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.”
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 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.
But tempers really flared when a GOP representative called for a dilatory procedural vote in the middle of a memorial service for Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA). Apparently, House Democrats had called the chamber back into session but had promised no votes would be cast until the service was over. By calling for the vote, members of both parties had to abandon the service while dignitaries were still speaking. Republicans say that Democrats knew that they would continue obstructing the bill whenever the House was in session, and thus brought this on themselves. Democrats rejoined that with no votes scheduled, the GOP should have shown a little respect and simply waited 20 minutes before resuming their obstruction.
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 »
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 Justice Department and CIA announced a joint inquiry Saturday into the spy agency’s destruction of videotapes of interrogations of two suspected terrorists.
The review will determine whether a full investigation is warranted.
AND THE LAST PARAGRAPH OF THE ARTICLE:
The decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose Rodriguez, then the head of the CIA’s clandestine directorate of operations under CIA Director Porter Goss. Neither works at the agency today.
December 7th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
You just wonder, is Old Scratch whispering to Mukasey: “Policy isn’t fitting the facts, it seems. Critical evidence has been lost? You’re thinking over what to do for the 44th time? Great tactics! Carry on.”
But, a gaggle of muddy angels interested in the old fashioned definition of justice are asking: Hasn’t Mukasey known for many days now that ‘tapes have been lost/ destroyed’?
Why hasn’t Mukasey shot out an immediate preservation order to all concerned so that all current records are protected from further ‘loss, misplacement, and addending’?
That grinding noise we’re hearing? Could it be shredders?
That scratching noise? Redacting/ revisioning of history?
That snoring sound? A Congress controlled by Democrats?
And Mukasey says? Mukasey says nothing of import in this critical matter.
————— See here, for ‘the thunder letter’ written by Sen Patrick Leahy when the previous AG Gonzales declined to issue a preservation order about a similar critical matter. Upon Gonzales declining to take charge, Congress issued their own supoena right over the top of him. Gonzales thought he was being loyal to the president.
As did Icarus think he was being loyal to his father Daedelus’ devilish instructions that left out the most critical part about flying for the first time, that is, that flying too high can cause hypoxia and thereby fatally imperil judgment.
AG Mukasey, if involved in the same kind of long ‘loyalty-do-nothing’ spasm AG Gonzales affected, will be Icarus II.
Here are three articles I wrote at TMV about Icarus psychology, and those in politics who begin with such promise, and yet fall from the sky in a nonstop dive they cannot pull out of.
And meanwhile, regarding the current AG Mukasey and his long overdue order, and regarding the Democrats in Congress who seem to be acting as though they are at tea party… while the Red Death traipses about, supposedly outside the walls…
Well, let’s just say Old Scratch is likely saying, “Perfect.”
Once upon a time, when Iran supposedly still had a nuclear weapons program and there was a war in Iraq, there was a scandal involving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former vice presidential chief of staff whose conviction in March as a result of the Wilson-Plame affair was commuted by President Bush.
Those halcyon days may seem like so much ancient history, but not for Representative Henry “Mr. Investigation” Waxman, the dogged Democrat from California, who is still trying to pry loose Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s FBI files on the case.
Waxman wants the potentially explosive files for an ongoing Oversight and Government Reform investigation because they include information that Fitzgerald did not present to the grand jury — and therefore is not subject to secrecy laws — that subsequently indicted Libby on obstruction of justice and perjury charges.
In July, the president turned down Waxman, but he has now asked newly-minted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to light a fire under the White House.
Fitzgerald, according to Waxman, has been cooperative and forwarded to his committee CIA and State Department files, but he cannot release White House-related files on his own.
The upshot of the Mukasey overture is likely to be more stonewalling because Waxman wants the transcripts, notes and other documents relating to Patrick’s interviews with the president, Vice President Cheney, former Chief of Staff Andrew Card, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.
