A CULTURE OF SECRECY
by CHARLES LEWIS
Charles
Lewis
is the founder and was the executive director (1989-2004) of
the
Center for Public Integrity,
a non-profit, non-partisan watchdog organization in Washington
that does investigative reporting and research on public policy
issues. Under Lewis' direction, Center reports have been honored
by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the Society of
Professional Journalists (SPJ), and others 28 times. Center
findings or perspective have appeared in roughly 8,000 news
media stories since 1990.
Lewis
has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post,
The Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism
Review, The Nation and many other publications. He serves
on the board of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and is
a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative
Reporters and Editors and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
* * * * * * * * * *
In
the world's oldest democracy, pressure on investigative journalists
is usually exerted in sophisticated, non-lethal ways, under
the public radar. Every day in Washington, D.C., thousands of
government and corporate public relations flaks and lobbyists
purvey their "talking points" with a friendly smile,
no matter how odious the client, no matter how intellectually
dishonest or morally dubious their message. Journalists must
trudge through the shameless "spin"-that vanilla word
admiringly used these days instead of "lying," which
has a harshly judgmental, jarringly rude ring in Washington
power circles.
Sometimes
the persuasion becomes less subtle. For example, when the Center
for Public Integrity obtained and prepared to publish online
the secret, proposed draft sequel to the USA Patriot Act, known
as "Patriot II," we got calls from the U.S. Justice
Department beseeching us 'not' to publish.
Over
the years, those unhappy with my investigations have tried just
about everything to discourage our work. They have issued subpoenas,
stalked my hotel room, escorted me off military bases, threatened
physical arrest, suggested I leave via a second-story window,
made a death threat personally communicated by concerned state
troopers who asked that we leave the area immediately (we didn't),
hired public relations people to infiltrate my news conferences
and pose as "reporters" to ask distracting questions,
attempted to pressure the Center's donors, and even brought
expensive, frivolous libel litigation that takes years and costs
millions of dollars to defend.
Being
despised and frozen out by those in power is an occupational
hazard-indeed, a badge of honor-for investigative reporters
everywhere. Certainly no one at the non-partisan Center for
Public Integrity harbors any illusions that he or she will ever
be invited to dinner at the White House. This is hardly surprising
given that the Center broke the Clinton White House "Lincoln
Bedroom" fundraising scandal, first revealed that Enron
was George W. Bush's top career patron and years later disclosed
that Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton,
is by far the Bush administration's favorite contractor in Iraq.
For these impertinent affronts to officialdom, the Center's
reports have received 28 awards from respected journalism organizations
since 1996.
Public
apathy, though, is another matter. Take our 2003 Center report
in which we posted and tallied up all of the major U.S. government
contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan-a project which won the George
Polk Award for online journalism. Center investigators found
that nearly every one of the 10 largest contracts awarded for
work in Iraq and Afghanistan went to companies employing former
high-ranking government officials, and 'all' 10 top contractors
are established donors in American politics, contributing nearly
$11 million to national political parties, candidates, and political
action committees since 1990. And on the eve of the Iraq war,
at least nine of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board,
the government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon, had
ties to companies that had won more than $76 billion in defense
contracts in 2001 and 2002.
The
personal financial disclosure forms of those advisers are secret,
and much about the entire contracting process is deliberately
hidden, and therefore unknown to the public. For example, it
took 20 researchers, writers, and editors at the Center for
Public Integrity six months and 73 Freedom of Information Act
requests, including successful litigation in federal court against
the Army and State Department, to begin to discern who was getting
the Iraq and Afghanistan contracts, and for how much. Why? What
has happened to the principles of accessible information and
transparency in the decision-making process in our democracy?
True,
there is nothing illegal about such cozy, convenient confluences
in the mercenary culture of Washington, D.C. But what does it
say about the state of our democracy that, beyond some spot
news coverage of the Center's findings around the world, there
was almost no reaction or interest by Congressional oversight
committees, which are controlled by Republicans loath to criticize
the Bush administration? Of course, no official reaction means
no second day story, no "hook" for the cautious and
sometimes deferential national news media, no mounting public
awareness or concern, and no political problem. Welcome to business-as-usual
Washington.
Undeterred
by what we had found, we plunged even deeper, producing a report
entitled
Outsourcing the Pentagon,,
in which a team of 23 researchers, writers and editors examined
more than 2.2 million Pentagon contract actions totaling $900
billion spent over six years. This massive nine-month investigative
report profiled the 737 largest Defense Department contractors
who, including their subsidiaries and affiliates, have received
at least $100 million in contracts. Once again, the Center found,
the largest contractors are among the most lavish spenders on
political influence. And, most notably, we found that no-bid
contracts like the infamous one Halliburton received to do business
in Iraq have accounted for more than 40 percent of Pentagon
contracting since 1998. That's at least $362 billion in taxpayer
money given to companies without competitive bidding.
