Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly. — JOHN ASHCROFT
With the drip drip of revelations that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the so-called War on Terror began not with commanders and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but at the highest levels of the Bush administration, arguments that these insiders should and could be tried as war criminals have become more credible.
Just not tried in the U.S., of course.
As if we needed to be reminded that the White House has worked as hard to prevent these insiders from facing the consequences of their dirty deeds as they worked to rationalize the use of Nazi-like torture techniques, there is a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that would immunize them against prosecution.
But only in the U.S., of course.
Overseas is another matter, and any Geneva Conventions signatory nation has the right — indeed, the responsibility — to detain someone suspected or accused of violating Article 3 of the conventions.
Indeed, courts in Italy and Germany have issued warrants demanding the arrest of CIA operatives for kidnapping and torturing citizens and residents of their nations, although the warrants have not been executed for diplomatic reasons.
And an effort to prosecute former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in France for the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the flagship accommodation in the Rumsfeld Gulag, has foundered because no court was willing to take on this hot potato.
But with every new revelation comes a flurry of articles suggesting that Bush administration big shots, present and former, might want to think twice before jetting off to Europe this summer for some sightseeing.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, and here for an index of torture-related stories and links.
It is now well known that when the White House needed justification for its endorsement of Nazi-like torture techniques, it turned to John Yoo.
The young attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of memos that he believed gave the Bush administration the legal fig leaf it needed to use torture and deny enemy combatants protection under the Geneva Conventions.
Yoo was a foot soldier in a national tragedy starring Vice President Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft and his successor, Alberto Gonzalez, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleeza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet. And, of course, The Decider himself.
The administration’s embrace of torture is the most atrocious aspect of a presidency that has determinedly turned the separation of powers, due process and the Rule of Law on its collective ear.
All in service of the specious claim that the president should have unlimited powers in the post-9/11 world even if it means defecating on the very constitutionally enshrined rights that we are fighting the so-called Global War on Terror to protect.
Public reaction to this dark interlude has been underwhelming.
This is because news coverage has sucked — and can you imagine it being any other way considering the spectacle of last night’s presidential “debate”? I also suspect that many people are okay with torture so long as it isn’t their son or daughter who is being waterboarded.
Meanwhile, there has been loud flailing by those who want to punish Yoo now.
Any alleged terror plot has to be taken seriously, but the Justice Department is amassing a pretty lousy record when it comes to separating the amateurs from the pros.
So it is no surprise that the second trial of the Liberty City Six, formerly the Liberty City Seven, whom the government alleged were planning to take a bus from Miami to Chicago and blow up the Sears Tower ended yesterday with another mistrial.
The Justice Department made a collective fool of itself because Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (remember him?) pulled out all of the public-relations stops and equated these nimrods from the dirt poor Liberty City neighborhood of Miami with the foulest of the Al Qaeda foul.
Gonzo had asserted that the group represented a “new brand of terrorism” created by “the convergence of globalization and technology,” but these lads were clearly buffoons who didn’t even have the money to buy bus tickets to get to Chicago.
No matter, the government retried the six mistrial defendants (a seventh was acquitted) in the hopes that if it threw everything up against the wall something would stick. Alas, nothing did and the jury was excused after 13 days of deliberations.
Next up is the Fort Dix Six, a bunch of hard-drinking blue-collar bozos who asked cops for maps of military installations, had trouble finding lethal weapons, practiced jihadist attacks by playing paintball in the Pocono Mountains, went to a Kinko’s to have a videotape of their training sessions made into a DVD, and were infiltrated by not one but two informants, include a brainiac who knew the wide open New Jersey Army base “like the back of his hand” because he once delivered pizzas there for his family’s restaurant.
A modest prediction: The informants will bomb on the stand and the Fort Dix Six will walk.
April 13th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Once he was the nation’s Attorney General, appointed — and constantly protected and defended by — President George Bush. But he is considered by some to have been one of the worst Attorney Generals in recent history — and now Alberto Gonzales is having a hard time finding a job at a law firm.