I agree with blogger Empty Wheel, late of FireDogLake, that the focus of Waxman’s continuing investigation is how it was that Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a covert CIA operative was leaked but there was no investigation or removal of security clearances for the blabbers, who include Rove, among others.
The answer, of course, is beyond obvious: The White House had no interest in doing anything, let alone play by the rules, once its primary objective was attained – striking back at Joseph Wilson for revealing that one of the principal rationales for the Iraq war was false and then ruining his wife’s career for good measure.
Bush administration apologists will continue to argue that Plame really wasn’t a covert operative, Patrick overstepped his bounds, Libby was framed and Bush’s commutation of Libby’s 30-month prison sentence was appropriate. They’re right about the commutation insofar as it was within the president’s purview, while the other claims are demonstrably false.
So if this is ancient history, why should Waxman be wasting his time and our money on it?
Because unlike Arkansas land deals and Oval Office blow jobs, national security was severely compromised and the truth must out.
November 14th, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
A major reversal is about to take place in the Bush administration. The seemingly sandbagged-from-within investigation into the controversial warrant-less wiretaps program is about to start up again:
The Bush administration has apparently changed policy and cleared the way for the Justice Department to restart an investigation into the government’s no-warrant electronic surveillance program, a department official told Congress on Tuesday.
For months the White House had blocked granting the security clearances necessary for investigators in the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to determine whether any department attorneys had engaged in unethical behavior.
In a March letter to congressional leaders, an assistant attorney general had stressed that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had recommended the clearances be granted, but the president decided not to do so.
H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice office, told members of Congress on Tuesday that the investigation will be reopened. But in his one-paragraph letter Jarrett sidestepped the issue of who in the Bush administration had reversed course.
“We recently received the necessary security clearances and are now able to proceed with our investigation,” Jarrett said in the letter he wrote to five members of the House, including Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat from New York.
So what has changed since the spring?
The Attorney General:
“I am happily surprised,” Hinchey told The Associated Press. “It now seems because we have a new attorney general [Michael Mukasey] the situation has changed. Maybe this attorney general understands that his obligation is not to be the private counsel to the president but the chief law enforcement officer for the entire country.”
Jarrett said the investigation will be confined to the “role of Department of Justice attorneys in the authorization and oversight of the warrantless electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency and in complying with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”
The Justice Department is still stressing the limited nature of this probe. And since election year is on the horizon it would not be a shock if no major, earth shattering revelations eventually come of it.
But it does seem to signal a shift from the “I can do what I want, I dare you” attitude of Alberto Gonzales to a style the acknowledges the importance of cooperation. Plus, it shows a smarter perspective on the importance of image. Substance? Don’t be your house in Vegas yet. But in this instance at least the Justice Department has seemingly shifted a gear out of defiance mode.
November 14th, 2007 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Car damaged in Blackwater shooting incident
In yet another black eye for Condoleezza Rice and her white-washers at the State Department, FBI agents investigating a September incident in which Blackwater USA security personnel shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians have found that the personnel were not fired on, that at least 14 of the shootings were unjustified, and they violated deadly-force rules for security contractors in Iraq.
A Defense Department review had concluded that none of the killings were justified, but a State Department probe conducted after the Blackwater personnel apparently were offered immunity had found that the shootings in Baghdad’s Nisour Square were justified.
The FBI’s findings are under review by the Justice Department and could be one of the first major issues to be decided by Michael Mukasey, the new attorney general.
U.S. law is murky and there may not be sufficient grounds under it to prosecute the Blackwater personnel.
But there has been outrage in Congress – as well as in Iraq – over the trigger-happy antics of Blackwater and some other private security contractors, as well as the Bush administration’s repeated failure to hold them accountable for their actions.
Representative David E. Price, a North Carolina Democrat who has sponsored legislation to extend American criminal law to contractors working overseas, said the Justice Department must hold someone accountable for the shootings.
