Huston, we have a problem.
So remarked a worried Richard Nixon back in 1971.
The worry was that teamsters, nuns, Trotskyites and suchlike were storming the streets of the crystal cities of the USA demanding that he stop killing Cambodians.
The administration had been carpet-bombing Cambodia since the previous year, ostensibly to stop the Vietnamese resistance using the territory as sanctuary and as a route for resistance fighters from the North infiltrating South Vietnam.
The bombing ceased in 1973, when Congress cut off funds.
The reason Congress took this tough line was not just that a majority was opposed to bombing Cambodia “back to the stone age” (Henry Kissinger), but that the entire enterprise was illegal. The US was not at war with Cambodia. The President did not have authority without recourse to Congress to order an attack on a sovereign State, much less daily and devastating attacks over a prolonged period.
Said Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield: “It’s as clear-cut as can be that this is an abuse of power. The only way to face up to our responsibilities, the only way to do it effectively, is to cut the purse strings.”
It wasn’t solely in relation to the bombing that Nixon had abused power. He had also trampled on the constitution to suppress opposition to the bombing.
The B52 onslaught on Cambodia had transformed the terrain of one of the poorest countries on earth into a moonscape sculpted from mud. Lawyers, college students, suburban mums and brothers off the block were marching arm-in-arm, demanding that the President resign. Mainstream newspapers carried stories from deep within the administration, itemising moral corruption in pursuit of an immoral war. Nixon, dumbfounded, demanded to be told how this wave of dissent could have arisen. The administration, he reckoned, needed far more accurate intelligence on what was afoot in US society.
Deputy White House Counsel Tom Huston was dispatched to liaise with the CIA, the FBI and the various intelligence agencies and to come back with a plan. Thus, the Huston Plan, involving wire-taps, burglaries, mail openings, black-bag jobs, the infiltration of organisations suspected of harbouring anti-war sentiment and so on.
Huston explained to Nixon that most of these activities were illegal. Nixon signed the order approving them anyway.
It was this subversion of civil rights at home, as much as the trashing of law to wage war abroad, which provided the tipping point in Congress in 1973 and ensured that funding for the bombing was cut off.
Nixon was forced out of office under threat of impeachment the following year. It was to be a further three years before he spoke publicly about the abuses which had brought his career to a close – in an interview with David Frost, broadcast in June 1977, 30 years ago this month.
Frost: “So what, in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the President can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal?”
Nixon: “Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Frost: “By definition?”
Nixon: “Exactly. Exactly. If the President, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the President’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law.”
Fast forward to 2005. The US is locked into another war of dubious legality. The New York Times reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring letters, e-mails and telephone conversations and using high-tech surveillance to record the movements and exchanges between thousands of individuals and groups across the country. The revelations come amid a Congressional debate over re-authorisation of the Patriot Act, passed after September 11, giving the FBI power to conduct secret searches and surveillance. Operations under the Patriot Act are overseen by a secret court which must approve applications for wiretaps, searches etc. Some have doubts about the constitutionality of this practice. But there is little doubt about the NSA operation, governed by no act, outside the purview of any court, with no authorisation of any kind other than the personal go-ahead of the President.
“This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration,” says Kate Martin, director of the Centre for National Security Studies. “It’s clear that the administration has authorised criminal activity,” adds Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union.
It’s just as clear that the big difference between Nixon then and Bush now is that people in Nixon’s day did give a damn. Enough of them, anyway, to organise to drive the miscreant from office. But not this time.
Anti-war sentiment was the main factor in delivering the Democrats a majority in both Houses of Congress last November. But in the first and key test of commitment to ending the war, the Democrats last month capitulated to the administration and ratified an emergency appropriations bill for $100 billion of additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
No senior Democrat echoed Mansfield’s 1973 declaration that, “The only way to face up to our responsibilities... is to cut the purse strings.”
During a debate between declared Democratic presidential contenders in New Hampshire on June 3, carried live on CNN, none of the front runners – Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards – advocated withdrawal from Iraq. Not one. The furthest any would go was to envision redeployment from combat to garrison duty, with “quick-reaction strikes” against “terrorists”. All supported the retention of tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for the indefinite future, with thousands more on stand-by in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf.
The question of impeaching Bush for his resort to criminality and attacks on civil liberties didn’t rate a mention during two hours-plus of debate.
The role of the media, too, stands in contrast to the defence of civil liberties offered by mainstream outlets during the Nixon years. We can be certain there’s no re-make of “All the President’s Men” in development at the moment.
The NY Times had the gen on Bush’s NSA surveillance operation for a year before publishing. Senior executives have been frank in admitting that the reason they held off was that the White House had asked them to. They put the facts into print only upon learning that a Times staffer was about to reveal all in a book.
Even now, the major US newspapers, including the NY Times, and news agencies including Reuters and Associated Press, routinely refer to Bush “secretly authorising” the NSA’s activities, or “granting powers” to the agency, as if Bush actually possessed these powers and the only matter at issue was the advisability of using them as he did.
The same style is adopted by the BBC and RTÉ.
One of the roles of hotpress over the last 30 years has been to do what we can to hold power to account. It is a more vital role now than it was in the beginning.