Maybe not yet — but the New York Times reports that Gonzales is finding the response to his resume has not been enthusiastic:
Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.
He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales’s case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government’s chief lawyer, are typically highly sought.
A longtime loyalist to George W. Bush dating to their years together in Texas, Mr. Gonzales was once widely viewed as a strong candidate to be the first Hispanic-American nominated one day to the Supreme Court. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he carried an impressive personal story as the child of poor Mexican immigrants.
Despite those credentials, he left office last August with a frayed reputation over his role in the dismissal of several federal prosecutors and the truthfulness of his testimony about a secret eavesdropping program. He has had no full-time job since his resignation, and his principal income has come from giving a handful of talks at colleges and before private business groups.
“Frayed,” indeed. Any prospective employer from Mars who did not know who Gonzales is could do a Google search about his legacy and not be impressed by this,this,this, this,this,this or this.
But has there been a new development that won’t improve his legacy but will perhaps end even the remaining half-ounce of doubt about his role in “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the phrase used for “torture” by those defending the administration who apparently also like the phrase “pre-owned cars” instead of “used cars.”) and why he played the role.
While the Bush administration’s stewardship of the economy and that pesky war, among other areas of vital concern to the national interest, have been seriously lacking, its ability to make significant policy changes without bothering to tell anyone — let alone come clean about their implications – has been nothing short of masterful.
In one of the more insidious examples of this, the Justice (sic) Department, in the service of an administration allergic to regulating the corporate fat cats who bankroll Republican causes (and Democratic, too), is no longer regularly threatening wrongdoers with criminal charges and penalties and instead is offering settlements.
At first blush, this might not seem like such a big deal.
Not every case of corporate crime should result in a CEO or CFO frog-walking to the nearest federal penitentiary for a turn in the laundry room and a few rounds of tennis. But removing that threat and substituting it with a cash settlement also removes a pretty big disincentive to not behave badly if the consequence of doing so is no more than a wrist slap in the form of a one-time accounting charge.
During the last three years, the department headed by the sycophantically corrupt Alberto Gonzales and now by the despicable Michael Mukasey has deferred on the prosecutions of more than 50 corporations on charges ranging from bribery to fraud. Instead, these corporations have been invited to enter into what are euphemistically called “deferred prosecution agreements” and “nonprosecution agreements.”
A new report from the Department of Justice has good news and bad news. The good news is that the DEA had “a 50 percent reduction in the frequency with which laptops are lost and stolen” since 2002. Of course they can’t actually figure out what was on all those stolen computers, unlike the 160 laptops the FBI has lost or had stolen during the last 4 years — they think at least 10 of those actually had sensitive information on them. It is known that at least one of the missing DEA computers did in fact have sensitive data on informants. That’s the kind of thing that could get people killed. For those keeping count, there are 231 laptops missing from the DEA in the last 5 years. New policies include encryption of some data, but frankly this is one of those cases where the best security is to minimize the data that can be breached in the first place.
Oh, but that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that even though they are losing fewer computers, they are losing more guns: 22 lost and 69 stolen. Many of the weapon thefts could have been prevented by simply following policies already in place, which is frankly inexcusable.
Maybe things work differently at the Department of Justice, but I think I would be fired if I lost a laptop full of company data, or if my own stupidity in the workplace caused a firearm to be stolen. Mistakes happen, sure. But sometimes you can’t afford to make mistakes at all. “Oh gee, I’m sorry!” won’t put an outed investigation back on track, or bring back a human being killed with a stolen gun.
It has taken no time at all to understand that in his own way Attorney General Michael Mukasey is even worse than Alberto Gonzalez. That is because he is more clever than Gonzo in doing the White House’s bidding, which is to say suborning the law at every opportunity.
