crossposted from Daily Kos at the request of Lowell
That's why the Bush White House's corruption in the end surpasses Nixon's. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.
Strong words. The final words in a column appearing in tomorrow's New York Times by Frank Rich entitled The Real-Life '24' of Summer 2008. While the column title invokes Jack Bauer, the column is in fact an exploration of a new book by Jane Mayer of THe New Yorker entitled The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. Rich's discussion makes the book seem like a must read. Of greater importance, what he describes from the book should lead us all to demand MEANINGFUL investigations by the Congress, NOW, even if that requires an impeachment investigation to accomplish.
Rich offers some comparisons between the Woodward and Bernstein (Carl, not me, even though we both had mothers named Sylvia who worked in the OPA, but that is a tale for a different time) The Final Days which provided such a riveting portrayal of the very end of Nixon's administration before he resigned in shame. Ultimately, as the final paragraph makes clear, he joins with John Dean in saying that what has been and still is occurring is worse than Watergate.
Rich describes Mayer as connecting the dots of her own reporting with the best of some of her colleagues, such as James Risen of the New York Times (NOTE: Risen had the NSA story, but the Times sat on it before the 2004 election, when news of that story might have had an effect, and only finally published it because Risen was going forward with his book). Rich draws from the book
that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become "so paranoid" that "they actually thought they might be in physical danger." The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.He explains why the parallel with the book on Nixon is insufficient:
The Dark Side" is scarier than "The Final Days" because these final days aren't over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president's narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer's portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television's "24," all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.. Of course, the Taliban and Al Qaeda seem to be reconstituting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Rich's column reminds us that the Bush administration lied when it said "we do not do torture." The Mayer book goes beyond what we already know from Antonio Taguba:
Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.
Rich describes top administration officials who have been involved in some of these activities as being nervous:
Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military's barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymoreand, perhaps more telling:
So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to "never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel."
But it may be far worse. Let me offer two more selections, so that perhaps we might begin to grasp how much this administration has to cover up. First s Meyer tells it:
a major incentive for Mr. Cheney's descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House's failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.'s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was "all preventable." By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.'s inspector general, "50 or 60 individuals" in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects - soon to be hijackers - were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, "I don't want to hear about that anymore!"
And what should absolutely shock us all if this is true:
The coerced "confession" to the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real murderer.
There is more, much more in the column. And I suspect that Rich's column merely scratches the surface of what Mayer has prepared for us in the book. I expect to purchase a copy as quickly as I can.
I believe this is yet another indication of why we cannot grant immunity from law suit, condone pardons for criminal acts, or refuse to investigate. The Congress, both House and Senate, have a moral, legal, and constitutional obligation to fully determine what actions this administration has done. First, those actions involve the expenditures of moneys taken from the federal treasury for which there has apparently been no authorization. Second, the actions about which we know, and the many more we logically should suspect have also been done, represent clear violations of US Statutes, ratified treaties, international conventions, and the principles of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Apparently some people in Congress may have known, but somehow we the American people did not know, and perhaps many in Congress did not know because the administration would disclose information to a limited group of Members and Senators so they could fulfill the letter of the law requiring notification, but barring those elected representatives of the American people even from sharing with their colleagues. As a result, the Congress has been appropriating, authorizing, legislating, and approving without the knowledge necessary to fulfill their own constitutional obligations and oaths of office.
This administration may be "almost over." But in the remaining months the leaders will be making every attempt possible to lock down as much as they can to bind the next president. It is not dissimilar from the previous tactic - repeated in this administration - of deliberately bankrupting the federal government so that the domestic programs for which Democrats campaign and which many conservative Republicans oppose become financially impossible absent serious tax increases.
If we are to remain a democratic republic - and that assumes that we in fact still are one - we must have accountability. Because the administration will refuse any attempts of information, it is past time to call the bluff. Start arresting people who refuse to testify on the basis of inherent contempt. And if the stonewalling continues, begin an impeachment inquiry, and if the administration still refuses to comply, continues its stonewall, then that is an obstruction of the right and duty of the Congress to investigate the possibilities that high crimes and misdemeanors have been committed. That obstruction is itself a high crime and misdemeanor.
I am a realist. Absent information not currently available, there would be no pressure on Senate Republicans to convict, even were articles of impeachment passed by the House. That is not the point. It is time to lay down clear lines, for the Congress to reassert its authority, so that no president in the future, be s/he named Obama, McCain, Clinton, Sebelius, or people whose names are not yet on the horizon, will eer be able to act in such a clearly unconstitutional and unlawful and - yes - tyrannical fashion as we have seen from this White House. Tyranny is when the leader(s) of the government are not restricted by constitution, law, or other governmental power. Given the continued cravenness of the Congress, I think one can fairly say that we have at least face evidence of tyrannical acts.
