The Progressive Magazine: Bush Worse Than Nixon

This month's issue of the Progressive Magazine has a commentary, The Reign of Secrecy, by editor Matt Rothschild, that examines the comparative need for secrecy in the Nixon and Bush Administrations:

I was speaking with John Dean of Watergate fame a couple of months ago, and he said flat out that the Bush Administration is even more obsessed with secrecy than Nixon’s was. At the time, I thought he might have been engaging in hyperbole. But his assessment looks increasingly accurate...

On the not so secret 'secret' that the government was gathering financial information illegally:

...The New York Times, which was just doing its job in exposing the wholesale gathering of private financial data by the Bush Administration without a warrant.

The Wall Street Journal, a Bush cheerleader, also reported on this story, but Bush and his hatchet men singled out the Times because it serves their political interests to attack a liberal newspaper...

...Representative Peter King...said he would ask Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to “begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times—the reporters, the editors, and the publisher.” (Gonzales needs little encouragement.

I just love it.  The congressional shills go after The New York Times as 'treasonous,' but leave the Wall Street Journal alone. The great irony is that President Bush trumpeted this illegal government activity over a year ago:

But the terrorists surely know that the U.S. government has been tracking their financial transactions. Bush himself has boasted of this...

What is news is not the revelation of the activity but the documentation that it is illegal:

What the Times story revealed, though, was that the Administration may be violating the law and our privacy in the process.

The Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978 says, “No Government authority may have access to, or obtain copies of, the information contained in the financial records of any customer from a financial institution unless the financial records are reasonably described” and “a copy of the subpoena or summons has been served upon the customer or mailed to his last known address.” The government can delay notice to the customer “by order of an appropriate court.” There is an exception for a “legitimate law enforcement inquiry respecting name, address, account number, and type of account of particular customers.”

But, according to the Times article, “Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records.” Nor do any of the customers appear to have been notified, and nor does the government appear to have gone to a judge to delay that notification.

As Rothschild properly concludes:

A lot of what the Bush Administration has been doing over the past five and a half years has been “fundamentally inconsistent with American democracy.”

It’s not just up to the courts, it’s up to all of us to bring our government into line.

The first line of defense for our freedoms is not the lowest bar set by the United States Supreme Court.  It is the highest standard demanded by a people who command their government.

Comments

[antpoppa]

For those who haven’t heard this latest list about the Bush administration, we can hear from John Conyers.
Worse than Nixon? Nixon could at least form a sentence and realize a thought.
John Conyers has a new report called the Constitution in Crisis. This is a preview of next year's reckoning:
The laws implicated by the Administration’s actions include federal laws against making false statements to congress [sic]; federal laws and international treaties prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; federal laws concerning retaliating against witnesses and other government employees; Executive Orders concerning leaking and other misuse of intelligence; federal regulations and ethical requirements governing conflicts of interest; the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; communications privacy laws; the National Security Act; and the Fourth Amendment.