They Don't Know Jack

It’s bad enough that Bushco has approved domestic spying in violation of the FISA. It’s bad enough that they planted a partisan at White House press conferences who once ran a military porn web site, with the intention of having this person lob softball questions on behalf of the administration. It’s bad enough that they cherry-picked information from intelligence analysts to support their flimsy case for going to war in Iraq.

Now they want to, in essence, pick a dead man’s bones in search of “classified” information that they want to suppress and, quite possibly, destroy outright.

As reported here by CBS News (and also by TIME Magazine recently), the FBI contacted the family of legendary reporter Jack Anderson recently in order to search Anderson’s files (Anderson died earlier this year at age 83).

This is completely consistent with the Bush mindset of ruling outright as opposed to performing the duties of governance as spelled out for the President of the United States in the Constitution, which, you’ll recall, Bush swore to “preserve, protect, and defend” not once but twice.

Revisiting Bush’s wiretapping scandal, this story from The Nation explains the historical context behind the FISA.

Also from The Nation, this article explains how Bush installed Allen Weinstein as national archivist, a historian who, according to the article, “has been criticized for failing to abide by accepted scholarly standards of openness.” As noted in the article (from two years ago):

Bush's move is part of a larger pattern of expanded White House secrecy, starting with its fight to conceal the names of members of the Cheney energy task force and continuing with the recent effort to prevent the 9/11 Commission from revealing such documents as the now-famous Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001. It's true that all Presidents want to control access to their papers, but it's the responsibility of the archivist to see that access is "free, open, equal, and nondiscriminatory," as the Statement on Standards of the American Historical Association puts it.

This link takes you to a collection of articles on this administration’s penchant for propaganda and disinformation as part of Bush’s “ceaseless push for power” (hat tip to The Existentialist Cowboy).

It would seem that a “tug of war” is coming between the Anderson family and the FBI over the papers in question from the legendary journalist, who was refuted to pick through the garbage of the FBI’s infamous J. Edgar Hoover in search of information. As son Kevin Anderson said, “I wish Dad were around to enjoy it.”

I would argue that, given the times in which we live, it is incumbent on anyone in the online community to carry forward Anderson’s relentless legacy of holding people in power accountable for their wrongdoing because, as Spencer Tracy noted so prophetically in the film “Inherit The Wind,” “fanaticism and ignorance are forever busy, and need feeding.”

Update: Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky "stare down the beast" in Anderson-esque fashion here.