Rockefeller And Senate Leadership Are Traitors To The Constitution And Country

Senate Democrats have decided to sell out their country and Constitution by collaborating with George Bush and Republican leadership to allow wholesale privacy invasions in violation of the Fourth Amendment and to grant blanket immunity to telcom companies for their participation in the illegal and unconstitutional domestic surveillance programs of the Bush Administration. In terms of honoring and upholding the Constitutional principles this country was founded upon, and grounded in ever since, there arguably has never been a lower and more pathetic time in our history. Fresh off the Washington Post:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

The Fourth Amendment has been under attack by the authoritarian Republicans and their insidious hatchet groups like the Federalist Society for over twenty five years now. It began with the characterization of hideous and substantive Fourth Amendment violations of fundamental search and seizure law under the Fourth Amendment as "mere technicalities". Soon conservative authoritarian politicians andprosecutors started shading their duties and principles under the law to find creative ways around Constitutional protections in order to further their oppressive and often racially tinged agenda. Then the authoritarians proudly proclaimed how they had protected the "law and order for the citizens" by "clamping down on criminals" and "elimianting the criminal's use of technicalities". The more they talked the talk, the more they belligerently walked the walk.

The sad result over time is the situation we now find ourselves in where the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution be damned, the government and justice system is to be used as just another partisan tool for monitoring and controlling the citizenry. The Last Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, dismissively branded the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" and inconsequential. George Bush has belligerently said of the Constitution that "it's just a damn piece of paper". The Executive Branch acts, and thinks, like Article II of the Constitution (the one delineating and defining the Executive Branch) is the only portion that exists or matters. This is what happens when political goals of the few in power trump adherence to the due process principles of the system.

Well, today, the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment is just about complete.  If the terms of this agreement that Rockefeller and Democratic leadership have entered into with Bush and the Republicans becomes law, you can also pretty much write off any thought of accountability on the part of the Bush Administration for any of it's sins.  Passage of this bill by the Democrats is nothing short of implicit ratification and approval of the criminal behavior of the Bush/Cheney Administration; ballgame over.

The atomic clock for due process and privacy is about to strike midnight. Time is fleeting fast; but there is still time. Place phone calls to the critical Senators. If any of them have an office in your town, go to their offices and demand to make a personal statement to the highest ranking soul in the building. Cause a ruckus, make a scene, take a stand; then do it again. This is incredibly important to the integrity of our Constitution and right to privacy; leave no card on the table and no ounce of effort unspent. This post from FireDogLake contains all the contact information necessary for the battle. Step up to the plate. Make it count!

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Crazed, Sick Cretins or Opportunistic Fascists?

The following is from an article in the New York Times Magazine by Jeff Rosen scheduled for release on September 9, 2007. The article describes the thoughts and experiences of Jack Goldsmith, a former head of the Attorney General's Office of Legal Counsel.

..Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, which was highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts. “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.

In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: “They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations,” he writes. Goldsmith’s first experienced this extraordinary concealment, or “strict compartmentalization,” in late 2003 when, he recalls, Addington angrily denied a request by the N.S.A.’s inspector general to see a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal analysis supporting the secret surveillance program. “Before I arrived in O.L.C., not even N.S.A. lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department’s legal analysis of what N.S.A. was doing,” Goldsmith writes.

Goldsmith also witnessed perhaps the most well-known confrontation over the administration’s aggressive tactics: the scene at Ashcroft’s hospital bed on March 10, 2004, when Gonzales and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, visited the hospital to demand that the ailing Ashcroft approve, over Goldsmith and Comey’s objections, a secret program that was about to expire. (Goldsmith refuses to identify the program, but Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, has publicly indicated it was the terrorist surveillance program.) As he recalled it to me, Goldsmith received a call in the evening from his deputy, Philbin, telling him to go to the George Washington University Hospital immediately, since Gonzales and Card were on the way there. Goldsmith raced to the hospital, double-parked outside and walked into a dark room. Ashcroft lay with a bright light shining on him and tubes and wires coming out of his body.

