Message: Don’t Fuck with the Government. They’ll Come After You When You’re Dead
In it’s ongoing effort to keep us safe from finding out how our government functions, Team BushCo is tracking down another leak. You’ll be glad to know that the FBI is going after the late Jack Anderson’s files. His son says no way: (from the NYT)
Mr. Anderson’s family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen.
Mr. Anderson’s son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father’s principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.
“It’s my father’s legacy,” said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist’s nine children. “The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father’s view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they’re up to.”
It sounds like Kevin Anderson isn’t going to let this go and good for him. The FBI is saying that it’s all about the rule of law (those documents were obtained illegally and must be recovered!) and that they need to look for information about AIPAC, a story Anderson’s son said that his father didn’t write about.
The NYT story ends with a cliff hanger:
Mr. Carter of the F.B.I. declined to comment on any connection to the Aipac case or to say how the bureau learned that classified documents were in the Anderson files.
Now that I’d like to have answered. It looks like Enemies Lists outlast the actual enemies.
April 20th, 2006 at 3:40 am
Anderson (and before him, Drew Pearson) were heroes of mine. You raise a good point: how do they know what his files hold? I think the answer is: they don’t.
This is a fishing expedition, designed to find out what embarrassing secrets remain. This is an attempt to intimidate an already weakened MSM. This is not evidence of threatened naional security. It’s evidence of totalitarianism’s tentacles, going after our freedoms like a spreading cancer in our democratic system.
It must be stopped if our Bill of Rights is to be more than used toilet tissue.
April 20th, 2006 at 6:44 am
They’re selective about who they go after. About 10-15 years ago the Washingtonian Magazine profiled Bob Woodward and included a photo of him in his study at home; on a low table or ottoman next to his chair sat a pile of documents. On top was one with a distinctive cover clearly recognizable to all of us “in the business” as being an NSA sensitive compartmented intelligence report. Some interagency gossip ensued, but no one followed up with Mr. W.