|
Not
married, with children? Not in our town thanks
· Missouri council defends policy
to 'protect values'
· Unmarried couple could be fined $500 a day
Oliver Burkeman in
New York
Thursday May 25, 2006
Guardian
The town of Black Jack,
Missouri, got its name from the variety of oak tree that once grew nearby.
"Those stately trees represent who and what we are today, a proud city with
strong roots, providing the safety and respite of community," its
promotional literature explains. It is the kind of place where family is
valued - just as long as the family in question meets certain criteria.
Olivia Shelltrack and Fondray Loving's family, it seems, do not.
The couple could face fines of $500
(£270) a day, and Black Jack is already facing the unwelcome glare of
national attention, as a result of a local regulation that bans unmarried
couples with more than one child from occupying homes there.
"The character and stability of a city is
not an accident, it is the result of years of hard work by the residents,"
Norman McCourt, the mayor of Black Jack, said in a statement after the city
council rejected a proposal to abolish the regulation. Mr Loving and Ms
Shelltrack now plan to file a lawsuit with the help of the American Civil
Liberties Union, while the US department of housing, in Washington, has
launched an investigation to determine whether Black Jack's ban is illegal.
Mr Loving, 33, and Ms Shelltrack, 31,
have lived together for 13 years. They have two children and also live with
Ms Shelltrack's daughter, who calls Mr Loving her father. They bought their
Black Jack home earlier this year.
"We're just like anybody else," Ms
Shelltrack told the Guardian. "It's not like we're purple with polka dots or
something. I just really feel like this shouldn't be anybody's business."
The couple were not opposed to getting
married, she said, but wanted to wait until they could afford a "nice big
wedding ... I don't think a piece of paper is going to validate our
relationship, though. We love each other, and our kids are happy, healthy
individuals. You can't define family."
Other American towns have regulations
similar to Black Jack's, which technically bars any group of more than three
people from living together unless related by "blood, marriage or adoption".
Generally, such rules are intended to stop rowdy college fraternity houses
from being established on residential streets. But in a country increasingly
riven on issues of social morality, housing regulations represent an easy
way for towns to try to give their definitions of acceptable lifestyles the
force of law.
In an earlier dispute, in 1999, Mr
McCourt wrote that city officials "do not believe that an unmarried couple
having children, residing in our community, is an appropriate standard that
they wish to approve". The family in that case broke the restriction because
they had triplets.
Black Jack has backtracked on the mayor's
earlier warning that Mr Loving and Ms Shelltrack might be evicted, but if it
takes them to municipal court and wins it could fine them up to $500 a day.
Sheldon Stock, the town's special counsel, said a 1977 supreme court
judgment had affirmed the view that a city could uphold traditional family
values by limiting the number of unrelated people who share a home.
"I find it curious at best that housing
laws are being used to define the relationships that count," said Frank
Alexander of Emory University law school in Georgia, who has
researched the phenomenon. "It seems a dangerous way to do indirectly what
we may not be willing to confront directly, which is social control over the
definition of family." Rules were being used increasingly, he said, to
target immigrant communities - "where extended familial relationships are
common".
Michael Watson, a former marine who lives
in Black Jack, has been taking a special interest in the case, since he too
shares a home with his girlfriend and their children. He told the St Louis
Post-Dispatch they had contemplated getting married, but were unwilling. "If
I do get married, am I getting married out of super love, or am I getting
married because Black Jack says I have to? If we're forced out of our house,
what do our neighbours get? A sex offender? A drug addict? A drug dealer?"
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers
Limited 2006 |
|
Chair: Welcome, Mr. Cheney. As you no doubt are aware, the rules of this
Truth & Reconciliation Commission, as established by the President and
Congress, require that you speak the whole truth here if you want to avoid
criminal prosecution. Do you solemnly and willingly take the oath to do so?
Please raise your right hand.
Cheney: I do so swear.
Commissioner#1: Very well. Mr. Cheney, when you were engaged in the criminal
conspiracy that led to your impeachment and removal as Vice President and
your later indictments, were you aware of the illegality of your actions?
