Why Capitol Pages Fear Retaliation
By Robert Parry
Created Oct 2 2006 - 4:31pm
For generations, American parents have sent their high-school-age children
to Washington to serve as Capitol Hill pages and to learn about the real
world of politics. In the scandal surrounding Rep. Mark Foley's salacious
e-mails, it's clear that one lesson the pages learned was to fear Republican
retaliation.

It now appears that one of the chief reasons why Foley's e-mails remained
secret for so long - and why some former pages still won't speak publicly -
is that they recognize that divulging what Foley did to them could kill
their hopes for future careers in politics.

This fear of retaliation from today's take-no-prisoners Republican power
structure in Washington has been a little-noted subtext to the stories about
Foley's sudden resignation on Sept. 29 over his e-mails to pages since 2003.

The congressional pages who received the "creepy" e-mails "didn't do
anything beside telling other pages about it," said Matthew Loraditch, 21,
who runs the U.S. House Page Alumni Association's Internet message board.
Loraditch, a senior at Towson University, explained that three of the former
pages have refused to comment, citing fear of long-term damage to their
ability to land jobs. [Washington Post, Oct. 2, 2006]

Fear of retaliation also has limited the willingness of adult Republican
staffers from commenting about the Foley case.

"One House GOP leadership aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity for
fear of losing his job, conceded that Republicans had erred in not notifying
the three-member, bipartisan panel that oversees the page system," the
Washington Post reported.

Politics of Fear

In a very perverse way, the story of the e-mails and the pages does
represent one of the fundamental lessons of working in today's one-party
Washington: Whether in politics, intelligence or journalism, avoid doing or
saying anything that offends powerful Republicans.

At Consortiumnews.com, we have addressed this politics of fear before,
noting many examples of retaliation against reporters, intelligence
analysts, political leaders and prominent citizens who have refused to toe
the line.

For instance, in understanding why Washington insiders so thoroughly bought
into George W. Bush's bogus case for war in Iraq, one has to remember the
abuse heaped on anyone who challenged Bush or his rationales.

The critics could expect to be trashed by influential Republicans, taunted
by the powerful right-wing media and treated harshly by mainstream news
outlets, too.

While Bush rarely joined personally in the attack-dog operations, he
maintained a remarkable record of never calling off the dogs, either.

In some cases, such as the punishment of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and
his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, Bush did get his hands dirty. The
President oversaw a campaign to discredit Wilson - which came to include
exposing his wife's covert identity - after Wilson complained about
"twisted" intelligence on Iraq. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Did Bush Lie to
Fitzgerald? [1]"]

But the more typical Bush-on-the-sidelines approach was illustrated by what
happened to the Dixie Chicks, a three-woman country-western band that has
faced more than three years of boycotts because lead singer, Natalie Maines,
slighted Bush before the invasion.

During a March 10, 2003, concert in London, Maines, a Texan, remarked,
"we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Two days
later - just a week before Bush launched the Iraq invasion - she added, "I
feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and
alienating the rest of the world."

With war hysteria then sweeping America, the right-wing attack machine
switched into high gear, organizing rallies to drive trucks over Dixie
Chicks CDs and threatening country-western stations that played Dixie Chicks
music. Maines later apologized, but it was too late to stop the group's
songs from falling down the country music charts.

On April 24, 2003, with the Iraq War barely a month old, NBC News anchor Tom
Brokaw asked Bush about the boycott of the Dixie Chicks. The President
responded that the singers "can say what they want to say," but he added
that his supporters then had an equal right to punish the singers for their
comments.

"They shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want
to buy their records when they speak out," Bush said [2]. "Freedom is a
two-way street."

In that way, Bush made clear that he saw nothing wrong with his followers
hurting Americans who disagreed with him or who caused him trouble.

As CBS's "60 Minutes" reported in a segment on May 14, 2006, the Dixie
Chicks were still haunted by the pro-Bush boycott. "They have already paid a
huge price for their outspokenness, and not just monetarily," said
correspondent Steve Kroft. Sometimes, Bush supporters even turned to threats
of violence.

During one tour, lead singer Maines was warned, "You will be shot dead at
your show in Dallas," forcing her to perform there under tight police
protection, said the group's banjo player, Emily Robison. In another
incident, a shotgun was pointed at a radio station's van because it had the
group's picture on the side, Robison said.

'Whoa, Dude!'

Other celebrities who opposed the Iraq War, such as Sean Penn, faced similar
treatment. Bush's supporters gloated in 2003 when Penn lost acting work
because he had criticized the rush to war.