Suddenly, Gonzales and Card came in the room and announced that they were there in connection with the classified program. “Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest,” Goldsmith recalls. “All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn’t appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn’t the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I’ve ever witnessed.”

After a bit of silence, Goldsmith told me, Gonzales thanked Ashcroft, and he and Card walked out of the room. “At that moment,” Goldsmith recalled, “Mrs. Ashcroft, who obviously couldn’t believe what she saw happening to her sick husband, looked at Gonzales and Card as they walked out of the room and stuck her tongue out at them. (Emphasis added)

Well, here we have what is unquestionably the most powerful lawyer in the Bush Administration, Cheney Chief of Staff and Counsel David Addington, pining away for another terrorist bombing of the United States so that the Administration can cravenly grab even more power and completely eviscerate the Fourth Amendment. And, as Goldsmith relates, that extra authoritarian/dictatorial power is exactly what everybody in the Administration wanted desperately; so you can easily presume they were all similarly hoping for just such an event so they could grab their dream. Wonderful, eh?

If that were not enough cretinous craving for you, we now have the further details of their attempts to take advantage of the medically debilitated and incapacitated John Ashcroft in the hospital ICU. My hat is off to Mrs. Ashcroft for sticking her tongue out at these evil rubes. My answer to the question posed in the title to this piece is both.

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A Sober Assessment of Iraqi Security Forces

Iraqi National Police man a check point, as seen from a bullet-ridden
armored carrier window in Baghdad's Saydiya neighborhood
Photo by Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

The independent commission established by Congress last May for the express purpose of assessing the capabilities of the Iraq securityforces, has arrived at some sobering conclusions. The commission, headed up by retired Marine Corps General James L. Jones, former commander of EUCOM, has concluded that the unchecked sectarian infiltration that has been part and parcel of the current police forces in Iraq since the units started forming is too great to be overcome. Instead, the entire system needs to be scrapped, and a new state police force started over from scratch.

The report, to be delivered to congress next week, is one more in a long list of offsets that will be obstacles to overcome for Petraeus and Crocker when they come to the Hill week after next. The Jones commission assessments are likely to get a great deal of attention because the 14 member team, made up of former or retired military officers, Defense Department officials and law enforcement officers, is highly respected oveall. In addition, the commission is narrowly focused, concentrating solely on the worthiness of the Iraqi security forces.

This critical indictment of the security forces is another body blow to the leadership of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and will likely be seized on by congressional opponents of the Bush escalation strategy, offering it as proof that a fundamental shift in American policy is required.

And Americans are once more on the horns of a dilemma. Disbanding the current security forces could carry the same risk of armed backlash that followed the decision of Paul Bremmer to disband the Iraqi military after the invasion of 2003. An administration official confirmed that the recommendations were being evaluated as part of a strategic review.

A spokesman for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Geoff Morrell, said that an American effort to retrain the Iraqi police was in process. He went on to say that Pentagon officials believed that the effort to cleanse the security forces of sectarian operatives without scrapping the whole shebang. “We’re not giving up on the Iraqi National Police,” Mr. Morrell insisted, adding that the United States and Mr. Maliki’s government were “both committed to seeing it through.”

The national police earlier this year were charged with playing a major role in providing security in neighborhoods after the areas were cleared of insurgents by Iraqi and American military forces.

The police have proven that they are not up to the task.

Instead of security, sectarianism runs amok. Problems with supplies and equipment have underlied frequent complaints by U.S. military units that the national police are ineffective at best, and frequently in open alliance with dhi'ite militias that operate in many neighborhoods.

From the New York Times:

American commanders on the ground in Shiite-controlled areas of Baghdad say that the local police actively subvert efforts to loosen the grip of militias, and in some cases, attack Americans directly. One commander in northwest Baghdad said most bomb attacks against American patrols in the area this spring occurred close to police checkpoints.

Officers involved in training the national police units, which fall under the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry, acknowledged deep problems with the police but said that they had been working methodically for months on retraining national police units to do exactly what the Jones commission is proposing — purge them of Shiite militants and install better leaders.

