Reflecting on the Gerstein disclosures

Yesterday we noted Josh Gerstein’s New York Sun story on the bureaucratic resistance to the Justice Department’s leak investigations, extending obviously even to the Justice Department itself. The story discloses a scandal, lying in plain sight, but lacking a narrative line that is acceptable to the mainstream media, which is itself a principal in the scandal. Gerstein’s disclosures have therefore been met with silence everywhere but here, National Review Online and Rush Limbaugh. Today’s New York Sun editorial reflections on the Gerstein disclosures are therefore particularly welcome.
Gerstein’s disclosures are only the most recent chapter in the story that we have written about at length and perhaps ad nauseam here. John and I devoted three Standard columns to the subject in late 2005 and early 2006. I took a whack at piecing together the underlying narrative in “Three years of the Condor” and in addressing the legal issues in “Exposure.” John took a whack at the underlying narrative in “Leaking at all costs.” Gerstein’s disclosures add a crucial piece of evidence to the story we have sought to tell.
The bureaucracy — the CIA, the State Department, the Justice Department and others — has waged an unrelenting war on Bush administration foreign policy specifically and on the Bush administration generally. Bureaucrats have waged this war in blatant disregard to their own legal obligations and to the rule of law. At every step of the way, they have waged this war in partnership with the New York Times and the Washington Post. The lack of interest in Gerstein’s story among the mainsteam media is, like the unnamed dog that didn’t bark in the classic Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” a clue to the identity of the wrongdoers. (Thanks to Dr. James Woolery for correcting my “Silver Blaze” reference.)
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