Yesterday, former NSA director (and former CIA director) Gen. Michael Hayden was the lead guest on CBS’s Face the Nation, hosted by Bob Schieffer. “As usual, no mention was made of the role he played in secretly implementing an illegal warrantless spying program aimed directly at the American people,” Glenn Greenwald points out in the Guardian today, referring to Hayden’s directorship of the NSA under George W. Bush’s watch.
That’s not all. Greenwald goes on:
But worse than the omission of Hayden’s NSA history is his current—and almost always unmentioned—financial stake in the very policies he is being invited to defend. Hayden is a partner in the Chertoff Group, a private entity that makes more and more money by increasing the fear levels of the US public and engineering massive government security contracts for their clients. Founded by former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, it’s filled with former national security state officials who exploit their connections in and knowledge of Washington to secure hugely profitable government contracts for their clients….
In other words, Hayden has a clear financial stake in the very NSA debates he’s put on television to adjudicate. And while he’s sometimes identified as a principal of the Chertoff Group, what that means—the conflicts of interest it creates in the very debates in which he’s participating—is almost never mentioned.
It’s true there’s a kind of stunned-into-submission gaze that all TV journalists do when interviewing someone with a very high security clearance; after all, the person being interviewed knows so much more than the interviewer. And it’s not just interviewees on the far-right that benefit from this kind of obsequiousness (the president surely benefits from it, too), but the military is a conservative institution, so the defense world leans heavily toward the right wing. Obviously, not all TV journalists are as obsequious as Bob Schieffer (Martha Raddatz comes to mind as an exception). But Greenwald’s opinion is absolutely right on: It’s nuts that Schieffer doesn’t disclose Hayden’s apparent conflicts of interest here.