Cheney: I did not think they were illegal. The Administration sought the
best judicial advice we could get, and were assured that what we were doing
was within the law and the Constitution.
Commissioner#1: And where did you obtain this legal advice? Did you query
the country's leading conservative and liberal Constitutional and legal
scholars? Did you seek out specialists on Supreme Court decisions from
outside the Administration?
Cheney: We relied on our expert counsels in the White House, Department of
Justice, Pentagon and the like.
Commissioner#1: In other words, you asked employees you had chosen for their
jobs -- those whose employment depended on staying in your good favor and
who were partisan colleagues -- to evaluate the already-decided policies of
their bosses. Is that a fair assessment?
Cheney: They had total freedom to disagree with us. They didn't. We relied
on their legal opinions.
Chair: Mr. Cheney, I think you are not fully appreciative of the purpose of
the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, so I will cut to the nub of the
matter: If you want to heighten your chances of staying out of federal
prison, you must at this Commission accept your responsibility for the
crimes you committed against the Constitution and citizens of the United
States, and talk about your role in those crimes and the coverup. If you do
not wish to do so, it's best to say so now, so that we can call witnesses
who do desire to cooperate and save themselves from criminal prosecution. Do
you understand, sir?
Cheney: Yes, Madame Chairman, I apologize to this Commission if I've given
the impression that I don't want to fully participate in these proceedings
openly and honestly.
HOW U.S. WAS DECEIVED INTO WAR
Commissioner#2: Then, Mr. Cheney, please provide a chronology indicating how
you and your similarly-charged defendants deceived the American people and
the Congress and the United Nations in order to take this country into war
with Iraq.
Cheney: Your question is like "are you still beating your wife?". We did not
lie, we used the best intelligence then available to make our judgments.
Some of those judgments turned out to be wrong, but at the time we thought
they were correct. I resent your implication that we consciously misled our
fellow citizens.
Chair: Mr. Cheney, your attempts to dance around the truth will not be
permitted to continue. We possess a documented record of what you did, so do
not for a moment think that you can evade your responsibility. As I did to
your fellow conspirator
Donald Rumsfeld when he was before this commission, I hereby issue this
final warning: You tell the truth to this Commission or you will be
summarily frog-marched out of this hearing room. Bailiffs, prepare to remove
the witness.
Cheney: Very well, Mr. President. Under the threat of coercion, I will
testify openly and fully.
Chair: No. We accept no coerced testimony. I will remind the former Vice
President that you petitioned this Commission requesting that you be allowed
to testify, as a means of escaping criminal prosecution. If you are feeling
coerced, I would urge you to peer into a mirror for a good look at your
coercer. The witness will answer the question now pertaining to the
chronology of lies and deceptions that resulted in the U.S. attacking Iraq.
Cheney: (long silence) We had decided to attack Iraq long before we assumed
office in January of 2001. My fellow members of The Project for The New
American Century, including Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, had urged
President Clinton to attack Iraq a few years before but with no luck. So,
with the Soviet Union gone and there being no military power out there that
could stop us -- and no political opposition worth speaking of inside the
country -- we decided to make our move.
WHY IRAQ WAS THE TARGET
Commissioner#3: Why Iraq and what were your goals?
Cheney: Iraq because they had the second largest oil reserve in the world,
and had no military power to speak of to oppose us. Why? Because we could.
And because we needed to control Iraq as a starting point from which to
totally alter the geopolitical power structure in the Middle East. We
thought many other Islamic rulers in the area, especially those in Syria and
Iran, might come on board our American plan once they saw the consequence of
our military wrath in Iraq: 'Shock & Awe' as a lever for change in the area,
so that access to all that oil and gas would be in friendly hands for many
decades to come.
Commissioner#3: You admit that Saddam was weak militarily, you knew that
Iraq possessed no WMD stockpiles, no nuclear program and so on?
