Administration officials might not want to read this

from USATODAY.com

"Administration officials might not want to read this" WASHINGTON -- George W. Bush sometimes suggests that he abandoned reading newspapers when he moved into the Oval Office. 'I glance at the headlines just to (get) kind of a flavor for what's moving,' the president told Fox News last September. Bush said during the TV interview that he prefers to get his information from briefings by chief of staff Andy Card and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also seems to have broken his addiction to print. During his surprise whirlwind visit to Iraq on Thursday, Rumsfeld joked while speaking to U.S troops, 'I've stopped reading newspapers. You've got to keep your sanity somehow. I'm a survivor.' For those of us who write words that appear in black type, it is hard to note these developments without a sense of disappointment. When John Kennedy famously canceled the White House subscription to the Republican-leaning New York Herald Tribune, JFK was merely displaying pique at a single newspaper and not dissing the entire journalistic profession. But Rumsfeld's remark, assuming he was at least partly serious, has the makings of a trend. Pretty soon the Bush administration may need to arrange 12-step programs in newspaper avoidance to help top officials maintain psychological equilibrium in troubling times. Editorial pages and, yes, columnists would undoubtedly be the first to go as addiction counselors point the way to print-free recovery. Then the front pages and all news from Iraq. After a week or two of this tough-love regimen, officials battling newspaper withdrawal would be limited to the sports sections and weather maps. Just a year ago, amid the triumphant mood following the fall of Saddam Hussein, newspapers were brimming with praise about Rumsfeld's masterful command in military briefings. Unlike Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld appeared to revel in matching wits with his press critics. For all his grumbling about individual press stories, the Pentagon chief came across as far too confident to ever need to kick the newspaper habit. But the prisoner-abuse scandal and the brutal casualty figures from Iraq have damaged Rumsfeld's reputation. Sure, both Bush and Cheney have gone out of their way to roll out the laudatory adjectives about Rumsfeld's tenure at the Pentagon. But something strange is happening when Rumsfeld feels compelled to declare, even in jest, "I'm a survivor." True survivors endure without challenge rather than proclaiming their determination not to go quietly into retirement. Bush, like any president running for re-election, is also a survivor. And there may come a moment, especially if prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill publicly join the anti-Rumsfeld chorus, when Bush's political self-interest trumps his obvious feelings of personal loyalty. True, Rumsfeld can take comfort in the poll numbers that suggest only hard-core Democrats want him ousted from office. Accountability is an imperfect mechanism in a democracy. Cabinet members serve at the pleasure of the president and can otherwise only be removed from office by impeachment. As a result, Rumsfeld can remain impervious to the public clamor and ignore the newspapers as long as he retains the support of the man in the White House. Congressional shock at the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison brings to mind an earlier firestorm that raced through Capitol Hill. In late 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA had flagrantly violated the law by spying on domestic dissidents within the USA. Coming in the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War, these revelations prompted the Senate to set up a special investigatory panel known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Idaho Democrat Frank Church. The dramatic Church Committee hearings uncovered CIA misdeeds that went far beyond domestic snooping. Americans were horrified to learn that the CIA had attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro, rigged elections in democratic countries such as Chile and cynically conducted drug experiments on unwitting Americans. What makes the Church Committee experience relevant today is the way that the investigation mushroomed from a single news story into a wide-ranging exposé of the dark underside of the CIA and other spy agencies. In similar fashion, tales of sadistic abuse at Abu Ghraib have prompted renewed questioning about the tactics that the CIA has used in interrogating al-Qaeda captives. The Times reported Thursday that the CIA has been employing something called "water boarding" in which prisoners are strapped to a board, held underwater and threatened with drowning. Under our system of government, the most potent investigative body is Congress. As Loch Johnson, a professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia and a special assistant to Church during the hearings in the 1970s, put it, "Congress has always done well to do its own probes. Government agencies are self-protective organisms, whether they're the Army, the CIA or the White House itself." After a week of congressional hearings, it is far too early to gauge the full ramifications of the prisoner-abuse scandal. But if the past is any precedent, it may be many months before Rumsfeld and other administration officials resume happily reading the papers. Walter Shapiro's column appears Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at wshapiro@usatoday.com