The very thought of a Gonzales Perjury investigation makes my stomach churn

I should have been ecstatic over the prospect of a perjury investigation into Alberto Gonzales like the one proposed in this article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070726/congress-gonzales/

Instead I am lukewarm at best, and deep down I am dreading it because I already know nothing will ever come of it. The problem is that we've let these obvious liars and villains reach such strongholds of power, they can't be investigated or stopped by any traditional means.

For example, Congress has issued Contempt of Court citations for Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers, two of Bush's top political aides, for their refusal to even APPEAR to testify with regard to the politically motivated firings at the Justice Department. That doesn't matter, though, because that same justice department has already said they will refuse to enforce the citations. So the ones we are trying to investigate are the same ones whose help we need to execute an investigation. How well is this going to work?

In a similar way, how are we going to try Alberto Gonzales for perjury? The guy is the top of the heap as far as prosecutions are concerned. He is supposed to be the most gung-ho prosecutor in the entire country, yet now he is blatantly violating the laws in a ridiculous effort to defend the leader of the free world. What are we supposed to do?

So many scandals its actually muddying the water

The Bush administration may have come up with a new tactic: Create so many scandals at once that none of them gets extreme coverage, and then claim that none of them are such a big deal, and wait for them to start dropping off the national radar. There's so many freaking scandals now that every time there's a new development in one of them, I kind of have to jog my memory of exactly what it was all about. It's really incredible how this guy can still be in office. I don't think he's gone more than a few weeks without a major scandal in months.

What the hell does "Mixed Bag" even mean?

It never ceases to amaze me how Bush will take language that seems meant to describe a round of golf and apply it to the war in Iraq. Today he issued a progress report on Iraq that said the government there had made satisfactory progress on about half their benchmarks, and called the results there a "mixed bag". You know, a mixed bag, like "I hit a few birdies, a few too many bogies, I was in the rough a lot off the tee, but I putted pretty well." That's a mixed bag. "We quelled the resistance in Al-Anbar at the cost of hundreds of dead Americans and thousands of dead Iraqis, but Baghdad is still hostile despite the mass death there." That's not a mixed bag. That's an unmitigated disaster.

This administration's willingness to use rhetoric, and this President's ability to use his supposedly "simple" grasp of language to minimize problems is truly incredible. But what is really shocking is the way the mainstream press just reports this bullshit. Every single paper who reported this White House update as if it were factual in any way should be ashamed. In fact, the administration should not be allowed to report on the state of the war at all. It's like a parent telling a five year old to clean her room, and then taking her word that it's done instead of opening up the door and looking for themselves. Gee, I wonder if she's going to say she's made more progress than she really has.

What it is really like, though, is the Enron case. It's like during the trial, Enron issued an internal report saying that there was reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt. And then, in the middle of the trial, Enron's defense lawyers pulled out the report and said, "See, this report says there's doubt, so they can't be guilty." And then the jurors (played here by the media) said "Well, they must be right, look, it's right there in that report." People are such GD idiots.

Scooter Libby gets what's coming to him

Bush did it. I knew it was coming, but this halfway bullshit doesn't fool me at all. Scooter Libby got a pardon, whether they call it that or not. He got two and a half years of his life back, and as for the fine? As for the loss of reputation? I'll bet anybody a million dollars that Scooter Libby doesn't have any trouble getting a job somewhere, and I'll bet he makes waaaay more than a quarter million dollars (the amount of his fine) in the next thirty months.

I actually don't have a problem with Scooter getting a pardon. In fact, Bush SHOULD have pardoned him, since Scooter was clearly doing exactly what Bush wanted. If he hadn't pardoned him, it would have been a supreme act of disloyalty. What I have a problem with is Bush pardoning him, in the context of Bush's unwavering support for tough sentences and mandatory minimums. I've written on this blog about the kid who got a DECADE in prison for having consensual sex with a fifteen year old girl when he was seventeen. Bush took a look at that case and decided not to intervene with a pardon. But now less than three years is too much for a guy who perjured himself to obfuscate the process by which this country was led into a war has resulted in thousands of deaths. Seems a little strange to me.