Law school prof Jonathan Turley has reached a not dissimilar conclusion in writing in a Los Angeles Timesop-ed piece that:
“The recent decisions of . . . Mukasey to block any prosecution of Bush administration officials for contempt and to block any criminal investigation of torture led to a chorus of criticism. Many view the decisions as raw examples of political manipulation of the legal process and overt cronyism. I must confess that I was one of those crying foul until I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey’s action.
“In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey’s Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president — and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.”
It is worth noting for the umpteenth time that none of this mischief might have transpired had feckless Democratic leaders like Senator Charles Schumer drawn the line at Mukasey’s nomination hearing when he bobbed and weaved on what constituted torture and blew them off by saying that he’d get back to them after he was sworn in.
As Turley also notes, that is the ultimate paradox.
Meanwhile, there is the reason that Mukasey was nominated in the first place: Gonzalez couldn’t keep his stories straight about why nine U.S. attorneys had been sacked, eventually had to resign and is now lawyering up for coming legal fireworks.
Although the answer is something of an open secret, Congress wants to know where the orders to purge the attorneys came from.
This prompted contempt citations against, Joshua Bolten, President Bush’s chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, the prez’s former counsel and failed Supreme Court wannabe, after the White House claimed executive privilege and refused to let them testify. Mukasey has dutifully said he will not refer the contempt citations to a federal grand jury.
House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who like other Democratic bigs seems to show up for work with a spine on some days but not on others, has responded that she will give the House Judiciary Committee the authority to file a civil lawsuit against Bolten and Miers in federal court.
February 28th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
If the next president is a Democrat (and that is by no means a foregone conclusion) what if any investigations of Bush administration criminality and other misdeeds should be persued?
Or, should the Democratic president and Congress, in the spirit of a new era and an appeal to bipartisanship, wipe the slate clean?
The criminality and misdeeds include:
* The refusal of Alberto Gonzalez, Harriet Miers and other key adminstration officials to answer subpoenas in connection with the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys.
* The refusal to hand over to congressional investigators certain testimony from Vice President Cheney and other key administration officials in connection with the Wilson-Plame leak scandal.
* The official embrace of torture in contravention of the Constitution, treaties and conventions and common decency.
* The Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
* Pre-9/11 CIA and other intelligence failures.
* The willful destruction of millions of White House emails sought by congressional investigators.
* Voter supression efforts directed by the Justice Department.
* A full accounting of the costs of the Iraq war.
* No-bid contracts given Halliburton and other firms working in Iraq and Afghanistan with close administration ties.
* The consequences of the multiple Bush signing statements.
* Government and government-funded scientific research and studies skewed for political reasons.
* Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s legal conflicts of interest.
February 19th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
The George Polk Award inevitably plays second fiddle to the Pulitzer Prize, but it commands just as much respect from journalists.
This makes the award of a Polk this morning to Josh Marshall and his staff at Talking Points Memo — the first time that a blog has been honored — so sweet and well deserved.
Josh started TPM back in 2000 as a bit of a lark, but it has grown into a full-time enterprise and a model for what blogs are capable of doing above and beyond the mainstream media.
TPM’s Polk is for its dogged coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration, a story that the MSM at first pooh-poohed and then had to play catch-up on. Josh and co-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood did most of the muckraking, but were assisted by readers who helped them analyze important documents.
More than anything or anyone else, we have TPM to thank for the fact that Alberto Gonzales is back in Texas lawyering-up.
February 19th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Five perilous days have now passed since those treasonous House Democrats decided to hold the U.S. hostage by refusing to cave in to President Bush by questioning the telecom immunity provision in the FISA renewal bill.
Unless there is yet another vast mainstream media cover-up, there have been no terrorist attacks on our fair homeland although the president, his minions and a host of fearmongers in the right-of-center blogosphere warned that the Duplicitous Dems were leaving Uncle Sam with his hands tied without the Protect America Act provision of the FISA bill being renewed.
