http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0602-21.htmPublished on Thursday, June 2, 2005 by the Long Island, NY Newsday
by Sheryl McCarthy To hear Pat Buchanan and Charles Colson talk about W. Mark Felt is like hearing a couple of old mob captains dismiss a soldier who has gone bad.
Plenty of Americans are celebrating Felt's coming out as Deep Throat, the secret informant who helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unearth the Pandora's box of dirty doings that was the Nixon White House.
According to Colson and Buchanan, however, the biggest crime was that W. Mark Felt was a snitch.
"I'm still in a state of shock," Colson told "Today" show host Matt Lauer. "I never thought anybody in such a position of sensitivity in the Justice Department would breach confidence. And if the FBI can't be protected to keep confidences, then it shakes you - it shakes the citizens' confidence in government."
Rejecting the description of Felt as a national hero, Buchanan said "there's nothing heroic about breaking faith with your people, breaking the law, sneaking around in garages, putting stuff from an investigation out to a Nixon-hating Washington Post."
What shook the nation's confidence in the government wasn't an FBI official who leaked information to a couple of newspaper reporters. It was Richard Nixon and his men giving the nod to all kinds of dirty tricks because they thought it was all right to do anything that served the purpose of getting him re-elected and keeping him there, even if it involved running roughshod over the Constitution.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0602-21.htm