"Sean Penn is fired from an acting job and finds out that actions bring
about consequences. Whoa, dude!" chortled pro-Bush MSNBC commentator Joe
Scarborough.

Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, cited as justification for
Penn's punishment the actor's comment during a pre-war trip to Iraq that "I
cannot conceive of any reason why the American people and the world would
not have shared with them the evidence that they [Bush administration
officials] claim to have of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." [MSNBC
transcript, May 18, 2003]

In other words, no matter how reasonable or accurate the concerns expressed
by Bush's Iraq War critics, they could expect retaliation.

While highlighting pro-Bush shows like Scarborough's, MSNBC canceled Phil
Donahue's program because it allowed on too many Iraq War critics. In 2003,
MSNBC was determined to wrap itself in the American flag as tightly as Fox
News did.

With Bush's quiet encouragement, his supporters also denigrated skeptical
U.S. allies, such as France by pouring French wine into gutters and renaming
"French fries" as "freedom fries."

Bush's backers also mocked U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix for not finding WMD
in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. CNBC's right-wing comic Dennis Miller
likened Blix's U.N. inspectors to the cartoon character Scooby Doo, racing
fruitlessly around Iraq in vans.

As it turned out, of course, the Iraq War critics were right. The problem
wasn't the incompetence of Blix but the fact that Bush's claims about Iraq's
WMD were false, as Bush's arms inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer
concluded after the invasion.

Political leaders who spoke out faced ridicule, too. In September 2002, when
former Vice President Al Gore presented a thoughtful critique of the dangers
from "preemptive wars" in general and the Iraq invasion in particular, he
was met with a solid wall of denunciations from Fox News to the Washington
Post's Op-Ed page.

Some epithets came directly from Bush partisans. Republican National
Committee spokesman Jim Dyke dismissed Gore as a "political hack." An
administration source told the Washington Post that Gore was simply
"irrelevant," a theme that would be repeated often in the days after Gore's
speech. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2002]

Conservative opinion-makers took aim at Gore from editorial pages, talk
radio and TV chat shows.

"Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered," wrote
Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. "It was dishonest, cheap, low. It
was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas,
very nearly of facts - bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and
embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked
political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man
pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It
was contemptible." [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002]

"A pudding with no theme but much poison," declared another Post columnist,
Charles Krauthammer. "It was a disgrace - a series of cheap shots strung
together without logic or coherence." [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002] At
Salon.com, Andrew Sullivan entitled his piece about Gore "The Opportunist"
and characterized Gore as "bitter."

History of Fear

But this strategy of using the power of modern media to inject career fear
deeply into the Washington political process did not begin with the Iraq
War. In many ways, it can be traced back to the 1970s when Republicans felt
victimized by the Watergate scandal and the exposure of lies that had been
used to justify the Vietnam War.

Conservatives were determined that those twin disasters - losing a
Republican President in a devastating political scandal and seeing the U.S.
population turn against a war effort - should never happen again.

As I describe in Secrecy & Privilege [3], the initial targets of the Right's
strategy in the 1970s and early 1980s were the national news media and the
CIA's analytical division - two vital sources of information at the national
level.

The U.S. press was blamed for exposing President Richard Nixon's dirty
tricks and for spreading dissension that undermined morale in the Vietnam
War. CIA analysts had to be brought under control because the driving
rationale for the conservative power grab was to be an exaggerated threat
assessment of America's enemies.

If the American people saw the Soviet Union as a leviathan coming to swallow
the United States, then they would surrender their tax dollars, their civil
liberties and their common sense.

Conversely, if the CIA analysts offered a nuanced view of the Soviet Union
as a rapidly declining power falling farther behind the West technologically
and desperately trying to keep control of its disintegrating sphere of
influence, then Americans might favor a shift in priorities away from
foreign dangers to domestic needs. Negotiations with the Soviets - not
confrontation - would make sense.

So, one of the first battles fought in this historic neoconservative
conquest of the U.S. government occurred largely behind the walls of the
CIA, beginning in 1976 (under George H.W. Bush's directorship) with the
so-called "Team B" assault on the CIA's fabled Kremlinologists.

In the 1980s, this attack on the professional objectivity of the CIA's
analytical division intensified under the watchful eye of CIA Director
William J. Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates.