This, of course, was complete rubbish since:
* The Republicans could have voted to extend the PAA provision instead of running off for a 12-day recess and whining to their constituents about Nancy Pelosi’s calumny.
* Existing warrantless domestic surveillance can continue for up to a year without extending the PAA provision.
* And if that isn’t good enough fer ya, domestic wiretapping rules would in any case revert to the original FISA, which requires the government to obtain a warrant from a special court.
As the Week of Living Dangerously is tick ticking on with nary a national hangnail, some pundits have begun changing their tune.
February 18th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Having been eligible for the draft and an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam since I was 18, 1968 was the year that I turned 21 and finally was old enough to drink and vote, which I did in that order and with great enthusiasm.
I had a front-row seat for this year of great change — including antiwar protests, the King and Kennedy assassinations, and the coming of age of the civil rights and women’s movements — but nowhere were those changes manifested so powerfully than in the presidential race that year.
This presidential election year also is shaping up to be one of potentially great change, which begs the question:
Were the changes of 1968 more important than the changes of 2008 could be?
That is a difficult question because America and the world have changed (there’s that word again) in myriad ways over the last four decades, so for the purpose of trying to tease out an answer, I’ll reframe the question thusly:
Were Americans individually and the nation generally better off in 1968 than in 2008?
Thus framed, the answer to that question is a big fat “yes,” and so the answer to my initial question is that the changes of 2008 — at the very least the much anticipated end of the Age of Bush — may indeed be more important.
Since we’re looking at year versus year through the prism of presidential politics, it should be noted that there is an obvious similarity and two obvious differences.
The similarity is the looming presence of costly and unpopular wars in both 1968 and 2008.
The first difference is that unlike 1968, the U.S. today is the sole superpower, has an unprecedented global reach and is the subject of profound loathing abroad, notably among the people whose most radical elements can do the American homeland harm.
The second difference is that in 1968 most of the opposition President Johnson faced was from within his own party over his stewardship of the Vietnam War, which prompted him to opt out of running for reelection, while in 2008 President Bush has gotten a free pass from most of his prospective heirs apparent, who dutifully worship at his altar although he is extraordinarily unpopular and is the chief reason the Republican hegemony in Washington is coming to such an unceremonious end.
February 15th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
PRESIDENT NIXON GREETS RETURNING POW McCAIN
No one in their right mind would believe that the last year of the Reign of Bush would be any less tendentious than previous years. There are, for example, the latest flurry of presidential signing statements and the lame duck’s insistence that telecoms be granted retroactive immunity for embracing his initiatives to spy on their customers.
But you would have to go far to top the shame team of Michael Mukasey, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Antonin Scalia and John McCain with their embrace of torture as an official instrument of Bush administration policy.
Long story short: Human dignity is trumped by political expedience.
Mukasey is the attorney general who was going to put things to rights after the disastrous tenure of his predecessor, but now embraces the extralegal excesses of the Dear Departed Gonzo and his thugs at arms, including Steven Bradbury, who acknowledged this week that torture may be illegal but because the Justice Department hasn’t ruled as such then it isn’t.
Senators Schumer and Feinstein, symptomatic of the lack of Democratic due diligence in Congress, are responsible for greasing the skids for the approval of Mukasey’s nomination after they let him off the hook by not having to explain what he really thought about torture.
Supreme Court Justice Scalia, a judicial pop-off without peer, defended the use of torture this week. Employing the pretzel logic that has made him such a right-wing darling, he asserted that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment didn’t cover cruel and unusual interrogations. Clever, eh?
McCain, the victim of torture himself as a Navy pilot who was shot down and imprisoned in a North Vietnamese POW camp for six years, has now flip-flopped back into the pro-torture camp as he cements his frontrunner status in the Republican presidential race.
My feelings for McCain have been mixed for years: A war hero and a man of principle who nevertheless held some political views that I could not abide. Until Wednesday, I believed that depending upon how things shook out I could conceivably vote for him in November.
