Is dissent during a time of war patriotic?

The Boston Globe reports that Senator Kerry said troops are dying because of what he called an inept and deceitful policy orchestrated by the Bush administration. His speech fell on the 35th anniversary of his speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where as a young Navy veteran returning from war he asked, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Kerry's case yesterday was much the same: that Americans have a duty to speak out against a war that is sacrificing lives on the "altar of stubborn pride."

"Presidents and politicians may worry about losing face or losing votes or losing their legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent civilians who are losing their lives," Kerry said, to a thunderous standing ovation.

Matt Wylie, executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, dismissed Kerry's comments, saying, "There has never been a time in our nation's history when so many people freely gave dissenting opinions about the nation's policies from both ends of the political spectrum. John Kerry should hop on the Internet, and he'll see there is a dialogue about all the positions going on in America today."

While the subject of dissent during wartime has always been contentious, it has sparked some particularly heated debates since the attacks of 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war. A few days after 9/11, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that."

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Dissent against the Bush administration's policies, particularly in Iraq, has been much more public in the past two weeks when several top retired generals questioned whether the US had pursued the right course in Iraq and called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the First US Infantry Division in Iraq, wrote in The Washington Post that he believes he has " an obligation and a duty to speak out."

Civilian control of the military is fundamental, but we deserve competent leaders who do not lead by intimidation, who understand that respect is a two-way street, and who do not dismiss sound military advice. At the same time, we need senior military leaders who are grounded in the fundamental principles of war and who are not afraid to do the right thing. Our democracy depends on it. There are some who advocate that we gag this debate, but let me assure you that it is not in our national interest to do so. We must win this war, and we cannot allow senior leaders to continue to make decisions when their track record is so dismal.

But conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote Friday in The Washington Post that the retired generals' decision to dissent publicly against the government goes against American tradition.

We've always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Saddam's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America. Some other retired generals have found it necessary to rise to the defense of the current administration. Will the rest of the generals, retired or serving, now have to declare themselves as to which camp they belong? It is precisely this kind of division that our tradition of military deference to democratically elected civilian superiors was meant to prevent. Today it suits the anti-war left to applaud the rupture of that tradition. But it is a disturbing and dangerous precedent that even the left will one day regret.

In another case, Editor & Publisher reports that William Bennett, former education secretary in the Reagan administration, said recent Pulitzer Prize winners Dana Priest of The Washington Post and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times should not be celebrated but " were worthy of jail" because their reporting on the existence of secret prisons in foreign countries where the US was housing some prisoners undermined the US cause and damaged relations with US allies.

"How do we know it damaged us? Well, it revealed the existence of the surveillance program, so people are going to stop making calls. Since they are now aware of this, they're going to adjust their behavior .... on the secret sites, the CIA sites, we embarrassed our allies....So it hurt us there.

"As a result are they punished, are they in shame, are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer prizes - they win Pulitzer prizes. I don't think what they did was worthy of an award - I think what they did is worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward."

The conservative Powerline blog, under the heading " The Pulitzer Prize for Treason," said "[the] Pulitzer Prize award to the Times brings a new shame to the Pulitzer Prize committee."

But liberal columnist Eric Alterman, writing a piece for the Huffington Post opinion blog under the title "What some call treason, others call truth," said it was ridiculous to attack the reporters for publishing these leaks (which recently led to the dismissal of a top CIA agent), but to ignore the " leaks lovingly dealt out to administration-friendly reporters" like Bob Woodward of the Post or Judith Miller of the Times that dealt with no less secretive or sensitive matters.

Many in the media noticed a similar pattern to the awards, though their reactions were understandably proud, rather than censorious. The Washington Post's Marc Fisher blogged that "The stories that won [the Pulitzer] prizes were reported and written for the best of reasons, the reason that drew most of us into this craft: To use the power of light to force the bad guys out of the shadows." Marketwatch's Jon Friedman put it more succinctly, noting that the stories "accurately reflected the nation's growing discontent with President Bush." Indeed, a Harris Interactive Poll published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday contained the now familiar headline that George W. Bush had reached yet another milestone of presidential unpopularity, as a mere 35 percent of adults surveyed now think Mr. Bush is doing an "excellent or pretty good" job as president, compared with 63 percent of Americans who said Mr. Bush is doing an "only fair or poor" job. It is stories like these that explain why.

The New York Times reports that the CIA has dismissed a senior career officer for disclosing classified information to reporters, including some of the information used by the Post and Times reporters for their stories that recently won Pulitzer prizes.

The CIA would not identify the leaker, but several government officials said it was Mary O. McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, where she served under Presidents Clinton and Bush. At the time of her dismissal, Ms. McCarthy was working in the agency's inspector general's office, after a four-year stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based organization that examines global security issues.

Finally, in yet another case of a former top intelligence official speaking out against the administration about Iraq, CBS News reports that a former top CIA official, Tyler Drumheller – a 26-year veteran of the agency – told the network's news show 60 Minutes that "he saw how the Bush administration, time and again, welcomed intelligence that fit the president's determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not."

Also...
• The 'American Inquisition' (USA Today)
• Lawyer: Rice allegedly leaked defense info (Associated Press)
• New plans foresee fighting terrorism beyond war zones (Washington Post)
• Feedback appreciated. E-mail Tom Regan .