Through bureaucratic bullying and purges, the neocons silenced CIA analysts
who were reporting evidence of Soviet decline. Instead, a "politicized" CIA
analytical division adopted worst-case scenarios of Soviet capabilities and
intentions, estimates that justified the Reagan administration's costly arms
buildup and covert wars in the Third World.

This strategy was so successful that the battered CIA analytical division
largely blinded itself to the growing evidence of the coming Soviet
collapse. Then, ironically, when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990, the
neocons were hailed as heroes for achieving the seemingly impossible - the
supposedly sudden collapse of the Soviet Union - while the CIA's analytical
division was derided for "missing" the Soviet demise.

Pressing the Press

The second important target was the U.S. national press corps. The strategy
here was twofold: to build an ideologically conservative news media and to
put pressure on mainstream journalists who generated information that
undercut the desired message.

The so-called "controversializing" of troublesome mainstream journalists was
aided and abetted by the fact that many senior news executives and
publishers were either openly or quietly sympathetic to the neocons'
hard-line foreign policy agenda.

That was even the case in news companies regarded as "liberal" - such as the
New York Times, where executive editor Abe Rosenthal shared many neocon
positions, or at Newsweek, where top editor Maynard Parker also aligned
himself with the neocons.

In the 1980s, reporters who dug up hard stories that challenged the Reagan
administration's propaganda found themselves under intense pressure, both
externally from well-funded conservative attack groups and behind their
backs from senior editors.

The New York Times' Central America correspondent Raymond Bonner was perhaps
the highest profile journalist pushed out of a job because his reporting
angered the neocons, but he was far from alone.

The Reagan administration even organized special "public diplomacy" teams to
lobby bureau chiefs about ousting reporters who were deemed insufficiently
supportive of government policies. [See Robert Parry's Lost History [4].]

To protect their careers, journalists learned that it helped to write
stories that would please the Reagan administration and to avoid stories
that wouldn't.

The same bend-to-the-right dynamic prevailed in the 1990s as mainstream
journalists wrote more harshly about President Bill Clinton than they
normally would because they wanted to show that they could be tougher on a
Democrat than a Republican.

This approach was not journalistically sound - reporters are supposed to be
evenhanded - but it made sense for journalists who knew how vulnerable they
were, having seen how easily the careers of other capable journalists had
been destroyed. [For an extreme example, see Consortiumnews.com's "America's
Debt to Journalist Gary Webb [5]."]

The consequences of these changes in journalism and intelligence became
apparent when the neocons - the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams -
returned to power under George W. Bush in 2001 and especially after the
Sept. 11 terror attacks.

As happened with the hyping of the Soviet threat in the 1980s, a pliant
intelligence community largely served up whatever alarmist information the
White House wanted about Iraq and other foreign enemies.

When an individual analyst did challenge the "group think," he or she would
be called unfit or accused of leftist sympathies, as occurred when State
Department analysts protested Undersecretary of State John Bolton's
exaggerated claims about Cuba's WMD. [See Consortiumnews.com's "John Bolton
& the Battle for Reality [6]."]

Propaganda Game

Meanwhile, in the mainstream media, news executives and journalists were
petrified of accusations that they were "blaming America first" or were
"soft on terror" or didn't sufficiently "support the troops."

News executives transformed their networks and newspapers into little more
than conveyor belts for the Bush administration's propaganda.

Poorly sourced allegations about Iraq's supposed nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons programs were trumpeted on Page One of the New York Times
and the Washington Post. Skeptical stories were buried deep inside.

This fear of retaliation has continued to spread. Academia is now feeling
the heat from right-wingers who want to eliminate what they see as the last
bastion of liberal thought. Corporate leaders also appear to be suffering
from the paralysis of fear.

After traveling to many American cities in 2005, New York Times columnist
Thomas L. Friedman observed that CEOs were staying on the sidelines in
crucial debates about education, energy, budgets, health care and
entrepreneurship.

"When I look around for the group that has both the power and interest in
seeing America remain globally focused and competitive - America's business
leaders - they seem to be missing in action," Friedman wrote. "In part, this
is because boardrooms tend to be culturally Republican - both uncomfortable
and a little afraid to challenge this administration."

So, in the context of Washington political/media society, which has cowered
in fear before the Bush administration and its aggressive right-wing allies
for years, it shouldn't be surprising that bright high school students who
go to Washington to serve as congressional pages would catch on to the most
pervasive message of all:

In a one-party political system in which power in concentrated in a few
hands, it is not wise to offend the people in charge, even when one of them
is writing you sexually offensive e-mails.

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson