ANTHONY LEWIS, PENTAGON PAPERS, FIRST AMENDMENT, HAMDI, YOO, ENEMY COMBATANTS

Inside the Pentagon Papers

edited by John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter

University Press of Kansas, 248 pp., $29.95

Anthony Lewis covered the U.S. Supreme Court for many years for the N.Y. Times, which included the Vietnam and Watergate eras. His Gideon's Trumpet describes Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the right of a person accused of a crime to have a lawyer, paid for by the public purse. The Public Defender, in California, the Private Defender Program, in some counties, Legal Aid in New York, and other names and arrangements elsewhere, but publicly supported.

Reproduced below, from the New York Review of Books, is his review of a book covering what the many volumes of the Pentagon Papers contained and the significance of the subsequent legal proceedings in which the government tried to enjoin publication by the N.Y. Times.  When the Times was enjoined, Katherine Graham bet all she had, the Washington Post, and published them in defiance of the injunction of the Times.  The republic stood.   The injunction was lifted by an uncorruptible judge whose promotion to the Court of Appeals stoodin the balance. 

The case pitted freedom of the press with the governments' interest in avoiding political embarrassment in the guise of "national security."  At the time "national security" was a magical term.  When you invoked it, you won the argument, in any court in the land, just by saying the magic words. 

The Pentagon Papers case exploded the myth (when used to hide misconduct, lies, incompetence, etc. protected by the false claim) of "national security."  We have armies to do that.  We don't need lying or self-deluded-by-their-own-importance government lawyers to do it for us. 

Today some of us look on those who argue "national security" as no better than the alleged patriot who wraps himself in the flag to bolster his lack of argument.

All of which simply means that one of the most significant results of the Vietnam experience is that the people who lived through it, many of them, have developed a well-earned sense of skepticism when the government hollers "national security."  The louder it screams, the phonier it must be.  Show me the evidence, I'm from Missouri, is the skeptics attitude, willing to be convinced, but only after seeing for himself. 

We want no more Colin Powells telling the U.N., the U.S., and the world, in essence, "I have seen the evidence and it is good," only to discover to his lasting embarrassment that he'd gulled himself, and been gulled, by his wishful thinking, and others in the Administration, over the already-made decision to go to war on Saddam's Iraq because it supposedly had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), i.e. nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (NBC), when they hadn't.

After we get past the flag waving and the magical incantations, maybe we can have a reasoned discussion.

Mr. Lewis compares the fight between the press and a corrupt president (Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon, resigned in disgrace) and his equally corrupt attorney-general (John W. Mitchell, resigned, convicted, jailed) to the fight between Pres. George W. Bush and the people held incommunicado and without representation in Guantanamo and Charleston naval brig, on the pretext of being "enemy terrorists."

The ultimate question is who is a greater to the United States, an enemy combatant against our wide array of military force, or a president who claims extra- (meaning "un'-") constitutional powers.

The penultimate question is who can better be trusted to know what's really going, the president and his political-crony henchmen or the American public?  You or them.

You'll have to make up your own mind on this.