Cheney: Yes, of course, we knew that. We weren't stupid; we weren't about to
wage war on a nation with nuclear weapons and biochemical agents. But we
were convinced that Saddam would seek to gain those weapons in the future,
maybe within five to ten years; better to take him out now while he was
defenseless. The CIA wouldn't, or couldn't, supply the proof we needed to
make a case that he had WMD, even after I spent days and days at Langley
leaning on them to do so. Rummy, my old PNAC buddy, set up his own
intelligence operation in the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans, stocked
it with our ideological friends, and using raw intel from exiles and the
like, came up with scary factoids that were stovepiped directly to Libby and
me and which we used to build the case in the White House for war. In
effect, we did an end-around the professional intelligence analysts. The
Congress bought our arguments and gave us a blank check for war; we sent
Colin Powell to the United Nations to snow the Security Council with this
supposed WMD evidence and came out with an ambiguously-worded resolution
that we were able to use as a cover for our coming attack. The U.N
inspectors in Iraq weren't finding any of that WMD we talked of, so we
simply ordered them out before they could finish their work, and before the
U.N. could stop us, and began our air and ground assault.
Woman in Audience: My daughter died while on duty in Iraq -- for no good
reason! You and Bush and Rumsfeld are war criminals who made sure never to
serve in uniform yourselves but were quite willing to send our children to
fight your wars! You are a disgrace to --
Chair: Madame, we deeply understand your grief and rage, but this is neither
the time nor the place for such comments. You will have your turn later.
It's imperative that witnesses appear and tell their stories before this
commission without fear of attack. Please take your seat. Thank you.
Commissioner?
THE MISNAMED "CAKEWALK"
Commissioner#3: You had led the country to believe the invasion would be a
cakewalk, and the occupation would be a brief one until a friendly Iraq
government was in place. The war lasted many, many years, with hundreds of
thousands dead and maimed, and its bloody effects are still being felt even
today throughout the region. What happened?
Cheney: We got to Baghdad so easily that we were convinced all our neo-con
projections were panning out. We didn't need a large occupying force, we
thought, because the Iraqis' interim government would gratefully do our
bidding. Meanwhile, we built a goodly number of permanent military bases,
which would serve as staging areas to support our geopolitical goals in the
region. We didn't figure on the Sunni remnants of Saddam's military coming
out of the woodwork and attacking us, along with local Al Qaida forces and
their suicide bomb missions. We didn't pay enough attention to ethnic and
religious machinations and the jockeying for power on the ground. We were
focused on the big picture -- protecting the oilfields, building our
permanent bases, using our muscle to dominate the Middle East (our cover
term was 'democratizing' the region), and so on -- and neglected real-life
concerns on the ground: public services, utilities, securing the abandoned
ammo dumps, humanely guarding our prisoners, etc. In short, we lost the
hearts and minds of the Iraqi people while Iran, in effect, won them.
Commissioner#1: Let's stop right there. You talked about losing the 'hearts
and minds' of the Iraqi people at least partially because of the harsh
treatment of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. care. The Administration concocted a
theory that said the president, and apparently the vice president as well,
could violate any domestic or international laws regarding torture of
prisoners, or any other laws, when done under the cover of fighting a 'war.'
How involved were you in creating the 'harsh-interrogation' attitudes toward
prisoner-care at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and secret prisons elsewhere? And
don't bother telling me of the lowly guards that were prosecuted for abusing
prisoners. We want to know your role from inside the White House.
Cheney: Yes, sir. You have to understand the mood of the time. Al Qaida had
just hit us big on 9/11. There were suspicions that they had more cells
inside the United States. We needed information and we needed it fast. At
our behest, the lawyers -- the ones I mentioned before at Defense and DOJ
and the White House -- came up with the theories you're talking about:
'commander-in-chief during wartime,' 'the unitary executive,' the
establishment of 'secret detention centers' and 'extraordinary rendition' of
suspects to countries less squeamish about torture, our leaders exempt from
international courts, and so on. The word was passed down the chain of
command that the White House required actionable intelligence; Rumsfeld
relaxed interrogation rules, but the parameters of what was permissible were
left deliberately vague. Those in charge of guarding the prisoners felt they
had been given carte blanche to use rough interrogation techniques: threats,
beatings, 'waterboarding,' sexual humiliations, snarling dogs, etc. So, yes,
I was involved in that.