The question this raises is whether Scooter was, as I just heard someone so eloquently put it, a "designated defendant" for Bush and Cheney. It is interesting how quickly Libby changed his tune about putting Cheney on the stand in his trial. He just kind of took his lumps...almost as if he knew he was going to get off the hot seat when it came down to it.

So although Bush has the power to pardon anybody he wants, isn't it fair to say there's a conflict of interest here? The guy was supposed to go to prison for protecting Bush. Now Bush is pardoning him. So you know what? I think that's what they call a flaw in the system.

Congress issues meaningless subpoena 5 years too late.

This article on HuffPost:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070627/eavesdropping-subpoenas/??

describes the subpoenas issued today by the congress for a whole slew of documents related to warrantless wiretapping, and other blatantly illegal programs employed by the administration during the war on terror.

First, I would point to the same insightful comment I posted a few days ago. Tying this up in the courts is, for the administration, just as good as killing the subpoenas. 2008 looms closer and closer, and all Bush et al has to do is get to the end of his term. It would take a fool to believe that these problems will follow him back to his ranch in Crawford, whence he will disappear in January '09, only to emerge for $250,000 speaking engagements in front of morons who worship him.

Goddamn I hate this guy.

To the CIA: Bend Over and Get Ready

Saw this morning that 700 pages of documents detailing illegal CIA activities are set fr release next week. I'm not going to speculate too heavily before I get a look at the docs themselves, but I think this should get real interesting. Stay tuned for updates, and buckle up...

PS-- The current CIA chief referred to the documents, which purportedly show illegal surveillance activities and unlawful imprisonments of enemies of the state, as "ancient history". Uhh...did that guy read about warrantless wiretapping and Guantanamo Bay? Cause I did. Memo to CIA Chief: Something happening a long time ago doesn't make it not relevant or excusable.

Dick Cheney is whatever he says he is

Just saw this article:

http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1371

on HuffPost regarding the way in which Dick Cheney claimed his office was not required to follow government-wide procedures for safeguarding national security information, because his office is "not a part of the executive branch."

Okay, first of all, that statement is absurd on a number of levels. First, yes it is. Second, all Dick Cheney talks about is the need for secrecy and the protection of national secrets, so this is coming totally out of left field. It's just a deeply confusing position for the guy to try and take.

Second, there is another cover-up at work here. When Representative Waxman, Chairman of a House Oversight Committee, wrote to, guess who, Alberto Gonzales over at DOJ and requested he force the Vice-President to follow procedure, guess what Cheney did? If you said complained to Gonzo and tried to get the administrative office of the National Archives (the office that oversees the procedures) shut down, paste a gold star next to whatever computer you're sitting at.

As a side note, for a more complete listing of Cheney's unprecedented efforts at secrecy, follow this link:

http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20070621095118.pdf

I've accepted the fact that Cheney is going to do whatever he wants. I'v accepted the fact that he isn't going to tell anyone what he's doing. I've even accepted the fact that the Democrats are too pussy to do anything about it. Fine. That's their fault, not Cheney's. But then an ironic thought occurred to me. It was a memory, something I had once read...let's see, I'm calling up the memory banks...

Oh yeah. Remember this article?

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,198829,00.html

They put the money shot right up front. It reads:

Invoking executive privilege, Vice President Dick Cheney refuses to disclose details of meetings he held last year with Enron officials.

Looks like Cheney had a change of heart sometime since 2002. His status as a member of the executive is about the only area in which he's shown the least bit of flexibility. Sorry Dick, can't have it both ways.

Oh, and also, I put together this post in 30 minutes with nothing more than my memory and Google. How much does anyone want to bet that none of the major news networks run anything like this? You know what show might? The Daily Show. See, cause this sort of calling leaders on their bullshit is only acceptable as a firm of comedy. Otherwise, people might actually start to demand action.