Officers in Iraq said in that 9 police brigade commanders and 17 battalion commanders had been relieved of duty during the course of the training effort for various acts of misconduct, in particular illegal actions of a sectarian nature as well as corruption.

Of course, attempts to redeem the hopelessly sectarian Iraqi police forces are nothing new. In fact, 2006 was dubbed "The Year of the Police" by the U.S. State Department as part of a *branding effort* that was aimed at obviating the sectarian problems that were, even then, deeply entrenched.

Some Pentagon officials have been forthright in why they are willing to discuss details of the leaked report: They hope that publicly disclosing some of the aspects of the report before it is released will defuse the impact of the findings and redirect attention to the Petraeus-Crocker-White House report due the following week.


[Crossposted from the newly-redesigned Blue Girl, Red State]

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TWO YEARS AGO

August 29, 2005:

 What was happening:
What Bush was doing:

What Bush was doing; i.e.eating cake with St. John McCain.
Later that night, Bush was joyful at another GOP fundraiser in California;
even grabbing a guitar and strutting around on stage. Urgent messages
to him were piling up about the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans and
the Gulf Coast. Bush ignored them, got a full night's sleep and got back on
Air Force 1 to return to his vacation in Crawford Texas and clearing brush
on his ranch. RIP NOLA.

(Hat tip to the incomparable Digby, from whom this post was effectively stolen) 

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Selling Our Soul Down The River

Today's Washington Post brings us more facts surrounding the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment resulting from passage of the "FISA Update" last weekend by your Congress. It is not pretty. There were two rulings, instead of the one we have been led to believe, by the conservative judges handpicked for the FISA Court that went against the Administration--one in March, and one in May, that were the impetus for the Administration's big push. Read and weep for your Constitution.

But in a secret ruling in March, a judge on a special court empowered to review the government's electronic snooping challenged for the first time the government's ability to collect data from such wires even when they came from foreign terrorist targets. In May, a judge on the same court went further, telling the administration flatly that the law's wording required the government to get a warrant whenever a fixed wire is involved.
....

The judges were sympathetic but said they believed that the law was clear. "They said, 'We don't make legislation, we interpret the law,' " the senior administration official said.

The rulings -- which were not disclosed publicly until the congressional debate this month -- represented an unusual rift between the court and the U.S. intelligence community. They led top intelligence officials to conclude, a senior official said, that "you can't tell what this court is going to do" and helped provoke the White House to insist that Congress essentially strip the court of any jurisdiction over U.S. surveillance of communications between foreigners.
.....

"I want to move forward," [Rockefeller] said. But Democratic leaders wanted something in return: the release of long-sought administration documents describing the controversial warrantless wiretapping program Bush had authorized in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The administration declined to release the documents, which include Bush's presidential order allowing the wiretaps, as well as the administration's legal opinions justifying the action. Administration officials described a particular showdown with key Democratic leaders -- including Rockefeller and Carl M. Levin (Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which Democrats proposed a trade of sorts.

While the exchange was not a quid pro quo, the senators essentially said, "You give us the documents we want, and we'll give you the legislation," according to an administration official present, who said the response was "no."

Heh. The FISA imbroglio really is the gift that keeps on giving. It just keeps getting better and better; in a strictly negative sort of way of course. Where do you even start? Recognition of the consistency of Bush and the Republican's desire for "strict construction" from Federal judges and their rulings? The admirable performance under pressure by the Democratic leadership? It is beyond sick. It is bad enough that Rockefeller and Levin would contemplate trading the essence of the Constitution and fundamental rights of the citizenry for documentation they were long ago entitled to, but were to weak and lame to obtain. But NO, they didn't even walk away with that pitiful outcome; all they got was humiliation. Hey, here is a thought for our Democratic geniuses, maybe the reason the FISC kept ruling against the Administration is because the activities were freaking illegal, unconstitutional and just plain wrong. Mind boggling is not a sufficient description for this. This has got to stop. The Democrats are no better than the Republicans; and that statement is no longer a humorous aside. The politicians of both stripes are selling the soul of our country down the river.

h/t to the incomparable Marcy (Emptywheel) Wheeler

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