SPYING ON AMERICAN CITIZENS
Commissioner#2: And how involved were you in getting the NSA and other
intelligence-gathering agencies to begin spying on American citizens here at
home, without court approval?
Cheney: As I suggested earlier, we needed intelligence, and we didn't feel
we had the time to go through the paperwork required by the law. FISA was
set up for an earlier time, and, without consulting the judges, we decided
that the FISA court was ill-equipped to deal with the new data-mining
technologies and new realities we faced. I suppose we could have gone to
Congress for enabling legislation that would permit the legal use of our
huge computer networks to mine and record data on emails and phone calls --
and to listen in and read emails -- but we considered ourselves at war, and
during wartime it's often necessary to cut corners in order to get anything
done speedily.
Commissioner#2: And ignoring laws of Congress for years, and violating the
Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one regarding lawful searches and
seizures, didn't bother you? If you thought what you were doing was
perfectly legal and appropriate, why not say so openly and proudly instead
of carrying out secret, anti-constitutional spying operations on millions
and millions of Americans?
Cheney: We figured going to Congress to get the required enabling
legislation would tie us up for months, maybe years, in public and
classified discussions with politicians who often disagreed with our
approach, so we decided to just go ahead and do what we had to do, and to
keep it top-secret. Naturally, in operations of this magnitude, there are
bound to be those who carry things to extremes or who go off the
reservation. Of course, a good share of what we were doing in secret started
to come out anyway years later.
ANY REGRETS? REMORSE?
Commissioner#1: Looking back on your activities during the Bush-Cheney
years, do you have any regrets about the actions you took that eventually
resulted in your impeachment, removal from office, and criminal indictments?
Cheney: You would like me to say I'm sorry, that I know I've done wrong and
ask to be forgiven for my lapses and so on. Of course, I'm sorry that, as
collateral damage, our policies got some people killed or hurt or put into
legal difficulties. But this is the Truth & Reconciliation Commission and,
as you keep reminding me, I am obliged to tell the truth. Therefore, I want
you to know that if I had it to do over again, I'd choose those same
policies. I think they were the correct decisions, though we erred at times
on how the operations were carried out and, in particular, in how we
communicated our goals and programs to the American people.
Chair: Do I understand correctly, Mr. Cheney, that you have no remorse for
your actions that have been judged by your fellow citizens to be enough to
warrant your removal from office and indictments on a wide variety of
criminal charges?
Cheney: Yes, Madame Chairman, you do understand correctly. I am prepared to
defend myself in court, if you do not grant my application for amnesty, on
the basis that I fully believed my actions to be in accord with the urgent
wartime exigencies of the moment and with the Constitution as we understood
it. Our political enemies and ideological foes engineered our slide from
power, perhaps as payback for our having impeached President Clinton, or
because they are soft on terrorism or don't understand the true dangers out
there on the world scene, I don't know. We were patriots who by virtue of
our election to power were in the position to make the decisions that had to
be made to protect and defend our country.
Chair: Is it not possible that those who opposed you were also patriots, who
believed the policies you were advocating were doing great damage to the
national interest of the United States and thus needed to be changed?
WE HAD ALL THE ANSWERS
Cheney: They were wrong, ill-informed, in effect doing the enemy's work. It
was my job as leader of the nation to decide what was best, based on the
wider knowledge we possessed.
Commissioner#3: Mr. Cheney, you just asserted that "it was my job as leader
of the nation," to make those decisions. Are you suggesting that it was you
who made the Administration's vital decisions and not Mr. Bush?
Cheney: Um, a mere slip of the tongue, Commissioner. I meant to say, of
course, that "it was our job." The President, naturally, made all the key
decisions, with special input from his closest advisors like me and Rove and
Rumsfeld. He was the boss, for sure. The President of the United States.
Chair: Methinks thou dost protest too much. But let's return to something
you said a moment ago. You believe your fall from power and your indictments
are the result of a plot to get you? That you did nothing wrong and are not
accountable for your actions to the citizenry and to the domestic and
international courts?
