Another socialist blog

True to form, the Democratic Party is once again helping the Bush administration get away with it. This time it’s the House Democrats who approved the FISA Amendments Act, which contains blanket immunity for telecoms that cooperated in warrantless government spying. Far from being a compromise, this bill is complete victory and vindication for illegal wiretapping by the White House, and will scuttle all civil lawsuits against the telecoms before they can be heard in court. Up with the lawless government, down with the rule of law. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Now it’s up to the Senate to vote final passage for the bill. See http://stopthespying.org for information on how you can give your Senators a piece of your mind.

Warrantless bag searches at commuter rail stations: Los Angeles Metrolink riders will be subjected to “random” bag searches. Signs will announce the random searches so terrorists will know to use a different station.

Protest police cameras, and the police raid your house. Philadelphia residents who circulated a petition protesting police surveillance cameras in their neighborhood, had their home raided by local police who entered and searched it without a warrant. The place was ransacked while the residents were held under arrest for 12 hours. No charges were filed.

The Human Rights Tribune is reporting that the United States has apparently quit the Human Rights Council, an international body within the United Nations System whose purpose is to address human rights violations.  The U.S. had only observer status to begin with, by its own choice, but now has apparently withdrawn completely as a gesture of opposition to the policy of the Council.

This is a departure even for the Bush administration, which usually offers lip service to human rights while ignoring them in practice.  Perhaps they didn’t want any embarrassing questions about human rights violations at Guantanamo?  More likely, they don’t want to do anything to legitimize U.N. involvement in the enforcement of human rights, at a time when the pro-torture policy of the administration will be getting increasing public scrutiny.

Those who are most cynical about the Bush administration are once again proven right: President Bush has commuted the sentence of convicted felon Louis “Scooter” Libby. Libby still stands convicted, but will do no prison time. It was not unexpected based on George W. Bush’s previous examples of immorality, lawlessness, and hypocrisy, but is still appalling. The rule of law has never in my life counted for less. Cheney and Rove and the rest of the gangsters in the White House are obviously convinced that they will be allowed to get away with any criminal act, and clearly they are correct.

There is a constitutional remedy for this, and it is the impeachment of the President. Cynics, myself included, predict the Democratic Party will never do it, that they haven’t the spine, that they are just as corrupt as the Republicans. It would be nice to be wrong about them, but I’m not holding my breath.

Bill Maher isn’t always right, but when he’s right, he’s really right. In his April 13 show he took to task the anti-intellectualism of the Bush administration in his “New Rules” segment.

Now that liberals have taken back the word, “liberal,” they also have to take back the word, “elite.” By now, you’ve heard the constant right-wing attacks on the “elite” media and the liberal “elite,” who may or may not be part of the Washington “elite,” a subset of the East Coast “elite,” which is overly influenced by the Hollywood “elite.” So, basically, unless you’re a shit-kicker from Kansas, you’re with the terrorists.

You know, if you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being elite, you’d almost be as wasted as Rush Limbaugh.

I - I don’t get it. In other fields outside of government, “elite” is a good thing, like an “elite” fighting force; Tiger Woods is an “elite” golfer. If I need brain surgery, I’d like an “elite” doctor. But, in politics, “elite” is bad. The “elite” aren’t down to earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-brains. [He said this while sitting across a desk from Scott McClellan.–DD]

Which is fine, except that whenever there’s a Bush Administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, where are they getting these screw-ups from? Well, now we know. From Pat Robertson. I’m not kidding.

Take Monica Goodling, who, before she resigned last week, because she’s smack in the middle of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She’s 33 years old. And though she never even worked as a prosecutor, she was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all 93 U.S. Attorneys.

How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College. You know, Messiah, home of the Fighting Christ-ies? And then went on to attend Pat Robertson’s law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said that the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, has a law school.

And what kid wouldn’t want to attend? It’s three years, and you only have to read one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a Tier Four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It’s not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook.

This is for people who couldn’t get into the University of Phoenix.

Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist’s diploma mill work in the Bush Administration? 150. And you wonder why things are so messed up. We’re talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college funded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U.? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House?

In 200 years, we’ve gone from “We, the people,” to “Up With People.” From “the best and the brightest” to “dumb and dumber.” And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson’s law school?

The problem here in America isn’t that the country is being run by “elites.” It’s that it’s being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And, by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling just hired to keep her ass out of jail, went to a real law school.

It’s now clear that Alberto Gonzales is not just a liar, but a brazen liar who thinks he can protect his job (or at least his future pardon chances) if he sticks to his unbelievable story about the political firings of eight U.S. Attorneys. Let’s run through an incomplete list of the whoppers that Justice Department officials have been telling us.