Following
news coverage of our findings, what was the reaction? Another
Washington yawn. There was barely any sign of an official pulse,
let alone government investigative interest or, perish the thought,
outrage. And yet most Americans assume-and expect-that government
contracts are competitively bid, partly because White House,
Pentagon and company officials have, year after year, emphasized
what they want us to know and, like a circus magician, misdirected
our attention away from what would expose them.
A CULTURE
OF LYING
Over
the years, I have investigated and interviewed members of Congress,
presidential candidates, judges, captains of industry, government
spooks, labor union presidents, crooks and terrorists, FBI agents
and Ku Klux Klansmen, billionaires and the homeless, brilliant
thinkers and the mentally deranged. And it is fair to say that
I have been lied to by people in virtually every part of the
United States, in swank marble buildings, smoky bars and dusty
local jails, eyeball-to-eyeball and by phone, fax, email and
hand-delivered letter, in all kinds of imaginative ways, almost
always with a straight face.
The
line between truth and falsehood-between the facts and a veneer
of verisimilitude-has become so blurred as to be indistinguishable.
Increasingly, what the powers that be say has become the publicly
perceived reality, simply because they say it is so.
Take
the war in Iraq. According to national election polling, a majority
of voters for George W. Bush believed that weapons of mass destruction
had been found in Iraq, and months earlier, more than half of
the nation thought Saddam Hussein and Iraq had close ties to
Al Qaeda or were directly involved in the attacks that brought
down the World Trade Towers on September 11th. How could most
Americans be so tragically misinformed, when official U.S. and
international government investigations, widely reported by
the news media, concluded otherwise?
Between
1999 and mid-2004, there were more than 700 specific utterances
by George Bush or Dick Cheney mentioning Iraq, often banging
the war drums in ominous tones; interestingly, there was not
a single sentence explicitly linking Saddam Hussein to September
11. Instead, that was often slyly implied contextually. At the
same time, with some notable exceptions such as Seymour Hersh
of The New Yorker and Walter Pincus of the Washington
Post, investigative news coverage before March 2003 of the Bush
administration's ramp-up to the war in Iraq was under whelming,
to say the least. Daily coverage of government policy pronouncements
and rationales was largely uncritical, almost stenographic.
At
a time in America's history when discerning the truth is more
elusive-and more essential-than ever, the mainstream news media
seem increasingly incapable of playing their traditional watchdog
role and digging out lies and inaccuracies.
The
world of journalism is in a crisis that goes well beyond the
spate of recent, highly-publicized scandals involving fraudulent
or poorly reported stories. The country has witnessed Sumner
Redstone, the chief executive officer of Viacom, home of CBS
News and its hallowed legacy of journalistic excellence dating
back to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, publicly endorse
an incumbent President on the eve of a national election-something
once considered unimaginable. Over the years CBS and many news
organizations have become hollow shells of their former selves,
letting go of hundreds of newsroom people and positions in order
to achieve ever higher profits and corporate consolidation.
The result? Less investigative reporting, reduced scrutiny of
those in power and, ultimately, a more easily bamboozled populace.
The
inadequate picture of reality that emerges is not limited to
politics and government. The fact is, most major news organizations,
particularly broadcasters, failed to recognize and report on
the business lawlessness of the 1990s, in which literally hundreds
of companies-aided and abetted by lawyers, underwriters and
accountants-cooked the books and lied to their shareholders
and federal authorities. Yes, the media did cover the "perp"
walks of CEOs in cuffs at the time of arrest or trial, after
the fact. But that's not investigative journalism. Where was
the high-profile scrutiny when these companies were deregulated,
which enabled their greed, deception and fraud and victimized
millions of employees and shareholders?
Nor
do the American people get "all the news that's fit to
print" when it comes to the political activities of the
media corporations themselves. The Center for Public Integrity
has been exposing their coziness with our national leaders.
News companies claim to objectively cover the President, his
administration and Congress, but lavish hundreds of millions
of dollars on lobbying and political donations in the hopes
of greater deregulation and other favors from them. That included
taking Federal Communications Commission officials on 2,500
all-expense-paid trips over an eight-year period.
