Good Editorial Piece in USA Today: Down to the Fourth Estate

The Fourth Estate, as you may recall, is the press.

Here's a bit, but if you care about the freedom of the press as I do (which isn't the shame as the freedom to mouth off like a Bill O'Reilly who is not and has never been a real journalist), think about reading it all.

Here 'tis:

This month, Congress is faced with a most inconvenient crime. With the recent disclosure of a massive secret database program run by the National Security Agency involving tens of millions of innocent Americans, members are confronted with a second intelligence operation that not only lacks congressional authorization but also appears patently unlawful. In December, the public learned that the NSA was engaging in warrantless domestic surveillance of overseas communications — an operation many experts believe is a clear federal crime ordered by the president more than 30 times.

What is most striking about these programs is that they were revealed not by members of Congress but by members of the Fourth Estate: Journalists who confronted Congress with evidence of potentially illegal conduct by this president that was known to various congressional leaders.

In response, President Bush has demanded to know who will rid him of these meddlesome whistleblowers, and various devout members have rushed forth with cudgels and codes in hand.

Now, it appears Congress is finally acting — not to end alleged criminal acts by the administration, mind you, but to stop the public from learning about such alleged crimes in the future. Members are seeking to give the president the authority to continue to engage in warrantless domestic surveillance as they call for whistleblowers to be routed out. They also want new penalties to deter both reporters and their sources.

The debate has taken on a hopeful Zen-like quality for besieged politicians: If a crime occurs and no one is around to reveal it or to report it, does it really exist?

The plain fact is that neither party wants to acknowledge that the president might have ordered the commission of federal crimes in the name of national security. Thus, while there have been calls for another feeble hearing (possibly with telecom executives), Congress would prefer to investigate steroids in baseball and the selling of horses to France for gourmet dinners.

Congress has become a sad parody of itself. In his State of the Union address in January, Bush proudly said he had repeatedly ordered the domestic surveillance operation and would continue to do so. In perhaps the most bizarre moment in modern congressional history, members from both houses proceeded to give him a standing ovation — cheering their own institutional irrelevancy.

Willful blindness, however, will only go so far when newspapers continually put these acts on the front pages. In addition to new possible penalties for whistleblowers, members of Congress are blocking the enactment of a long-overdue federal shield law to protect journalists from having to disclose their sources to prosecutors — despite the fact that the majority of states have passed such laws as an essential component to good government.

In the meantime, the Bush administration has carried out a scorched-earth campaign against whistleblowers, including demanding that employees sign waivers of any confidentiality agreements with reporters and using polygraphs designed to uncover anyone speaking with the media. It has also sought to convince a federal court in Virginia to radically extend the reach of the 1917 Espionage Act to cover anyone who even hears classified information while researching or reporting on government policy.

Scorched earth policy toward whistleblowers, indeed. This has been the most aggressive attempt to silence people throughout this country and world I have ever seen or heard about.