“Just because there are deficiencies in the law, and there certainly are,” he said, “that can’t serve as an excuse for criminal actions like this to be unpunished. I hope the new attorney general makes this case a top priority. He needs to announce to the American people and the world that we uphold the rule of law and we intend to pursue this.”
The FBI investigators have concluded that as many as five of the company’s guards opened fire during the September 16 incident, at least some with automatic weapons. They have focused on one guard, identified as “turret gunner No. 3,” who fired a large number of rounds and was responsible for several fatalities.
Among the 17 killings, three may have been justified under rules that allow lethal force to be used in response to an imminent threat, the F.B.I. agents concluded.
Rice and the officials she assigned to deal with the incident have been out of their depth from the outset and have offered conflicting explanations about State’s responsibilities in overseeing security contracting, which has grown from $1 billion four years ago to $4 billion today.
Department accounting procedures have failed to keep pace and a recent audit identified serious lapses in oversight of a major police-training contract held by DynCorp International, after Blackwater the second-largest security contractor in Iraq.
Richard Griffin, State’s security chief, resigned late last month amid allegations that there were severe lapses in his staff’s oversight of the contractors.
And there we have it: Michael Mukasey was recommended to the full Senate this morning by the Judiciary Committee, on an 11 to 8 vote, with Senators Schumer and Feinstein (as expected) tipping the scales in the AG-to-be’s favor.
MSNBC does an excellent job recapping and expanding on the basics, here and here, including the widely held assumption that the full Senate will follow the Committee’s lead and Mr. Mukasey will become this nation’s next Attorney General.
Like Shaun Mullen and many others, I was not supportive of Mukasey’s nomination after he hedged on waterboarding. Later, Holly’s post, on Schumer’s and Feinstein’s rationale for supporting Mukasey, forced me to re-think two key questions.
(1) Which is more important: the prospective AG’s unwavering clarity on this single-but-important issue, or gaining the benefit of what many believe will be his (otherwise) exceedingly competent and generally apolitical leadership at the helm of the DOJ?
(2) Is it all together Mukasey’s responsibility to clarify the waterboarding debate, or does Congress share some of that responsibility via new legislation, mandating (unequivocally, once-and-for-all) that this appalling practice is indeed torture and will not be allowed at the hands of any U.S. agency or person?
The conclusion I reached is perhaps best articulated by regular TMV commenter Domajot, who attached these thoughts to Holly’s aforementioned post re: Schumer’s and Feinstein’s decision …
[Their] reasoning is sound, but it’s a sad day for the US nevertheless.
It’s a sad day when the nation’s AG-to be can’t say what he thinks about waterboarding.
It’s a sad day when our heroes are people who had to settle for a questionable choice instead of a good choice.
Following the news and many opinions concerning Judge Mukasey and water-boarding, I came to the following conclusions:
1) We need an Attorney General
2) Judge Mukasey is likely to be a competent (if not an excellent) Attorney General
3) GWB will not put forth a “better” nominee than Judge Mukasey
4) The Senate should confirm Judge Mukasey so that he can clean-up the Justice Department after the mess made by Alberto Gonzales.
So I am pleased that Senators Schumer and Feinstein have declared their support so that Mukasey’s nomination will probably be approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and later the full Senate. Senators Schumer and Feinstein are currently taking a good bit of abuse on the Internet but I am proud of them and remember JFK’s book “Profiles in Courage.”
By Senator Arlen Specter’s calculus, the inextricably intertwined issues of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture and whether Michael Mukasey should be confirmed as the successor to the attorney general who issued secret legal opinions endorsing its use comes down to this:
If Mukasey says that waterboarding is torture and if torture is illegal then some CIA agents could get sued.
Now Specter is about as infuriating as any senator on Capitol Hill, legendarily infamous for his chameleon-like behavior, including threats to do the right thing followed by back-room deal making that is the wrong thing. But in this instance the Republican from Pennsylvania is dead on.
