Dispatches from the Culture Wars

The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut today produces an extreme piece of government-serving, stenographic "journalism," publishing a dubious administration press release masquerading as a lengthy news article on Obama's approach to Terrorism and civil liberties. The Post depicts Obama as heavily and heroically engaged in disrupting the alleged Najibullah Zazi domestic terrorist plot and -- repeatedly highlighting that success -- claims "the White House has been charting a delicate course as it attempts to turn the page on Bush-era anti-terrorism policies," whereby "the Obama administration is increasingly confident that it has struck a balance between protecting civil liberties, honoring international law and safeguarding the country." Here are all of Kornblut's cited sources for the article -- every last one of them -- in the order she cites them:

Obama aides pointed . . . administration officials said . . . a senior administration official said . . . officials said . . . a senior administration official said . . . senior Obama officials stressed . . . a senior administration official said . . . aides said . . . officials said . . . one senior administration official said. . . . one senior official said. . . . The official said . . . a senior administration official said . . . a senior administration official said . . . administration officials said . . . . a senior official said.

Not a single named person is cited, and there's not a syllable of quoted dissent in any of it. Virtually every sentence in the long article does nothing but praise Obama and depict him as stalwartly safeguarding America's civil liberties (unlike Bush did) even as he protects us from the dangerous Terrorists, so why is anonymity needed for that? It's nothing more than what Robert Gibbs is eager to say every day. Nor is there a hint of who these officials are, what the basis is of their knowledge, or why The Post granted anonymity, all of which are flagrant violations of the Post's own so-called "anonymity rules," which its own Ombudsman -- just six weeks ago -- complained are "routinely ignored"...

That's because what happened here is obvious: the administration wanted to issue a Press Release exploiting the fear surrounding the Zazi case to justify Obama's Bush-copying civil liberties policies (including its current demands for full Bush-era Patriot Act renewal and FISA continuation) while depicting Obama as our careful yet forceful protector. So they dispatched an official (or officials) to dictate the sanctioned administration line to Anne Kornblut. She then unquestioningly wrote it all down (after granting them anonymity) and The Post uncritically published it as a "news article." That's what Washington journalists typically mean by "reporting": we dutifully write down what government officials tell us to say -- while letting them hide behind anonymity -- and then we publish it. This morning's Post article is as egregious as it gets.

Greenwald is right. This is lazy journalism. Kornblut might as well have just allowed Robert Gibbs to ghost write the article for her. Hell, maybe she did. In reality, the Obama administration has not deviated from the Bush administration at all on these matters. They are pushing for a complete reauthorization of the Patriot Act and FISA as amended -- and made worse, not better -- by Congress last year, after Obama flip flopped on telecom immunity and virtually everything else and supported a bill he had pledged to filibuster.

Obama has zealously defended the NSA's data mining program, which is clearly unconstitutional, and continues to argue that no one has any legal standing to challenge any actions taken by the executive branch, and that even if someone could prove legal standing, the executive branch has absolute sovereign immunity against any legal challenge - never mind that FISA specifically authorizes such legal challenges for violations of that law. Greenwald points out all of that too:

The Post claims Obama is "attempt[ing] to turn the page on Bush-era anti-terrorism policies"; that "Obama discarded the term 'global war on terror,' along with some of its most controversial tools"; and "the Obama administration is increasingly confident that it has struck a balance between protecting civil liberties, honoring international law and safeguarding the country." But this is just plainly false. What has characterized the Obama administration's approach to terrorism and civil liberties, far more than anything else, is a full-scale embrace of the defining Bush/Cheney approach. The only two examples Kornblut cites to justify these claims -- that Obama jettisoned "enhanced interrogation techniques and secret prisons" -- prove little, since the formal authorization for such interrogation techniques was already withdrawn when Obama took office and secret prisons were already empty.

But even granting the significance of those first-week measures, the Obama administration has aggressively defended, justified and embraced the overwhelming bulk of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies -- the exact ones that caused liberals and Democrats to object so vehemently over the last eight years: imprisonment with no trials, maintaining a legal black hole at Bagram, military commissions, renditions, warrantless eavesdropping, claims of state secrets to prevent judicial review of presidential lawbreaking, legal immunity for all but the lowest-level war criminals, abuse-guaranteeing Patriot Act powers, impenetrable walls of secrecy in the national security context. The very idea that Obama has been "attempt[ing] to turn the page on Bush-era anti-terrorism policies" is ludicrous: blatant administration propaganda. Even among huge numbers of Obama-supporting progressives, there has long been a consensus that Obama's Terrorism approach is defined by a full-scale embrace of the Bush/Cheney mentality. Civil liberties groups have been astonished and horrified in equal parts by the Obama record in this area...

Reining in the excesses of the Patriot Act (and, relatedly, of ever-expanding eavesdropping powers) has long been a top agenda item for civil liberties groups -- and, at least so they claimed, for Democrats generally. In fact, when Obama voted for the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 last year in the middle of the campaign, he emphatically vowed that he would "fix" the problems with the FISA framework. But right as these reforms are finally being considered, the administration seizes on the Zazi case to insist that no such changes should be made:

At the same time, the Obama administration is pressing Congress to move swiftly to reauthorize three provisions of the USA Patriot Act set to expire in late December. They include the use of "roving wiretaps" to track movement, e-mail and phone communications, a tool that federal officials used in the weeks leading up to Zazi's arrest. . . .

"The Zazi case was the first test of this administration being able to successfully uncover and deal with this type of threat in the United States," a senior administration official said. "It demonstrated that we were able to successfully neutralize this threat, and to have insight into it, with existing statutory authorities, with the system as it currently operates."

So the Obama administration has its first allegedly big Terrorism case, and they can hardly contain themselves as they exploit it to justify a continuation of the very Patriot Act and FISA powers which Democrats (and, in the case of FISA, Obama himself) long claimed to oppose. Indeed, key Obama ally Dianne Feinstein has worked diligently in the Senate not just to block Patriot Act reforms, but to make the law even worse, and has repeatedly cited the Zazi case to justify that.

Now here's the irony. Fox News comes along and takes the same position in defense of the current statutory scheme of FISA and the Patriot Act but claims that the Democrats are out to weaken those statutes and take away the most powerful tools against terrorism. And Julian Sanchez absolutely rips that argument to shreds in this video:

Here's the truth about this whole thing: The Democrats will end up rubber stamping a reauthorization of the Patriot Act and its worst provisions, led by President Obama, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. The Republicans and the right wing media will still claim that any single provision that changes those laws to add even the most meaningless safeguard is an attempt by terror-loving liberals to destroy America.

And the only ones who will be telling the truth about it without regard to partisan considerations will be consistent civil libertarians like Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler, Nat Hentoff, Julian Sanchez and other libertarians, and -- if you'll pardon the self-promotion -- me. Oh, and Russ Feingold. And maybe Chris Dodd.

But the so-called "liberal media" like the Washington Post and the right wing media like Fox News will agree on the substance, while giving it the requisite partisan spin to benefit their benefactors.