• Jan. 18, 2007: Gonzales testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons, or if it would in any way jeopardize an ongoing serious investigation.” You could believe that, but you would have to ignore some suspicious facts about these fired U.S. attorneys.
  • David Iglesias of Albuquerque told lawmakers that he “felt leaned on” by Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, who wanted him to indict Democrats before election day 2006.
  • Carol Lam of San Diego, prosecuted former Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, now in federal prison for accepting bribes. She had a very positive 2005 performance review, calling her “an effective manager and respected leader.” She was also involved in an ongoing serious investigation, continuing the probe of defense contracting that began with Rep. Cunningham.
  • John McKay of Seattle said he stopped a top aide to Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) from asking him detailed questions about an investigation into the disputed election of Washington state’s Democratic governor, Christine Gregoire, in 2004.

  If you choose to believe Gonzales when he claims the firings weren’t political, you have to wonder about all the other lies told in the cause of convincing us.

• Feb. 6, 2007: Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “In every single case where a United States attorney position is vacant, the administration is committed to filling that position with the United States attorney who is confirmed by the Senate.” He repeated that tale today despite an email from Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff, saying the exact opposite. The email tells how the office intended to use the USA-PATRIOT act to appoint replacements without Senate confirmation. The very existence of that provision in the law is reason to believe the administration wants to dispense with advise and consent by Congress. Probably not what the Senators wanted to hear.
• Feb. 23, 2007: Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Hertling sends several members of Congress a letter saying, in part, “The [Justice] Department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin.” On March 28 the Justice Department itself tells Congress that letter is “contradicted by Department documents.” Perhaps those documents include an email from Gonzales’ chief of staff saying they are “still waiting for a green light from the White House” before firing the U.S. attorneys. Of course Rove is involved. And if Rove is involved, of course the operation is political.
• March 13, 2007: Gonzales give the dog-ate-my-homework excuse, insisting that he knew nothing, nnnnothing, about what was going on in the Department of which he is in charge. “I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood.” When Gonzales attended an hour-long meeting to discuss the matter on November 27, 2006, he perhaps was not paying attention?

Those who call for Gonzales to resign, and they are legion, are missing the point entirely. The fact that the Attorney General is a crook is scandalous, but not as scandalous as the fact that the President has known and tolerated unethical conduct at Justice. And even that is not nearly as scandalous as the likelihood that the President gave the orders. You can take out the Cabinet trash, but the White House will still stink when you’re done. Whoever claims outrage at the conduct of the Attorney General should be calling, not for his resignation, but for the impeachment of the President and Vice President.

So there we were, watching the 2000 Presidential campaign, and over and over we listened to George W. Bush talk about how he was going to bring “honor and dignity” back to the White House. I can’t think of a more significant pack of lies told in my lifetime. And I’m old enough to have heard Richard Nixon say “I am not a crook” on the evening news.

Like Nixon, Bush seems to have surrounded himself with criminals. Now that Louis “Scooter” Libby is a convicted felon, and Rove and Cheney are clearly identified as unindicted co-conspirators, it’s a good time to remember how many conservatives have held up George Bush as not just a moral leader, but a moral example. Indeed.

And what a blessing it is to have a moral leader at the helm as we continue to make war against Afghanistan, the war that Bush says God told him to start. On March 4th an American patrol was attacked near Jalalabad, and reacted by shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of civilians. Twenty civilians not involved in the original attack were killed and thirty more were wounded. Adding insult to injury, American troops threatened reporters covering the story and confiscated film and video of the dead civilians. This is not the way people behave when a moral leader is Commander in Chief. Rather, this is the way people behave when the know they have committed a crime and they are desperate to destroy the evidence. This is not the first atrocity committed by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Lest you think these were isolated incidents, don’t forget the murder of Nicola Calipari, an Italian, by U.S. solders in Iraq. Journalist Giuliana Sgrena was wounded in the attack, and has been adamant that the soldiers were not acting in self-defense, nor even manning a checkpoint as they have claimed. The Italian government has indicted a U.S. serviceman, Mario Lozano, in the shooting. Italian authorities have complained that the U.S. has refused to cooperate in the investigation and have refused to deliver Lozano to stand trial.

So basically we have a government of people who constantly proclaim the rule of law even as they are breaking the law, constantly tell us they are protecting us from thugs and murderers, while conducting themselves like thugs and murderers. And on the evidence, they are going to get away with it.

Gerald Ford, the only unelected President of the United States, has died at the age of 93. Many have stepped forward to say a kind word about him, as we should about any man who has died. But Ford was more than a man, he was a historical figure, and kindness toward the dead should never trump an accurate account of history.

The Vietnam War ended on President Ford’s watch, over the objections of Ford, which ought to tarnish his nice-guy reputation just a bit. In 1974 Ford made a speech to Congress trying to persuade them to vote more funding for Vietnam. Congress refused, and some freshmen members of Congress got up and walked out of the speech, to their credit. Today’s Congress could follow that example.