Cheney: I recognize no international-court jurisdiction over America's
elected rulers. Leaders are accountable only to their citizens. In two
national elections, we have prevailed. The American people approved our
policies by voting for us. Our mandate was secure and legal.
FATHER(LAND) KNOWS BEST
Commissioner#3: Without even getting into the issue of whether those
election results were fraudulently obtained, I think it's important to point
out that the Bush Administration did everything possible to hide its true
actions and agenda from its own citizens, rather than stand proudly on them
and let the citizens judge you at the polls on the basis of that knowledge.
Cheney: We had the responsibility to protect our citizens; they didn't need
to know everything we were doing on their behalf, and Congress likewise. We
had the facts and could see the big picture; most everyone seemed content to
let us do the hard, dirty work required, without asking too many questions.
They were frightened and confused, and we eased their minds by not requiring
them to think too deeply about what should be done. Democratic institutions
often get in the way, get bogged down with scrutinizing the legalities and
all that. Electing The Leader and letting him make all those messy decisions
is much faster and effective, we found.
Chair: Yes, we understand that line of reasoning. We've seen the tragic
effects of such governance in several world wars during the past 70 years or
so. Unfortunately for you, people want to be free. Which is why you've wound
up here, sir.
Cheney: This isn't over. The liberals will ruin this country. My friends and
I will be back.
Copyright 2006, by Bernard Weiner
Bernard Weiner, a poet and playwright, has written numerous fantasias
about the Bush Administration (
http://www.crisispapers.org/weinerpubs.htm#fantasies ). A Ph.D. in
government & international relations, he has taught at various universities,
worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently
co-edits The Crisis Papers. To comment: >>
crisispapers@comcast.net >>. |
| And, finally, it puts on display the utter
vapidity of the press corps we’re dealing with. If Dean Broder, who has been
covering Washington since 1820, can’t sit through a 45 minute speech on
energy policy, and the press on Air Force One would rather watch King Kong
than the Hayden hearings, while they devote their time and resources to a
long 50-source article about how often the Clintons are getting busy, then
we have a problem, and it’s not something we’re going to clear up at a
blogger ethics panel. And I would add that there is another equally
pernicious dimension to this. This tabloidization of political news is
almost exclusively focused on Democrats and gives the impression that the
left is unserious. John Kerry’s butler and his strange, wealthy wife.
Dean’s flinty personality and odd, reclusive wife. Gore’s pathological
lying and his phony manhood. The list goes on. It’s all very "entertaining"
but it makes people associate Democrats with celebrities in the most shallow
sense.
I do not believe this comes out of nowhere. There has long been a cottage
industry of GOP operatives who pass along these juicy tidbits to the press
(and I assume the entire social network in DC) who eagerly open their little
beaks and swallow it. This Hillary story on the front page of the NY Times
seems to have come completely out of nowhere. There’s no new hook, yet the
story says that "prominent Democrats" are all atwitter wondering about the
state of Clinton’s marriage and what it might mean. Well gosh, if they
weren’t before they certainly are now. The whole beltway high school circle
jerk society are suddenly beside themselves.
I would remind people of a little story from the 2000 election as
documented by the Daily Howler. Here’s Margaret Carlson:
Gore’s fabrications may be inconsequential—I mean, they’re about his
life. Bush’s fabrications are about our life, and what he’s going to do.
Bush’s should matter more but they don’t, because Gore’s we can disprove
right here and now…You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if
you really get in the weeds and get out your calculator or you look at his
record in Texas. But it’s really easy, and it’s fun, to disprove Gore.
What this does is trivialize liberals. The press corps projects its own
shortcomings on to Democrats and then attacks them for it. The silly,
insubstantial (idea-less) tabloid mentality is pasted to the Democratic
image which allows the Republicans to present themselves as the serious ones
(even mental midgets who say things like "is our children learning" or "OBGYN’s
can’t show love to their patients.") The "grown-ups are back" meme, which
was very successful for Bush and Cheney in 2000 would have been impossible
without the press having spent eight years covering the white house like
Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee lived there.