MSNBC News Shows failure today

Okay, let me say first that I think the Pundits and hosts on MSNBC are the best of all the 24 hour news networks. Top to bottom, they ask the best questions and let the smallest number of egregious statements go unremarked.

That said, they failed today with regard to the Karl Rove email story. Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson both devoted extensive coverage to Presidential Elections more than a year away, and neither did so much as mention the fact that 88 or more members of the current administration have broken the law, and that increasing evidence is available that they violated both the Hatch Act and the Presidential Records Act. These newest revelations are damning on a number of levels, and are but a further example of the duplicitous and decietful nature of the administration in general.

The only Pundit to give it proper coverage was Keith Oberman. Bravo Keith, but the problem is that he is too liberal for it to make a difference. That is, Oberman is going to cover ANY story that looks bad for Bush, so him being the only one to cover it makes it look like a liberal issue, which it is not. This is a well-established legal precedent that dates from early in the last century, and it should have been a lead story on any network. Bad form, MSNBC

If this isn't the final straw we have to just declare Bush "King of America"

Check out this article on HuffPost:

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/16/counsel-hatch-probe/

Here is the pertinent passage:

The White House has admitted that roughly 20 agencies have received a PowerPoint briefing created by Karl Rove’s office “that included slides listing Democratic and Republican seats the White House viewed as vulnerable in 2008, a map of contested Senate seats and other information on 2008 election strategy.”

Politicization of the federal government has been illegal for decades. The 1939 Hatch Act specifically prohibits partisan campaign or electoral activities on federal government property, including federal agencies.

Okay...so this is it, right? There must be some criminal charges forthcoming. The White House has ADMITTED that this happened, and there is no grey area. This is illegal. If they can't touch Rove on this, because of some Executive Privilege bullshit, this is the last straw. I'm renouncing my citizenship and moving to Europe.

The truth we've all known about Abu Ghraib...a few years too late.

Everyone should read the following article from the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=1

My comments are my own. All quotations are from the above article.

This article describes the intricate procedures and chain of command by which events like Abu Ghraib are allowed to transpire, and the calculation with which deniability is manufactured by high ranking members of the military, as well as civilian leadership.

Now, it has been obvious for a while that these horrific events were not simply the work of a few low-level soldiers. My friends serving in Iraq have told me as much in confessional tones, that these behaviors are the exception rather than the rule, and that the only violation of procedure in this case was the photographic documentation of the acts.

The basic problem is that, given the strict control of the civilian press by the military, the only people in a position to expose these abuses are the ones with the most vested interest in keeping them a secret: The US Military. All that stands in the way of this cover-up is the integrity and honesty of common soldiers and officers. The same qualities that the armed forces deem secondary to loyalty and blind obedience.

The other mechanism in place to prevent these abuses is, of course, congressional oversight. The article says:

By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military—including the Pentagon’s covert task forces—for the purposes of “preparing the battlefield” could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress.

So there is problem number one. Congress (which is not nearly aggressive enough in oversight anyway) was kept in the dark by an administration driven mad by fear-induced power.

The second problem was related, and potentially as serious: Those in the Special Operations community suffering under the same delusion of power, who decided to operate (or were forced by circumstances to operate) outside of designated guidelines. Again, the NY Article:

J.S.O.C.’s special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism.

So either way what we have here is a breakdown in the checks and balances that are supposed to control the behavior of our armed forces. The fact is that we will never know which it was, such are the pitfalls of allowing people to classify their missions and prevent transparency from ever being achieved.

But what we can say is that the secrecy of our secret operations has gotten totally out of control. From the article:

A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the investigation, because “it would spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it—insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure.

What the article fails to mention is who could possibly have put pressure on a high-ranking senator. Who could have the secrecy to avoid being named in the article, yet have the power to force a sitting senator to "stand up to" him, rather than simply tell him to shut the hell up?

