The New York Times and the threat to cancel the November election

By Barry Grey

It took the New York Times six days to respond editorially and
publish more than a news brief on the revelation that the Bush
administration had initiated internal discussions on the possible
cancellation of the November presidential election.

Newsweek magazine broke the story on Sunday, July 11, revealing that
the Homeland Security Department had requested a detailed analysis
from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel on the legal
basis for postponing the elections in the event of a terrorist attack
on or around Election Day.

Even the initiation of contingency planning for such an action
clearly represented an ominous and unprecedented threat to the most
basic democratic rights of the American people-especially coming from
a government that had been installed through the suppression of votes
and had seized on 9/11 as the pretext for launching wars, attacking
civil liberties, and riding roughshod over the Constitutional system
of checks and balances.

Nevertheless, the so-called "newspaper of record" remained
essentially silent on the matter for nearly a week. What the Times
finally did print, in its edition of Saturday, July 17, was a news
story and editorial focusing on official disavowals of any intention
of postponing the election. These pieces treated the entire question
as an unfortunate, but not particularly significant, political
gaucherie. As the headline of its editorial, "A Bad Idea, Rejected,"
implied, the affair had been resolved, and there was nothing more to
be said.

Behind the pose of bemused nonchalance was something quite different.
The real attitude of the Times could be summed up as, "The least
said, the better!"

Very little has been revealed about the Bush administration
discussions on canceling the elections. What are the names and
positions of those involved? What scenarios were discussed as the
basis for calling off the elections? What would the disaster
threshold be for such an extraordinary action? Under what mandate,
and on the basis of what emergency powers, would the present
government continue to rule?

None of this has been probed, but the Times has no interest in
pursuing its own investigation and seeking to place the facts before
the American people. On the contrary, its operating principle is to
conceal the dangers and keep the people in the dark.

The very placement of its articles demonstrates this. The Times
waited until Saturday, a slow news day, when its daily readership is
presumably at its weekly low point, to go into print on the election
threat. It inconspicuously buried its news article on page 10, and
led with Justice Department denials that it had ever considered plans
to delay the election. But the very facts the Times reported belied
its attempt to present the question as a settled issue.

The article noted that the Justice Department denied having ever
received a request from Homeland Security to look into the
possibility of postponing the elections, while Homeland Security
continued to insist it had made such a request. The Times passed over
this stunning contradiction without comment.

The editorial contained even more glaring contradictions and non-
sequiturs, raising more questions about the threat to the elections
and the Times’ own role than it answered. The newspaper wrote that it
was "troubling" to hear reports during the week that the Bush
administration was considering the possibility of postponing the
November election in the event of a terrorist attack. It said
DeForest Soaries, the chairman of the US Election Assistance
Commission, had set off a "firestorm" by raising the issue.

Why then, in the face of such "troubling" developments and the
consequent political "firestorm," had the New York Times remained
silent? Anyone who looked to the Times for news and political
commentary would have known next to nothing about the matter.

Suggesting that the motives of those Bush administration officials
involved were of the most innocent sort, the Times went on to
say, "However well-meaning they may have been, the inquiries were
greeted with cynicism." The editorial cited the statements of
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Soaries denying any
intention of postponing the elections, and declared: "It is good that
the issue was raised now and resolved."

With this combination of willful blindness, complacency and
dishonesty, the Times declared the matter "resolved." Really? What
about the bizarre press conference held only days before Newsweek
broke the story, at which Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge,
citing as a precedent the March train bombings in Madrid, announced
that Al Qaeda was in the "operational stage" of carrying out a
terrorist attack on the United States aimed at disrupting the
elections? What about the statements made last week by members of the
Election Assistance Commission who said that individual states could,
on their own, cancel the elections, or strip voters of the right to
vote for president by having the presidential electors appointed by
state legislatures?

The Times, by implication, accepted as good coin the most innocent,
and least credible, explanation for the Bush administration’s
internal discussions on canceling the elections: namely, that they
arose on the basis of sound "intelligence" gathered by the Homeland
Security Department, the CIA, FBI and other agencies. This readiness
to accept the word of Ridge and company was evidently unaffected by
the conclusion reached by the Senate Intelligence Committee in its
report released two weeks ago that all of the government’s claims of
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and close ties between Saddam
Hussein and Al Qaeda used to justify the invasion of Iraq were false.

Despite the mountain of evidence that the Bush administration lied
about the Iraqi "threat" to the American people, that it secretly
uses torture against alleged Iraqi insurgents and alleged terrorist
captives, and despite its unexplained refusal to take steps to
prevent the 9/11 attacks even though it had ample advance warning-the
Times implies that any questioning of the government’s motives is
illegitimate.

