Because the Decider-in-Chief can't keep his pie-hole shut about government secrets either. As Larry Johnson writes over at TruthOut:"Thu Jun 29th, 2006 at 08:37:38 AM EDT
There he goes again. The Leaker in Chief shooting his mouth off and compromising a national security asset in order to win domestic political advantage. Remember when US military forces whacked the terrorist Zarqawi? Well, the President, eager to burnish his image with the American people, rushed to the microphones, where he spilled Top Secret beans by identifying the head of the top secret terrorist unit at Fort Bragg. According to a recent article in Newsweek:
No one would have mentioned his name at all if President George W. Bush hadn't singled him out in public. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, West Point '76, is not someone the Army likes to talk about. He isn't even listed in the directory at Fort Bragg, NC, his home base. That's not because McChrystal has done anything wrong - quite the contrary, he's one of the Army's rising stars - but because he runs the most secretive force in the US military. That is the Joint Special Operations Command, the snake-eating, slit-their-throats "black ops" guys who captured Saddam Hussein and targeted Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi....
After the Zarqawi strike, multinational forces spokesman Gen. Bill Caldwell refused to comment on JSOC's role, saying, "We don't talk about when special operating forces are involved." But when Bush revealed to reporters that it was McChrystal's Special Ops teams that had found Zarqawi, Caldwell had to gulp and say (to laughter), "If the president of the United States said it was, then I'm sure it was."
Way to go George. And we're suppose to take you seriously when you cry about leaks? Because you live in a big glass house I suggest you think twice before tossing any more rocks at the New York Times."
So, when they can keep that jackass quiet, then they can go hassle the NYT and call them treasonous bastards or whatever the hell the rightwingers are tossing about with regard to the story published about the financial data mining the government has been doing...OK?Does anyone remember Daniel Ellsberg and the "Pentagon Papers"? I do..it was a turning point in Nixon's Vietnam War plans...the release of these documents really chafed his ass and finally started waking the public up to what was going on, why and who the assholes were. Reading them as a young adult made me mad, fighting mad..and they helped to make me become an activist against the Vietnam War. An excerpt from the LA Times editorial about publishing secrets, By Dean Baquet and Bill Keller, DEAN BAQUET is editor of the Los Angeles Times. BILL KELLER is executive editor of the New York Times.:
"Thirty-five years ago Friday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people." As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government's passion for secrecy and the press' drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote."
Evidently great minds think alike because the first thing I thought of when this shitstorm started was the Pentagon Papers. We need to remember the past or we are doomed to repeat it. The attack on the MSM's right to publish isn't new, is it? It is always going to piss off the folks running the show in DC if it makes them look stupid, arrogant, fucktarded or any of a host of reactions that intelligent people feel when they read about the shit our government is trying to pull in the back rooms up on the Hill or in the Oval office. I feel the asshats in charge protest too much..they need to shut the fuck up and deal with it. They need to stop threatening the press and people that disagree with their methods... and start getting their shit together. Methinks they doth protest too much..or however that damn quote goes..
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