Caught in Scam, Yet It's Brazen As Ever-We've got a Justice Department these day

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Mon, 28 Mar 2005 10:21:06 -0800 (PST)

 

Caught in Scam, Yet It's Brazen As Ever-We've got a Justice

Department these days that is like a Mafia law firm. It's on retainer

to provide legal cover for whatever the godfather wants to get away with.

 

Published on Monday, March 21, 2005 by the Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)

 

Caught in Scam, Yet It's Brazen As Ever

 

by Tom Teepen

 

We've got a Justice Department these days that is like a Mafia law

firm. It's on retainer to provide legal cover for whatever the

godfather wants to get away with.

 

First the department conveniently redefined torture so narrowly that

it let the Bush administration shrug off just about any mistreatment

of prisoners short of drawing and quartering them on the village

green. So much for the Geneva Conventions.

 

Now Justice is advising the sundry agencies of the federal government

to ignore a finding by the Government Accountability Office that it is

not -- repeat: not -- OK to hoodwink the public with phony TV news

reports.

 

It was bad enough that the administration was running the scam in the

first place. Now, caught, the White House simply swaggers on,

undeterred, a new pinnacle of brazenness for this already

chutzpah-rich administration.

 

The administration has been caught repeatedly circulating phony news

reports that promote its policies -- the Medicare prescription

legislation, the anti-drug program, gains in air travel security --

and sending them to local TV stations to be broadcast as legit news,

as apparently, and to their discredit, scores of stations did.

 

The practice fits a broader pattern of fakery. Administration agencies

gave lucrative contracts to three conservative columnists, suborning

sycophancy, and salted the White House press corps with a ringer who

could be counted on to ask powderpuff questions whenever the going got

rough at news conferences.

 

The Government Accountability Office's declaration that the fake news

violates laws forbidding covert propaganda has now been countermanded

by Joshua Bolton, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and

Steven Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general, in a

memo instructing government offices to ignore the finding. The Justice

Department's Office of Legal Counsel dissents from the ruling and the

dissent, the memo claims, governs.

 

That defiance converts what could have been rebuked and then dismissed

as bad judgment and shoddy practice into a willful and downright scary

assertion that the president has some near-monarchial authority to

mislead the public as it suits his interest.

 

And adding insult to injury, officials blame the local TV producers.

 

Bill Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human

Services, said, " TV producers who receive our material are clearly

aware where it comes from. To hold us accountable for ethical news

judgment is a bit difficult to understand. "

 

Well, yes, but still that's like the three-card monte swindler blaming

his victim for being a sucker.

 

The core issue here is not just some quibble about legal

technicalities or just another bureaucratic snit over whose department

rules. It is a matter of bedrock ethics.

 

Even if it were lawful for an administration to manufacture

counterfeit news in hopes that some useful number of stations will

abet the fraud by fobbing the stuff off as their own, the resort to

that deception would be no less appalling, manipulative and cynical.

 

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0321-29.htm