But that was before McCain joined 44 other senators to vote against a bill prohibiting the CIA from using waterboarding and other Nazi-like torture techniques banned by the Army’s Field Manual. Some 51 senators — including Schumer and Feinstein, many days late and many veto-proof votes short — voted for the bill.
“Underscoring the complexity of the political currents . . . McCain led earlier efforts in the Senate to ban cruel treatment of prisoners, and has denounced waterboarding in presidential debates. But preserving the CIA’s ability to employ so-called enhanced interrogation methods has broad support in the party’s conservative base.”
Dick Polman captured perfectly the corner that McCain has painted himself into:
“The problem is that, by flip-flopping so blatantly, he undercuts his image as a man of conviction (to the delight of Democrats who fear his appeal) - without even mollifying his conservative critics, some of whom seem to believe that today’s pandering can never erase yesterday’s heresies. He could be saddled with this dilemma well into autumn.”
Yes, presidential candidates have to be mindful of their political base. Yes, they sometimes have to pander. But we’re talking torture here, not pork, and for me McCain’s betrayal is now complete.
A man whom I have hugely admired, now 35 years from the Hanoi Hilton and comfily ensconced in the chambers of the Greatest Deliberative Body in the World, betrays himself as someone who will grovel at the feet of his new captors — the people he needs to be elected.
Vice President Richard Cheney, parting company with the official Bush Administration position on the test case before the Supreme Court on the Second Amendment, signed onto a brief Friday urging the Justices to strike down the District of Columbia handgun ban without ordering any further proceedings.
The brief — representing the views of a majority of the members of the Senate and of the House — explicitly endorsed the “categorical approach” that the D.C. Circuit Court used in declaring the pistol ban invalid under the Second Amendment. That decision, the brief argued, should simply be affirmed, thus nullifying outright the local law. The brief can be downloaded here.
In contrast, the Justice Department — speaking for the Administration — told the Court on Jan. 11 that the Circuit Court had used too strict a constitutional standard, and should be told to reconsider its decision. The government filing took no direct position on the validity of the D.C. law. The Circuit Court should reconsider that question, the Department contended, using a “more flexible standard of review.” The Department did urge the Court, though, to rule now that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to have a gun for private use. The filing was not labeled as a supporting brief for either side in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290), now scheduled for argument March 18.
This dual-role thing that Cheney gets to fulfill, even though prior Vice Presidents have done the same, has just always felt so…improper. Can anyone tell me why Read the rest of this entry »
It is now beyond obvious that Michael Mukasey blew beaucoup smoke up the collective asses of the senators who grilled him regarding the Bush administration’s embrace of torture during his confirmation hearings to replace Alberto Gonzales as attorney general.
Beyond being wishy-washy on the use of waterboarding, Mukasey promised that he would review the legality of the administration’s reprehensible approval of Nazi-like torture techniques, which Senator Charles Schumer and his posse of Craven Cavers bought into lock, stock and barrel.
The fig leaf that The Chuckster and his ilk used is in retrospect laughable: They would vote to approve Mukasey’s nomination because Gonzo had left the Justice Department a mess and it needs strong leadership.
There’s certainly an argument that we get the government we deserve. It’s just that I feel that I personally deserve better.
About the best we can say about Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s testimony Wednesday in the Senate is that he was no Alberto Gonzales, with the frequent memory lapses and possibly intentional misstatements.
But that is a very low bar.(New York Times)
It certainly is. Dahlia Lithwick snarks, "Mukasey is only willing to make and defend his decisions without explaining them. Still, he is very convincing in asserting that even though his decision is secret and its rationale is secret, and all future applications are secret, he is nevertheless confident that it’s the right decision." (Slate) Isn’t this the conduct we’ve come to expect and take for granted whenever a Bush administration official is asked to demonstrate accountability to the public?:
Yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, featuring day-long testimony from Attorney General Michael Mukasey, was extraordinary foronly one reason: for our country, what happened in the hearing is now completely ordinary….[Mukasey] is, ideologically,…as much of a loyal adherent to the Bush/Cheney extremist worldview as Gonzales ever was.
