waking up from the dark dream?

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/opinion/02RICH.html

"[...] The president's sentiments were no doubt sincere, as is his muscular
pursuit of the killers. But there is still scant evidence to suggest that
he condones the idea of a free press. Not since the Nixon years has an
administration done as much to stymie reporters who specialize in the genre
of investigative inquiry Mr. Pearl was pursuing when he was ambushed. Now
as then, the administration is equally determined to thwart journalists
whether they're looking into a war abroad or into possible White House
favors for a lavish campaign contributor who has fallen into legal peril
(Ken Lay now, Robert Vesco then). [...] We'll never learn who in the
Pentagon concocted this now orphaned idea of peddling fiction to the press,
but it certainly would have been within the expertise of our secretary of
the Army, Thomas White, previously a top Enron executive for 11 years.
Enron had its own myth-making machinery, recruiting employees as actors to
simulate frantic trading activity to fake out Wall Street analysts when
they came to call. The hoax even extended to the building of a
Hollywood-style "trading room" set in Enron's Houston skyscraper.

That bizarre antecedent of the Office of Strategic Influence aside, Enron
may have nothing to do with the war on terrorism, but the Bush
administration is handling it in the same way by feeding the press only
information that serves its own interests. The president advertises his
mother- in-law's loss on Enron ($8,000), but not the killing his father
made on Global Crossing ($4.5 million, according to Business Week) before
less well-connected stockholders were wiped out in its catastrophic
bankruptcy.

Last summer, when Enron was still in clover, the administration announced
that its ethics watchdog, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, had
found Karl Rove innocent of any conflict of interest after it was revealed
that Mr. Rove owned thousands of dollars of Enron stock while deliberating
on national energy policy with Enron executives. What the White House did
not announce was that its ethicist, Mr. Gonzales, was himself a past
recipient of serious Enron campaign money in Texas. President Bush has done
his best to minimize any further revelations about the history of his
team's relations with his biggest backer by depositing his Texas
gubernatorial papers not in the Texas State Library and Archives, where
they'd be subject to the state's tough Public Information Act, but at his
father's presidential library, where they may not be.
  
To fill the news vacuum it enforces on Enron and the war alike, the
administration has come up with a brilliant variation on the defunct Office
of Strategic Influence: creating a full-service line of infotainment. In an
end run around ABC News, the Pentagon has joined with ABC Entertainment to
present its own account of the war, a "reality" series produced by Jerry
Bruckheimer of "Top Gun." As Enron heated up, the White House also gave a
mighty impressive retrospective dramatization of its post-Sept. 11 internal
workings to a Bob Woodward team at The Washington Post. In the ensuing
eight-part epic, even second- rung functionaries like Norman Mineta sounded
like Patton. [...] "