So this is what it comes down to, America:
The nominee to replace Alberto Gonzales will stand not on principle (and for all we know he may be impaired in that respect) because it is more important to save a few CIA asses (although not Valerie Plame’s).
By all rights the Mukasey nomination should be as dead as a beaten and bloody Abu Ghraib detainee. But my prediction is that he’ll be approved because principle always is in short supply inside the Beltway and is notably hard to find these days.
With his once sure nomination as attorney general possibly hanging in the balance, Michael Mukasey has responded to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee about his equivocating on whether waterboarding is torture with further equivocating.
Mukasey declared Tuesday in a four-page letter that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques “seem over the line or, on a personal basis, repugnant to me” and promised to review the legality of such methods if confirmed.
But he told the Democrats that he still could not say whether waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was illegal torture because he had not been briefed on the details of the classified technique and did not want to suggest that CIA officers who had used such techniques might be in “personal legal jeopardy.”
The Dems did not appear to be assuaged and a vote on the once slam-dunk nomination still has not been scheduled.
The White House has whined that Mukasey has been put in an untenable position, and there indeed is some political grandstanding going on here. But as I said yesterday, I also would say that a long overdue day of reckoning has arrived.
With the drip, drip, drip subtlety and perhaps even some of the pain of waterboarding, a growing number of politicians seem to be finally realizing that the use of torture is not only thoroughly un-American, it is morally abhorrent, and are speaking out about it.
Can there be any doubt, as I wrote not long ago, that there is no darker stain on the Bush presidency — and on America at the start of the new millennium — than the top-down approval of the use of torture and this secrecy-obsessed administration’s systematic efforts to justify its use on the one hand while denying that it approved its use on the other?
Actually, yes.
With too few exceptions, the silence inside the Beltway during years of torture revelations from Abu Ghraib to the Rumsfeld Gulag to Afghanistan has been one giant silent scream and has compounded the shame that I have felt over a country that I bleed red, white and blue for.
So what has now changed?
* The drumbeat in the American town square against torture has grown louder.
Credit is due Andrew Sullivan, who has blogged about the horrifying similarities between the Gestapo’s use of Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced torture techniques that would leave no visible marks, and the CIA’s embrace of these techniques, as well as the tortured Nazi-like explanations of the White House and Justice Department in trying to justify their use.
*The administration’s Orwellian parsing has collapsed under its own weight.
The proverbial straw that broke this camel’s back was an October 4 New York Timesinvestigative report that found while the Justice Department publicly declared torture to be “abhorrent” in a 2004 legal opinion, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales then issued a secret opinion that endorsed the CIA’s use of hard-core techniques like waterboarding that the agency had cherry-picked from the cookbooks of Soviet and Saudi dungeon masters.
*Discomfort over the refusal of Gonzales’ designated replacement to say whether he believes that waterboarding constitutes torture.
What looked like a slam-dunk nomination has instead become a long overdue moment of moral clarity as a small but growing number of senators say they are troubled by Michael Mukasey’s equivocating over a technique condemned by U.S. military leaders, human rights organizations and prominent Republicans including Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
Mukasey’s waffling before the Senate Judiciary Committee came in response to a question from Dick Durbin, who then sent the nominee a follow-up letter with the signatures of all his fellow committee Democrats. Republican Arlen Specter then asked Mukasey to clarify his position, as did presidential candidate McCain and Graham, himself an Army lawyer.
Now four other presidential wannabes — Senators Clinton, Obama, Biden and Dodd — say they will vote against Mukasey if he doesn’t denounce waterboarding, and no amount of Rovian parsing on the part of the White House is going to bail out the nominee.
Congressional Democrats already have blocked confirmation of two other nominees to lesser posts — John Rizzo, who had endorsed torture, as general counsel of the CIA, and Steven Bradbury, author of the secret legal opinions on interrogation, as head of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The White House whines that Mukasey has been put in an untenable position, and there is indeed some political grandstanding going on here. But I also would say that a long overdue day of reckoning has arrived.
