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Bush imperilling free speech

Sidney Blumenthal

An imperial President is smothering the system of checks and balances.

THE MOST scathing public critique of the Bush presidency and the complicity of a craven press corps was delivered at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner on April 29 by a comedian.

Stephen Colbert performed within 10 yards of George. W. Bush's hostile stare and before 2,600 members of the press and their guests. After his mock praise of Mr. Bush as a rock against reality, Mr. Colbert censured the press by flattering its misfeasance. "Over the last five years you people were so good — over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out ... Here's how it works: the President makes decisions ... The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spellcheck and go home ... Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know — fiction!"

The next day, The New York Times published a front-page story on the latest phase of the administration's war on the press. Mr. Bush is weighing "the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws." Since The Washington Post exposed the existence of CIA "black site" prisons holding detainees without due process of law and The New York Times disclosed the President's order to the National Security Agency to engage in domestic surveillance without legal court warrants, the administration has applied new draconian methods to clamp down.

At Mr. Bush's orders dragnets are being conducted throughout the national security bureaucracy in search of press sources. And the FBI subpoenaed four decades of files accumulated by recently deceased investigative journalist Jack Anderson in an attempt to exhume old classified material.

Some in the press understand the peril posed to the first amendment by an imperial President trying to smother the system of checks and balances.

For those of the Washington press corps who shunned a court jester for his irreverence, status is more urgent than the danger to liberty. But it's no laughing matter. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars.)

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