Ford has an entirely undeserved reputation, in the mainstream media at least, as the “healer of the nation” because of the Nixon pardon. The Chicago Tribune’s comments are typical: Stanley I. Kutler claims that “the pardon spared us years of court proceedings, riding a wave of national obsession about Watergate.” Indeed, that’s what Ford said he was doing when he pardoned Nixon for all crimes he committed as President, even though no charges had yet been filed.

The obvious response is, where were the conservatives when the Bill Clinton legal proceedings were going on and on and on, all the way to impeachment? Where was the concern for “national obsession” then? (And since when does “national obsession” give anybody a Get Out of Jail Free card? By that logic, O.J. Simpson should have been pardoned before trial.) Allow me to supply the obvious answer: the interminable Clinton investigations were allowed to proceed because they were politically expedient for Republicans. And the years of court proceedings against Richard Nixon were halted—before charges could even be filed!—because it would have been disastrous for Republicans. Go ahead and call me cynical; I learned how to be a cynic from Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The message of the pardon is simply that you can get away with anything if you have sufficiently powerful friends. The long history of Presidential criminality since Nixon tells me that the message was heard loud and clear.

I was not one of those calling for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld didn’t get the war wrong, the entire U.S. government got foreign policy wrong. It’s not that we have a “job” to “get done” in Iraq, a job that Rumsfeld did badly. The entire enterprise was a crime from the beginning, and the entire administration should resign, not just Rumsfeld. Better than half of the Congress should go with them.

But Rumsfeld is out, and now we have Robert M. Gates nominated to succeed him. Lest you think that the Bush administration has learned its lesson, consider these highlights from the Gates bio:

• He has a history of cooking the intelligence: Intelligence cherry-picked for ideological purposes; the claims of a single, unreliable source treated as fact and stovepiped straight up to the White House; a National Intelligence Estimate riddled with dubious claims; efforts made to connect an enemy regime with international terrorism. This will no doubt remind you of 2003 and the run-up to the war against Iraq, but no, these charges come from the 1980s and come from his coworkers at the CIA. Ray McGovern served in the CIA for 27 years and was Gates’s branch chief at the CIA in the early ’70s. He comments that
  

  Bill Casey had this bizarre notion that the Soviets were going to come up through Nicaragua and Mexico into Texas. Reagan even said such things. And Bobby Gates sort of played on that kind of shibboleth. And when Casey mined the harbors, well, Gates wrote a memo that said we ought to bomb them, as well, bomb the tanks. So, you know, whether he believed that or not, this was a deliberate sort of pandering to the known proclivities of Bill Casey and, of course, the President.

• He has a history of lying to Congress about criminal conspiracies in the Executive branch. He told the Iran-Contra independent counsel that he, the deputy director of the CIA, knew nothing at all about Oliver North’s illegal contra resupply operation, the diversion to the contras of profits from covert arms sales to Iran, or the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. These claims of innocence were contradicted by other CIA officials .

George W. Bush couldn’t have nominated a better guy to shred documents for him.

The Bush government is fond of giving lip service to the rule of law. And when they give something lip service, they really give it lip service. These are people who know how to stick to the script. Just today we have comments in support of the rule of law from Bush himself, from Condoleeza Rice, and from State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey, to pick just a few low-hanging examples. There could hardly be a better example of doublespeak. These people who claim to love the rule of law hold it in utter contempt. There are so many examples, but the atrocity of the detainee tribunals in Guantanamo, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, will be the example of the day.

NPR reports on a study of 393 tribunal transcripts. The study reveals the tribunals to be empty of actual due process.

• In 100% of the cases the detainee was eventually found to be an enemy combatant.
• In 100% of the cases the government presented no witnesses at all.
• In 96% of the cases the government presented no evidence at all, relying instead on secret evidence that detainees were not allowed to see.
• In three cases there was a unanimous finding that the defendant was not an enemy combatant. The Defense Department ordered re-hearings in each case. In two of the three re-hearings the defendant was found to be enemy combatants. In the third, the tribunal again found unanimously that the detainee was not an enemy combatant, so the Defense Department orded a re-re-hearing for that prisoner. At this point the tribunal apparently got the message and found that, by golly, he is an enemy combatant after all.
• Detainees have a nominal right to call witnesses, but the only witnesses actually available to them are their fellow detainees. The U.S. State Department, which is responsible for producing witnesses from other countries on request, have produced none since the tribunals started.

It’s Kafkaesque. The government’s secret evidence is presumed to be reliable. The defendant, who has the burden to prove he is not an enemy combatant, has the right to rebut the government’s evidence. But without being able to see the evidence, he cannot know what there is to rebut, and cannot even get access to witnesses who might be able to take a stab at it. And finally, even if the prisoner is found not to be an enemy combatant, the result of the tribunal is simply vetoed by the Pentagon.

Americans should be deeply ashamed to be associated with this kind of injustice, and doubly ashamed and the hypocrisy of their leaders.