More and more, we’re moving towards a government where there is indeed an official line — and you toe it, or else:
The CIA has imposed new and tighter restrictions on the books, articles, and opinion pieces published by former employees who are still contractors with the intelligence agency. According to several former CIA officials affected by the new policy, the rules are intended to suppress criticism of the Bush administration and of the CIA. The officials say the restrictions amount to an unprecedented political “appropriateness” test at odds with earlier CIA policies on outside publishing.
The move is a significant departure from the CIA’s longtime practice of allowing ex-employees to take critical or contrary positions in public, particularly when they are contractors paid to advise the CIA on important topics and to publish their assessments.
What’s interesting about this National Journal piece is this: what we have seen increasingly under the Bush administration is that more and more the goalposts are being systematically moved so that members of the Republican party who once would scream bloody political murder about this and other matters 2, 5, 10 or 15 years ago now placidly go along with it. It’s as if the Bush administration is being given a blank check by GOPers to put in place the kind of Big Government with Ultra Powers that Republicans used to vigorously try to keep from materializing. Congressional “oversight?” Who needs it. Whistle-blowers? How 20th-Century! Former employees writing anything that might hurt The Powers That Be? Why allow it (it might lose votes)? MORE:
All current and former CIA employees have long been required to submit manuscripts for books, opinion pieces, and even speeches to the agency’s Publications Review Board, which ensures that the works don’t reveal classified information or intelligence sources and methods. The board has not generally factored political opinions into its decision-making, former CIA officials say. But in recent years, former employees have written memoirs and opinion pieces challenging the CIA and the Bush administration, particularly for its use of prewar intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. The board did not find that any of those pieces revealed secrets, a fact that makes the CIA’s new review standards troubling, former officials and intelligence-community analysts said.
Many of those experts believe that public criticism provides an important source of alternative analysis — something the CIA needs to understand terrorism, global disease, and other emerging threats. But the White House and CIA Director Porter Goss view spies-turned-authors as political liabilities who embarrass an already battered administration, former officials said. The CIA is now aggressively investigating — using polygraphs in some cases — employees who are suspected of leaking classified information to journalists, and last week the agency said it fired a senior official, Mary O. McCarthy, reportedly for having unauthorized contact with the news media.
Folks who if this had been done under the Clinton administration would have been screaming on talk radio shows, angrily emailing their elected representatives, and donating money to get politicians in place to combat this now look the other way, or just go along with it.
If you hear a noise tonight, it is probably the sound of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater turning over in their graves.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.