Mukasey explicitly embraces the most extreme theories of presidential omnipotence and lawlessness and displays as much Cheney-ite contempt for the notion of Congressional oversight as the Vice President himself. He repeatedly endorsed patently illegal behavior — including torture — and refused even to pretend that he cared what the Senate thought about any of it. He even told Republican Senators that they have no right to pass a whistleblower law allowing federal employees who learn of lawbreaking to inform Congress about it, because such a law would infringe on the President’s constitutional powers. In Mukasey’s worldview, the President has unlimited power and
Congress has none. (Salon: Greenwald; links in original)
An op-ed in The New York Times suggests that the American people "deserve better from their highest law-enforcement official."(New York Times) I wonder if we do. If so, we clearly haven’t done an effective job of conveying this to our elected representatives. Read the rest of this entry »
For those who doubt America’s capacity to influence events in other countries, this piece about Washington’s denial of a visa to a corrupt former official should set the record straight. A debate has now erupted in that Central American nation about why the U.S. has done this - and a furor has begun over the country’s culture of corruption and lost standing in the world. According to this news account from El Heraldo of Honduras, one anti-corruption official says, ‘This decision by the United States shames us, because we are the ones that should have acted against this impunity and complacency toward corruption. … the Executive has been robbed, Justice has been robbed and the legislature has been robbed, because we have created a country that embarrasses us before the entire world.’
Translated By Barbara Howe, January 26, 2008, Honduras - El Heraldo - Original Article (Spanish)
Tegucigalpa: According to Juan Ferrera, coordinator of the National Anticorruption Advisory Council, the U.S. decision to deny entry to the former chairman of HONDUTEL [the Honduras. Telecommunications Business] is a message to the government of Honduras. [Washington has refused to allow former HONDUTEL chairman Marcelo Chimirri to step foot on U.S. territory]. “The decision by the United States to deny former government officials entry only goes to demonstrates how we are seen from the outside.”
[Editor’s Note: HONDUTEL - the Honduras Telecommunications Business - was created in 1976 to oversee and streamline the nation’s telephone system. It is an autonomous government-run body].
The former functionary was denied entry to that nation for his connections to “serious cases of public corruption.” Read the rest of this entry »
As legal affairs writer Dahlia Lithwick noted, Jose Padilla turned out turned out to just be the wrong Muslim at the wrong airport on the wrong day.
That remains the inescapable conclusion after the hapless Padilla was sentenced to 17 years in prison today after having been found guilty of the small handful of remaining charges that the government had not been embarrassed into dropping.
The government had initially boasted that the former Chicago gang member turned Muslim was the “Dirty Bomber” and intended to detonate a crude nuclear device in a major American city. But by the time Padilla went on trial last fall, there wasn’t a peep about the bomb plot because it would have opened the door to the administration’s use of torture and other coercive interrogation techniques.
For me, Padilla has been the ultimate wake-up call to the true character of the Bush administration: Imprisoning one of its own citizens on U.S. soil with no charges of any kind and then keeping him for years incommunicado, a line that I never though I would see crossed in my beloved America.
What is doubly sad is that the entire Padilla saga aroused so little controversy.
When the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence met yesterday afternoon behind closed doors to continue its investigation of the destruction of those CIA torture tapes, its star witness was nowhere to be seen.
Jose Rodriguez Jr., who as CIA director of operations in 2005 ordered the destruction of two videotapes recording the harsh interrogation of two terrorism suspects, including the use of waterboarding, had refused to testify without a grant of immunity.
I noted here that would be akin to a murderer facing no repercussions for testifying about his own crime.
