From Murray Waas who examines not only the hypocrisy of the Bush administration and the GOP when it comes to leaks, he looks at the way the Bush team is using this as a weapon to silence and squelch his political enemies. It's Kremlinesque:
In a response to questions for this article, Times Editor Bill Keller said in an e-mail that he believed the Bush White House is on a campaign to intimidate the press. "I'm not sure journalists fully appreciate the threat confronting us," Keller wrote. "The Times in the eavesdropping case, the Post for its CIA prison stories, and everyone else who has tried to look behind the war on terror."The Bush effort to destroy the press will leave us with Fred Hiatt, the Washington Times and FOX News. It's bad enough now, but imagine that. The way things are going historians may have to examine whether this lack of scrutiny got us into a war with Iran, too?
Keller asserted that "there's sometimes a vindictive tone in the way [administration officials] talk about dragging reporters before grand juries and in the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public's business risk being branded traitors." He warned that journalists possibly are "suffering a bit of subpoena fatigue. Maybe some people are a little intimidated by the way the White House plays the soft-on-terror card. Whatever the reason, I worry that we're not as worried as we should be."
On the issue of leak investigations, one former senior intelligence official said that the Bush administration has targeted "leaks and leakers they don't like, while turning a blind eye to those they do like, or [leaks] they do themselves." Should this continue, the former official said, it would set a "dangerous precedent in that any president will be able to control the flow of information regarding any policy dispute.... When historians examine this, they will see that is how we got into war with Iraq."
This is scary stuff -- and the hypocrisy is monumental. If Bush cared about prosecuting leakers, Karl Rove would be in jail. And the Waas article reminds us that Senator Pat Roberts would be too.