The very existence of any such person is a huge problem for this country. It literally smacks of the SS, or the KGB under the worst auspices of Communist Russia. I am not merely using these analogies to make a point. We in the free world CANNOT allow people to wield this sort of power from the shadows, any more than we can allow the people high up in our military or civilian leadership to claim they were unaware of abuses as a defense of their inaction. In a lengthy quote from the article:

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

"There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.
And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba (A full General, the primary investigating officer into the scandal, who has since taken a forced retirement), watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Rumsfeld is lying, and he was aware of the abuses. In that case, he is a human rights violator not qualitatively different than Saddam Hussein. The other is that he is telling the truth, and he didn't know. What it's impotrant to understand is that having your underlings in a place where they fail to inform you of something this serious is not deniability, it is negligence. It is not WORSE is Rumsfeld's underlings knew of this and failed to tell him, and he failed to ask, but it isn't that much better. He has still failed this country miserably. And anyone else in the chain of command, up to and including the President, who was similarly ill-informed, is equally negligent.

Finally, we come to the cover up, always the easiest part to prove and, in this case, actually the easiest to condemn. I've seen the Abu Ghraib photos, and they are terrible, but I do not hate the soldiers in them. I've often said that these kinds of abuses have occured in every war that has ever been fought, and will occur in every war that is ever waged. The point is that you cannot dehumanize a population enough to kill them, yet maintain an understanding of their dignity as human beings, enough to prevent rape and torture from occurring.

So the question of real importance is whether this torture was the sad but natural consequence of war, or the calculated policy of those tasked to oversee and prosecute the strategy. The following quote from the article may shed some light:

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”

Let me answer the question posed in that second to last sentence. The difference between shooting a guy in the street, as opposed to in his bed or in a prison, is that in the street, the guy has a chance to shoot back. That's the difference between a war and a massacre.

There are basically two sides in this conflict (That would be the conflict over the cover-up/information failure in Abu Ghraib. There are, unfortunately, many more sides than that in the Iraq War.). One side is the portion of the civilian and military leadership that claims no abuses are occuring, and no cover-up has occured, with reference to Abu Ghraib. They claim that aggressive investigation techniques are just that, and that the reported acts that are clearly torture did not occur. The other side is the other portion of the leadership, which says that there are unimaginable abuses happening at Abu Ghraib and other places around the world, and that the leadership, particularly the civilian leadership, right up to and including former Secretary Rumsfeld, did everything they could to obfuscate the acts.

Now, I want to point out two things. One is that one of the primary people on the second side is General Taguba, the guy who was specifically assigned to investigate this matter, who has spent more time than anyone looking at these issues, and who has since been (by his own account) ostracized by the military leadership and forced into early retirement in spite of his years of dedicated service. The second is that what we are really arguing about here is the semantics of torture, and whether or not the things that occured at Abu Ghraib are widespread or isolated instruments. What actually happened there is not at issue. As I said, I have personally SEEN PICTURES of people being tortured. That case is closed.

Normally I am all about shades of grey, but in this case, one or the other group is lying. Their accounts of what has happened are diametrically opposed. Either Rumsfeld had seen the pictures or he hadn't. Either he told people to cover it up or he did not. Either instructions came down to put the MP's in charge of softening prisoners up, or they did not. There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground here, as much as Rumsfeld, et al would like to create one.

The leadership insisting there is no torture and no coverup (Rumsfeld, et al) are protecting an organization which makes them among the most powerful people in the world. They are also protecting themselves from criminal prosecution from human rights violations. And they are doing it by sacrificing people with no power or voice to fight back.

The leadership claiming a coverup (Taguba, et al) are stirring up a hornet's nest within an organization they have dedicated their lives to. They are being widely criticized and ostracized by their peers, and in many cases they are ruining their careers.

The nice thing about a blog is that it is not a court of law. I don't have to prove anything, I don't even have to draw conclusions. So let me just pose this question. Given the two previous sets of circumstances, who does it seem would be more likely to lie?