Committee chairman Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat, is holding off on calling for a vote on the crucial immunity issue for the time being, but the smart money says that Rodriguez will be immunized sooner or later.
“We’re pleased that the committee is considering our request for immunity,” said Robert S. Bennett, Rodriguez’ attorney. “It’s only fair in light of the fact that he has not been given access to the documents he needs to defend himself with.”
Bennett is one of the most sly legal foxes in the Washington henhouse and his comment can be translated thusly: The documents thing is, of course, a ruse and the best way to assure that my client gets off the hook is through a congressional cover-up. We’re pleased that seems to be where we’re headed.
The CIA line has been that the tapes were destroyed out of concern for the safety of agency operatives who could be identified if the tapes were to be made public. No such concern, of course, was expressed over the identity of another operative by the name of Valerie Plame, who was outted in a concerted effort by Vice President Cheney and his henchmen.
Congress holds the key to unlocking the darker secrets of the tape destruction. This is because neither the Justice Department nor federal judiciary seem particularly curious.
During his nomination hearings, Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s responses regarding torture generally and waterboarding specifically were . . . well, tortured and he said he’d review the whole issue if he was confirmed stat. If he’s doing so it has escaped my notice.
You can bet the ranch that the executive branch is working hard behind the scenes to protect its own bunch of lawbreakers. The Justice Department is creating the appearance of playing softball when this scandal calls for hardball. And the judiciary is not asserting its powers for the moment, ceding the floor to Mukasey.
Congressional Democrats have again asked the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor with broad powers like Patrick Fitzgerald in the Wilson-Plame leak investigation. Mukasey instead named veteran federal prosecutor John H. Durham as a so-called outside counsel and it is likely that he will stay with him.
Meanwhile, Laura Rozen reports at Mother Jones that Rodriguez alleges he was advised by lawyers in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations that he had the legal authority to order the destruction of the tapes, which reportedly record the 2002 interrogations of Abu Zubayda, an Al Qaeda suspect captured in Pakistan, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole.
But Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican and committee member, said yesterday that information gathered by the committee indicated that Rodriguez had ordered the destruction even though he was directed not to do so:
“It appears he hadn’t gotten authority from anyone. It appears that he got direction to make sure the tapes were not destroyed.”
Bennett, of course, begged to disagree, saying:
“He’s wrong.”
Rozen writes that some Washington observers question Congress’ commitment to getting to the bottom of the decision and note that once again, all the attention is focused on the proverbial cover up, not the crime.
She quotes Jonathan Turley, the George Washington University law professor, as saying:
“There is a concerted effort in Washington to keep the focus of the investigation away from torture. Both Democrats and Republicans are struggling to do that, as if there is nothing on the tapes.”
The reason is obvious, says Rozen: Committee members knew about the torture program. It’s the only explanation for their confirming Mukasey even though he refused to answer the question of whether waterboarding is torture.
Things are not off to a propitious start for those of us who believe that the destruction of those Central Intelligence Agency torture tapes should be thoroughly investigated. And that if people with big offices and fancy titles aren’t taken down then it will have been a failure.
This is not a case of rushing to judgment — as in prematurely assigning guilt in what is a criminal investigation in key respects.
But mine certainly is a minority view in the face of overwhelming praise for Michael Mukasey although the new attorney general has said and done nothing to merit it beyond naming veteran federal prosecutor John H. Durham as a so-called outside counsel to look into why the CIA destroyed tapes of the 2002 interrogations of two Al Qaeda operatives despite being explicitly told to preserve them.
In fact, what Mukasey has not said and done is downright troubling.
The bar is set so low after the ruinous tenure of former AG Alberto Gonzales that when U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy decided this week to hold off on pursuing his own investigation over the legality of the destruction of the tapes it was spun as an expression of confidence in Mukasey and not whether it was the right thing to do.