And I suggest, although it is probably too late, that one question we should seek to get before the Speaker at Netroots Nation is precisely that of an impeachment inquiry. While I may have removed the words from my electronic signature, I still believe that if impeachment is off the table, so is democracy. Our system of government gives the final authority to the elected representatives of the people, the tow chambers of Congress. While Article II left the executive branch somewhat undefined, with the Founders trusting George Washington to demonstrate by example how the office should function, they were absolutely clear in giving the Congress the extraordinary power to remove members of the other two branches. The members of the House, who would vote the articles, have always been directly answerable to the people who elect them every two years, and on behalf of the people should exercise their responsibility to hold presidents, vice presidents, cabinet and other executive branch officers, and judges, accountable for the actions they do, or fail to do.
I read Rich. I thought about the implications of what he has to say about the Mayer book, which I will read. I wrote this.
Now it is your turn.
Peace.
I have finally become convinced that the warrantless surveillance began before 9/11, and was done against domestic persons for political reasons; this is the most likely reason that, over and over again, Congress has caved in, been cowardly in confronting the lawless behavior of an out-of-control Administration, because too many were threatened with secret knowledge of their pasts or of deliberate entrapment or threats of manufactured character assassination (look at Governor Seligman). I suspect that, in Cheney's eyes, the only reason Nixon was "caught" is that some weak link in his cabal squealed (Cheney's motto must be: "we must all hang together, or we shall surely hang separately"), and there is no way he's going to allow that to happen to him or Bush. Of course, it was all done in a good cause: to create a strong, unitary executive to protect America and enhance the inevitable success of globalisation and pf corporate profits in a hostile world. No to mention that some domestic allies expected the imminent arrival of a clash of civilisations and Armageddon.
It all makes me fear that this Administration feels so compelled to protect itself (and the work it has done) that they will never permit another Democrat to become President. They really never expected the Democrats to take over Congress in 2006; it caught them by surprise, and such a catastrophe (for them) must never be allowed to occur again.
He was in New York recently with a group demanding a new investigation into 9/11. He told me that he and a friend also invented code words for certain things, mainly using sports references. He laughed when he told me how interested observers were in the sports references (which weren't about sports at all).
The fact is that I can tell you of several cases where people were being observed because of political reasons, not because they were talking to "terrists". One person actually lost a security clearance because of political activities.
The slaves used code during to fool their white owners. Now average Americans are using code. One suggestion. Change your code words often.
allow me to offer a couple of snips from this superbly written review, which is more than a review, really a critical essay. For example, the opening paragraph reads:
With the appearance of this very fine book, Hillary Clinton can claim a belated vindication of sorts: A right-wing conspiracy does indeed exist, although she misapprehended its scope and nature. The conspiracy is not vast and does not consist of Clinton-haters. It is small, secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Another important snip:
To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, "hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system" and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.
Above all, the story Mayer tells is one of fear and its exploitation.
And this, quite important:
Mayer recognizes but does not dwell on the intimate relationship between the global war on terror and Addington's new paradigm. The entire rationale of the latter derived from the former: no war, no new paradigm. Hence, the rush to declare that after Sept. 11, 2001, everything had changed. The insistence that the gloves had to come off, that the so-called law enforcement approach to dealing with terrorism had failed definitively, that only conflict on a global scale could keep America safe: These provided the weapons that Addington's War Council wielded to mount its assault on the Constitution -- all of course justified as necessary to keep Americans safe.
and the final two paragraphs:
The extremists of the last century, both on the far left and far right, would have seen much to admire in Addington and his War Council. They too had an appreciation for how war concentrates power and removes constraints on its use. For this very reason defenders of democracy once viewed war warily.
The Bush administration has rendered such thinking obsolete: In Washington, the concept of the global war on terror continuing for generations has become widely accepted. This ranks as a considerable -- if almost entirely noxious -- achievement. The Dark Side allows us a glimpse of what that achievement signifies.
Bacevich, whose son died in Iraq, is no liberal. He was a career military man who writes and teaches on national security issues, and has long been a critic of this administration. The high praise he offers the book emphasizes its importance.
Even if you cannot afford to buy the book to give to your Congressional representatives, you can surely send the link to his review, in case they someone did not look at their Washington Post this morning.
Peace
America has bigger fish to fry. And the man will be gone in 6 months. Is any of this worse than the first Red Scare, the Sedition Act of 1918, Palmer's Justice Department? We didn't impeach Wilson. I mean look back in presidential history and there is some nasty stuff.
As far as uncovering what Bush has done, Waxman and the rest of the Democratic caucus have been doing so much of that since they took control of Congress. You also have journalists, writers, others who have been doing this long before Democrats took control. And yet the public is not demanding impeachment.
Also, Kucinich has proposed articles of impeachment and that has gone no where. Like I said above, there are much larger issues the public is concerned with. Democrats and Republicans both need to be focusing on solving those huge issues and that is what the public wants. The Democratic leadership is wise not to waste time on impeachment.