program...
...Secret documents leaked to the British press-and now available on the Internet-indicate that President George W. Bush was set on invading Iraq at least as early as July 2002...
...But that's another story...
...When the Bush Administration talks of introducing private investment accounts, it does not say how this would affect disabled younger workers who cannot accumulate enough assets to start such an account...
...Blair was quoted as having told the President there: "The UK would support military action to bring about regime change...
...General Motors says health coverage for its workers adds $1,525 to the price of every car it produces...
...Since nobody in my profession seems to be willing to stand up for news from nowhere, I will venture to fill the breach...
...Thus began the melancholy march to Clinton's impeachment...
...And from an anonymous military officer who spoke to the Times we heard what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had not told us-that the Pentagon believes U.S...
...Britain offers a further illustration of the maxim...
...My most dramatic encounter with a leak occurred in 1976, when someone provided me with the complete text of a House committee report on intelligence failures and misconduct that the House had just voted to suppress...
...The CIA had what you might term a mixed history of toppling governments in Iran and Guatemala, but was periodically hung out to dry for some serious intelligence failures, like missing the boat on the Yom Kippur War or trying to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro...
...Lately, however, there have been some sparks in the ashes of health care reform, mainly in what we call the private sector where two groups are looking for nonpartisan, nonideological solutions...
...This despite a British legal memo that ruled, "Regime change, per se, is not a proper basis for military action under international law...
...But the National Academy of Sciences estimates that 18,000 Americans annually die because of the lack of insurance and lack of proper care...
...Then came 9/11...
...On the talk shows their abiding resentments came through...
...There has been much discussion about his motive in systematically leaking to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post information damaging to the President he served...
...Spooks' Follies Time was when we had no intelligence agency...
...From their perspective W. Mark Felt, alias Deep Throat-the second in command at the FBI when Director J. Edgar Hoover died-is no hero...
...Such a bill, signed by the President on May 11, was the $82 billion for Iraq and foreign aid...
...G. Gordon Liddy, who masterminded (if that's the right word) the Watergate break-in, said Felt was honor-bound to report to a grand jury rather than "leaking to a selective news source...
...Undoubtedly he was resentful that Nixon passed him over and appointed a Republican fundraiser, L. Patrick Gray, to succeed Hoover...
...Whistleblowers rarely take risks out of sheer nobility...
...So President Bush appeared before the cameras with his poster child, a one-month-old baby born from a donated frozen embryo...
...In part, too, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, facing an ethics investigation, no longer exercises enough control to keep the bill off the floor or to prevent 50 Republicans from joining Democrats to vote for it...
...and posted the story on his Web site...
...It is advertised as an antiterrorist measure...
...Fourteen-year CIA veteran Melissa Boyle Mahle writes in her new book, Denial and Deception, that the following day Director George J. Tenet assembled the staff, and "What I found remarkable was a total denial of failure...
...No other source in memory has had the effect of helping to bring down a President...
...It can be assumed that this will lead to more unlicensed and uninsured alien drivers on the road...
...That was at a point when the White House was saying: "There are no plans to attack Iraq on the President's desk...
...In part, no doubt, the answer is that the President in his second term is no longer able to dominate the issue the way he did four years ago...
...Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction...
...Its ideas range from expanding existing health care vehicles to devising an entirely new program...
...Patrick J. Buchanan, who used to write speeches for Nixon, called Felt a "dishonorable man" and said he "behaved treacherously...
...In the House, voters for the bill included Democrat James R. Langevin, who rolled up to the microphone in his motorized wheelchair to talk about his spinal cord injury...
...Leaking from the Top Chastened by the violent protests in the Islamic world that followed its report on a desecration of the Koran by American soldiers, Newsweek has spread its regrets over several pages and issued rigorous new rules for dealing with material from unidentified sources...
...The identification of Deep Throat has reignited the controversy concerning the role of the confidential source...
...Support for embryonic stem cell research also appears to be strong in the Senate, reflecting the 56 to 32 per cent of Americans in a Pew Research Centerpoll who believe it is more important to seek new medical cures than to avoid the loss of potential life of human embryos...
...Moreover, in essence this was a contest between the religious lobby and what might be termed the patients' lobbyboth those with personal reasons to hope for a scientific breakthrough and those not content to see American science outpaced by South Korea...
...And David Gergen, who served four Presidents including Nixon, thought the question of what the whistleblowing role of a government official should be was "a really hard one...
...it is surely an anti-illegal immigration measure...
...It has been said that the ship of state is the only kind of ship that leaks mainly from the top...
...On many vital matters we would be left in the dark were it not for leaks...
...I have lived in several countries whose citizens carry identity cards, inconvenient only when unmarried couples check into a hotel...
...Some of the former President's men are finding it difficult to reach closure in the case of the "Trojan horse" in the Nixon Administration who helped do them in...
...I'm indebted to the New York-based National Center for Children in Poverty for a study of the oft-neglected aspects of Social Security...
...Such a sneak amendment was a mandate to the states to introduce far-reaching new rules for issuing driver's licenses...
...It was no surprise that President Reagan once said he was "up to my keister in leaks...
...It urged more competitive analysis, better information sharing among intelligence agencies, and the establishment of a new nonproliferation center to coordinate the fight against weapons of mass destruction...
...If the time has come to consider an American identity card, it should be examined on its merits, not sneaked into some emergency bill Family Insurance In the current not-so-great Social Security debate, you hear a lot about retirees and soon-to-retire baby boomers, but not much about the one in three beneficiaries who receive support from other components of the program...
...In 1975, it was CIA Director George H. W. Bush's naming of a Team ?’ to provide President Gerald R. Ford with a scarier assessment of the Soviet threat than Agency professionals had written...
...Do I have a personal interest...
...But Real ID is, at best, a half-measure...
...The Bush Administration seems intent on cutting back the financing of state Medicaid programs...
...A subsequent memo dated July 23 summarized a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top security advisers...
...Particularly on Iraq, its report was sharply critical of the intelligence community for not considering that Saddam Hussein might have been faking weapons stockpiles he no longer had...
...Medical Battlegrounds What explains the impressive, if not veto-free, victory in the House for Federally financed stem cell research...
...You bet I do...
...Briefly, it would require the states to verify whether an applicant for a driver's license or renewal is in this country legally...
...As a result, I was called before the House Ethics Committee and threatened with being cited for contempt if I did not reveal my source...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