The fawning reaction of CBS News legal correspondent Andrew Cohen was typical:
“Can you imagine such respect and deference from the federal bench during the end of the reign of error of . . . Gonzales? No way. By the end of his tenure at Justice the federal judiciary was bunching up its robes in disbelief at assurances from federal prosecutors. This brief order from Kennedy backs the judiciary out of a looming constitutional showdown with its sister branch and gives both Mukasey and Congress the opportunity to take the first crack at getting to the bottom of this disturbing development.”
Cohen fails to note that those federal judges with wardrobe problems played into the White House’s hands by not lowering the boom on Gonzo for his serial misdeeds well before he slunk back to Texas, let alone putting heat on some of the same Bush administration bigs who are now implicated in Tapegate.
Or that the September 11 Commission was told to take a flying leap when it requested all CIA documents related to Al Qaeda prisoners, something that the spy agency knew it could do with impunity since President Bush had fought creation of the commission in the first place and was only marginally cooperative when he eventually caved in to the outrage that greeted his initial refusal.
The aforementioned people with big offices and fancy titles include Gonzales, when he was White House counsel; Harriet Miers, his successor as counsel; David S. Addington, who was then counsel to Vice President Cheney, and Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service who ordered that the tapes go bye-bye.
In echoes of the Ollie North affair, lawyers for Rodriguez told Congress this week that he won’t testify without a promise of immunity.
Granted that there always is a good deal of back and forth in the initial stages of any Washington investigation when the stakes are high. But there is too much going on – or not going on – here beyond the feel-good media pronouncements of Mukasey’s righteousness.
During his nomination hearings, Mukasey’s responses regarding torture were . . . well, tortured and he said he’d review the whole issue if he was confirmed stat. If he’s doing so it has escaped my notice.
Then after he was confirmed, Mukasey refused to appoint an independent prosecutor with broad powers like Patrick Fitzgerald in the Wilson-Plame leak investigation although the destruction of the tapes makes the destruction of a CIA agent’s career seem almost quaint by comparison.
The Bush presidency has been one big constitutional crisis, so if it takes a constitutional showdown to make sure that the investigation is on the right track, so be it.
You can bet the ranch that the executive branch is working hard behind the scenes to protect its own bunch of lawbreakers. The Justice Department is creating the appearance of playing softball when this scandal calls for hardball. And the judiciary is not asserting its powers.
Which leaves it up the Legislative branch to insist that politics will not trump the rule of law. That means that Rodriguez must testify without a grant of immunity. To do so otherwise is akin to a murderer facing no repercussions for testifying about his own crime.
“Doing the right thing” is the universal wrench of politics and governance. This is because what constitutes the right thing has more to do with how a pol or public official adjusts the wrench to fit their circumstances — which is to say survive with arms and legs intact if not win points — than the moral high ground.
That so noted, the news that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has appointed a outside prosecutor aka special counsel for the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the willful destruction of those CIA torture tapes is welcome. But we’re so used to former AG Alberto Gonzales doing the wrong thing with such consistency that I’m having to suspend belief that Mukasey is doing the right thing and not playing a role in a drama with an outcome pre-determined by the White House.
I apologize for my cynicism, but you have to admit that it is well earned. There have been many investigations, criminal and otherwise, of administration officials that have gone nowhere because they were tinged with politics, and the only Bush era precedent for the Mukasey appointment is naming Patrick Fitzgerald to be an independent prosecutor in the Wilson-Plame leak investigation.
Mukasey assigned John H. Durham (photo), a veteran federal prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the CIA tapes investigation with the FBI.
Durham’s appointment is an indication that there is reason to believe that high-ranking CIA officers, and perhaps other administration officials, may have committed criminal acts in destroying tapes of the 2002 interrogations of two Al Qaeda operatives despite explicit instructions that they be preserved.
The George Polk Award inevitably plays second fiddle to the Pulitzer Prize, but it commands just as much respect from journalists.
![[El Heraldo, Honduras]](http://worldmeets.us/images/Chimirri_cartoon.gif)
