May 23, 2006
General Hayden and the "Corrosiveness Index."
by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
So there was General Michael Hayden doing his best Ollie North impersonation. Standing ramrod straight. Wearing his full dress uniform with medals and ribbons flashing in the TV lights. Supposedly there to answer Senators’ questions about his qualifications and plans for the CIA. However, given his directorship of the warrantless domestic spying program that has been going on for some years now, questions about it were raised as well. And so there was the General following Col. North’s Republican political playbook, which was originally written by Lee Atwater, the god-father of modern Republican Assault Politics: "Always Attack, Never Defend." He tells inquiring (Democratic) Senators that they, and that awful traitorous media too, should be ashamed of themselves for looking into the fact that he has for some years now been running a program that clearly violates the provisions of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Just in case you, dear reader, don’t carry that text around in your head, here it is, in full:
AMENDMENT IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Of course, Gen. Hayden tells us that everything he has done is "legal." So listen, the next time you rob a bank and get arrested, just tell the cops: "I’m using the Hayden Standard for determining legality: if I say it’s legal, it’s legal, and I say it’s legal" and everything will be alright, don’tchaknow. The General went on to tell the Committee that "media reports about the warrantless surveillance program have had a ‘corrosive effect’ on the nation’s intelligence gatherers" (Stone, A., "Hayden says NSA program is legal," USA Today, May 19-21, 2006, p. 1).
Now I know that the military likes rankings of potential harms-to-the-nation, likes levels of threat indexes, and so forth. So given that the Gen. thinks that inquiring into whether or not the nation’s intelligence community has suffered "corrosive effects" from revelations that what they are doing violates the Untied States Constitution, the protection of which is one of the reasons the Georgites gave for their War on Iraq, I wonder what "corrosiveness ratings of effects on the US intelligence community" he would give to the following:
1. The falsification of intelligence by the Bush Administration to justify the War on Iraq.
2. The use of CIA and possibly other intelligence service personnel to carry out Administration justified torture, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which are part of the US Constitution.
3. The use by the CIA of "rendition" of selected prisoners to other countries, presumably to subject them to torture levels above and beyond what the CIA would engage in itself.
4. The outing of a CIA agent who apparently played a vital part in the US program to prevent nuclear proliferation, especially to countries like Iran.
5. The possible involvement of the CIA in domestic spying itself, clearly in violation of the Statute establishing it.
6. The steady erosion of the CIA’s ability to conduct human intelligence, under the Georgites.
7. The early retirement of a large number of senior intelligence officials in the face of Georgite "let the facts reported fit what we have decided to do anyway" intelligence "policy," and their replacement at the top by political cronies with no significant intelligence leadership experience, especially under the direction of the General’s predecessor at the CIA, Porter Goss.
We should all await with interest the publication of the General’s "corrosiveness
index" for these policies and actions.
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) a weekly Contributing Author for The Political Junkies (www.thepoliticaljunkies.net) and a Columnist for BuzzFlash.