What
does it all mean? For the most part, there is little appetite
for investigative journalism. For the "suits" who
control what we read, see and hear, besides potentially alienating
the political power structure against their own company or industry,
thereby possibly jeopardizing millions of dollars in future
profits, this edgy enterprise journalism is not efficient or
cost-effective. It simply takes too much time, requires too
much money and incurs too many legal and other risks. Forget
whether or not this is fair or accurate, or relevant given the
civic obligation broadcasters and publishers have to the communities
they ostensibly serve. It simply is, and it helps to explain
why today we have so little independent, critical reporting
and why instead we are mostly fed a steady diet of pap from
morning to night.
The
problem is made worse by the presence of brilliant communications
tacticians in the White House who cleverly frame their controversial
policy agendas, setting up the class's stenography assignment
for the day, with bold, positive names: "No Child Left
Behind," the "USA Patriot Act," the "Clear
Skies" environmental policy, the "Healthy Forests
Initiative." Needless to say, such Orwellian word ploys-exacerbated
by largely docile, straight news coverage-slip devilishly into
common usage, leaving the public ill-equipped, unprotected and
vulnerable to breathtaking, unabashed manipulation.
THE
POLITICS OF FEAR
That
seismic date in our history, September 11, 2001, enabled those
in power to strengthen the prerogatives of the Presidency in
the name of national security, giving rise to a new politics
of fear which has severely diminished what the public can know
about its government. The Bush administration came to power
already overtly hostile to openness and the public's right to
know. In its first months, for example, it unsuccessfully attempted
to ensconce George W. Bush's gubernatorial documents in his
father's presidential library, outside the state's sunshine
disclosure laws. The White House has tenaciously and more successfully
kept from the American people information about public policy
meetings on public property between energy company executives
and top federal officials. A respected reporter's home telephone
records were secretly seized in order to ascertain his next
story and his confidential sources.
Since
9/11, the country has seen a historic, regressive shift in public
accountability. Open-records laws nationwide have been rolled
back more than 300 times-all in the name of national security.
For the first time in U.S. history, the personal papers of past
presidents now may only be released with White House approval.
A Justice Department "leak" investigation of the White
House regarding an Iraq war-related news story has degenerated
into a full-fledged witch-hunt against the news media and the
First Amendment, with reporters facing imprisonment if they
don't reveal their sources.
Against
this backdrop, thousands of people have been interrogated by
law enforcement officials and hundreds illegally detained-in
many cases held for more than three years without any charges
filed against them, their right to counsel and court review
denied, the customary arrest information withheld. White House
and other senior government officials have defended such policies
(some of which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in June),
as well as the physical and psychological abuse and torture
of foreign prisoners, as essential to the "war on terror,"
disregarding the Geneva Conventions and continuing to systematically
violate human rights.
How
far has the national security state mentality gone? Consider
the issue of political expression. In China last June, the fifteenth
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the government
tightened security in the name of "sound, stable social
order," and scores of dissidents (potential protesters
who might politically embarrass those in power) were harassed,
physically detained and removed from Beijing. The U.S. Government,
via the State Department at its daily briefing, expressed its
concern "about the harassment, house arrest, detention
and any other restrictions . . . We call on the Chinese government
to respect the right of the citizens to peacefully express their
views."
Yet
two months later, at the Republican National Convention in New
York, more than 1,800 protesters-predominantly non-violent-were
arrested during the days of the convention and kept from public
view, some held for 60 hours without seeing a judge, prompting
a State Supreme Court judge to order hundreds of them released
and finding city authorities in contempt. Civil rights lawyer
Norman Siegel said at the time, "We believe the city's
plan is to keep protesters detained until George Bush leaves
the city tonight." Although Siegel's statement was hotly
denied by authorities, the incident nevertheless represented
the largest number of dissidents arrested at a political convention
in U.S. history, more than Chicago 1968 or Miami 1972. Mayor
Michael Bloomberg's explanation: "The city did what it
was supposed to do: It protected the streets."
Of
course we are not China, where, as New York Times columnist
Nicholas Kristof recently noted, 42 reporters are in prison,
or Russia or Colombia, where according to the Committee to Protect
Journalists, 29 and 30 reporters, respectively, have been murdered
in the past decade. The situation here is nowhere near as tragic
or dire. But more than anytime in recent history, political
authorities in the United States are doing many, many things
in the name of "protecting the streets," to the ominous
detriment of truth in our democracy.
Despite
the inhospitable landscape and the grim nature of the work-forensically
excavating the cold corpus of unvarnished reality-most investigative
reporters would probably grudgingly acknowledge that they are,
to paraphrase John Kennedy, "idealists without illusions,"
with some modicum of hope that things can and should be better
than they are.
Hope
and perspective are essential, for there is much work to be
done.