Those who run the newspaper know better. They know that the Bush
administration is led by a gang of political criminals, who came to
power illegitimately and have ruled by means of conspiracy and
provocation. They cannot be blind to the fact that Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld and company have no brief for democratic rights or the
Constitution, and are capable of employing extra-legal methods to
hold onto power.

Given the acute crisis of the Bush administration, the undeniable
growth of mass antiwar sentiment, and the many indications, including
the official opinion polls, that Bush’s reelection is in serious
doubt, the danger of some kind of election-eve provocation is very
real.

The editors of the Times are likewise well aware that the entire week
when they were maintaining their discreet silence, the political
establishment was embroiled in a furious debate over the moves of the
Bush administration toward canceling the November election. The top
personnel of the newspaper were very likely involved in efforts to
extract from the Bush administration "plausible denials" that would
enable the media to conceal from the people the conspiracies being
hatched against their democratic rights.

The newspaper waited until the appropriate soporific denials had been
made and the turmoil within the establishment had subsided to go into
print and declare the matter "resolved."

Such deliberate deception is nothing new for the New York Times. In
March 2002, for example, when the Washington Post published a front-
page exposé of the fact that the Bush administration had secretly
established a "shadow government," supposedly as a precaution against
a nuclear terrorist attack on the US capital, the Times published
only two perfunctory articles on the subject, and failed to make an
editorial comment.

The Bush administration action-which remains in effect-constituted an
unprecedented threat to democratic and constitutional procedures. By
executive order, the White House set up a government-in-waiting,
consisting of 100-150 unelected executive branch officials, who live
in fortified bunkers in mountainous regions of the East Coast,
serving 90-day rotations while holding themselves ready to assume
full powers in the event of a nuclear attack on Washington.

No officials of the legislative or judicial branches are included,
and neither the elected party leaders in Congress nor those in the
constitutional line of succession to the presidency were even aware
of the program’s existence.

This shadow government provides an indication of the type of regime
that would emerge in the aftermath of a canceled election. It would
be a dictatorship based on the military and the police.

The existence of this police-state-in-waiting underscores the fact
that the internal government discussions about postponing or
canceling elections have little to do with a potential terrorist
attack. Were a massive attack on the scale of 9/11 to occur during
the elections, it would obviously have highly disruptive
ramifications—as would a major natural disaster. But no previous
American government, including those that held power during two world
wars and even through the Civil War, raised the possibility of a
hostile attack or some other calamity as justification for postponing
or canceling a national election.

The use, moreover, of real or invented terrorist threats as the
prextext for reactionary measures is hardly a novelty for the Bush
administration. This government has, since 9/11, deliberately sought
to create an atmosphere of fear and panic in order to justify
its "war on terror" abroad and its onslaught on democratic rights at
home, including the establishment of the Homeland Security Department
and the passage of the Patriot Act.

Whether or not the administration actually seeks to disrupt or cancel
the November election, it has set in motion a political initiative to
create some kind of authority with the power to close down elections
in the future. Already commentaries are appearing in major
newspapers, including the Washington Post, calling for Congress to
authorize the establishment of a bipartisan, "neutral" panel that
will have the power to postpone or cancel a national election.

An appropriate analogy to the use of terrorism as the pretext for
such a repudiation of democracy is the infamous Reichstag Fire of
February, 1933. Hitler and the Nazis seized on the burning of the
parliament building to create an atmosphere of hysteria and fear and
push through parliament a law abrogating parliamentary procedures,
revoking democratic rights, and establishing a police state in which
Hitler exercised virtually unlimited powers. A congressional
authorization to cancel a US election would be the modern, American
equivalent of Hitler’s "Enabling Act" of March, 1933.

It is clear from the contemptible role of the New York Times in
relation to the current conspiracy against the right of the people to
vote, and the Bush administration’s offensive against democratic
rights as a whole, that this erstwhile voice of American liberalism
would do nothing to seriously oppose such a development. The
dishonest and politically reactionary role of the Times underscores
the collapse of liberalism and the lack of any serious commitment
within the political establishment to the defense of democratic
rights.

Those sections of the ruling elite represented by the Times, which
look with foreboding at the ever more open moves to dismantle the
traditional procedures of bourgeois democracy, fear above all the
danger of a massive social and political reaction from below. They
seek to restrain the most reactionary sections of the ruling class
with appeals to reason and moderation, while doing their best to
politically disarm the working people and prevent them from
mobilizing against the capitalist class to defend their basic rights.

http://wsws.org/articles/2004/jul2004/nyti-j20.shtml