Matthew Engel Tuesday November 19, 2002 The Guardian
The elite American press prides itself on its old-fashioned inaccessibility: grey type, don't-read-me layout, and, on a bad day, totally impenetrable prose. Perhaps the Washington Post has already revealed that Osama bin Laden is working in an attorney's office in downtown DC, but none of us have managed to get to page A27 to read the story.
This tendency may partially explain the strange lack of reaction to news of the return of one John Poindexter: a name that might sound familiar, but which perhaps only the most obsessive pub quizzer could immediately place.
Vice-Admiral Poindexter was national security adviser in the Reagan administration before being named as "the decision-making head" of the Iran-Contra affair, the scheme to sell weapons to Iran to fund anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. He was jailed, but eventually got off, solely because it was ruled that his evidence had congressional immunity.
However, another relevant fact about Washington is that no one disappears. Ambitious functionaries who have once glimpsed the frilly underwear of power can never bring themselves to go back to the winceyette nighties of Peoria. They linger around town: in attorney's offices (with or without Osama) or thinktanks, as lobbyists or academics. Then, when the time is ripe, they creep back into government.
And with the Pentagon currently able to command as many billions of dollars as Donald Rumsfeld demands, this is the moment of opportunity for anyone with rightwing credentials and a half-baked idea. Poindexter has re-emerged as head of a new Pentagon operation - with a $200m annual budget - called the information awareness office.
Its logo gives the flavour: an eye illuminating the world and the slogan "Scientia est potentia" (Knowledge is power). Its main programme is called Total Information Awareness, which means precisely what it says. The object is for the US to build the biggest data-surveillance system ever, to know everything about everyone, everywhere, just in case.
Now you may be of the school of thought that thinks only a terrorist or criminal could worry about the US Department of Defence having access to every imaginable piece of data: emails, credit card records, telephone bills, even - if Poindexter's dreams come true - security camera sightings, whether in its jurisdiction or not. If so, you appear to be in good company because no one here seemed bothered either.
A news agency first put out a report almost a month ago. There was no newspaper coverage at all until a story in the New York Times three weeks later. Finally, on Thursday, the Times columnist William Safire got into the subject with a ferocious attack on the plan, headed "You are a suspect". This was followed up on the front page of the Washington Times the following day.
Bear with me: these names are significant. Safire, once Richard Nixon's speech writer, is the leading Republican-minded columnist on his paper, and the Washington Times - owned by the Moonies - is almost certainly the most rightwing newspaper on earth.
Where, you might ask, was the famous liberal press? Where was the political opposition? If the Tories came back to power in Britain and some old scapegrace - Jonathan Aitken or Neil Hamilton - was quietly rehabilitated and handed oodles of money to construct a scheme like this, wouldn't someone in the Labour party ask a question or two?
In so far as they were awake at all, the Democrats turned out to be implicated. According to the Washington Times, the proposal was actually included in the Democrats' own version of the homeland security bill, the final wording of which is still being bickered over, though hardly debated, in the Senate.
As of yesterday morning, the only active politician on record on the subject was Bob Barr, a Republican congressman also associated with the extreme right, who called the whole thing "outrageous", but added: "In defence of members of Congress, many don't read the whole legislation and very few people read the fine print." However, the New York Times' editorialists finally woke up yesterday and advised: "Congress should shut down the programme pending a thorough investigation."
What the fallout from September 11 revealed was that the US government is not so much short of information, as incapable of sifting what it has. You might have thought that rectifying this situation would be an important question for full debate in the legislature and media of a free society. Two weeks ago someone at the Pentagon told me sharply that the American political system "worked perfectly". Analyse and discuss.
matthew.engel at guardian.co.uk