That was the mentality of the DC press corps as it existed up to the 2000
election when suddenly the coverage became all about Bush’s tremendous
integrity and seriousness. And the shot across the bow from the NY Times
this week (and the giggly reactions among the chattering class) tells us
that the Clinton Rules are in full effect.
For those of you who missed this peek at the patented seventh grade Mean
Girl style of the kewl kidz, check out the
transcript for Chris Matthews this past Tuesday. He spent more than half
the show squealing and giggling with his guests like he had the latest copy
of Tiger Beat in his hands. He, like Broder and the New York Times also
breathlessly passed along the name of this canadian politician whom we are
all apparently supposed to assume is servicing Bill Bill’s needs these days.
I particularly liked this bit, aided and abetted by none other than good
guy Bob Herbert who apparently thinks it’s just fine for the news media to
decide who can and cannot be elected president:
HERBERT: I can make one other point. The fact that we‘re talking about
the Clintons‘ marriage here I think is just that kind of discussion, the
story in The Times today is really harmful for Hillary‘s presidential
chances, because I think that there is a real hunger for change in this
country politically, and I think if we keep harping on that, and I think it
is a legitimate story, but I mean, if the media does keep harping on that,
there will be a tendency among the electorate to say, you know, enough
already. We‘re going to move on. We may move in a different direction.
MATTHEWS: It may be like putting on the old bad tire that you‘ve gotten
fixed a few times on your car. We‘re back again where we started. Do you
think there is a fatigue out there of the Bushes and the Clintons together
like for years we‘ve had the Bushes, we had Nixon all the time, now we‘ve
got the Clintons all around us, do you think, Michael, that people are tired
of this bunch?
The old Cokie Roberts defense: "It doesn’t matter if its true ot not,
it’s out there" is back with a vengeance now that Democrats are becoming
relevant again. And the New York Times put it "out there." It seems
they’ve decided for us that Hillary won’t do. Perhaps we could skip all this
unpleasant untidiness with elections and whatnot and they can just tell us
now who we are allowed to have as candidates and we can save some money. And
if, as I suspect, John McCain has been chosen by the journalistic pooh-bahs
to be the it-boy of 2008, it’s better to know this in advance so that we can
do what we have to do to tell the whole story.
If you read the entire transcript (or saw the show) you’ll notice that
Chris quite obviously holds up his marriage as being superior to the
Clintons. I sure hope he doesn’t have any dirty laundry he doesn’t want all
over the internet. There was no blogosphere the last time these puerile
panty sniffers had a go. There is now. |
Is Congress aiding and
abetting the creation of a police state? Recently, the chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., helped to give the
CIA and NSA unprecedented police powers. By inserting a provision in the
FY07 Intelligence Authorization Act, Hoekstra has undermined the existing
statutory limits on involvement in domestic law enforcement. This comes
after revelations in January of direct NSA involvement with the Baltimore
police in order to "protect" the NSA Headquarters from Quaker protesters.
Add to this, the
disquieting news that the White House has been barraging the CIA with
totally improper questions about the political affiliation of some of its
senior intelligence officers, the ever widening use of polygraph
examinations, and the FBI’s admission that it acquires phone records of
broadcast and print media to investigate leaks at the CIA. I, for one, am
reminded of my service in the police state of the U.S.S.R., where there
were no First or Fourth Amendments.
Like the proverbial
frog in slowly boiling water, we have become inured to what goes on in the
name of national security. Recent disclosures about increased government
surveillance and illegal activities would be shocking, were it not for the
prevailing outrage-fatigue brought on by a long train of abuses. But the
heads of the civilian, democratically elected institutions that are
supposed to be our bulwark against an encroaching police state, the ones
who stand to lose their own power as well as their rights and the rights
of all citizens, aren’t interested in reining in the power of the
intelligence establishment. To the contrary, Rep. Hoekstra and his
counterpart at the Senate, Pat Roberts, R.-Kan., are running the risk of
whiplash as they pivot to look the other way.
James Bamford, one of
the best observers of the inner workings of U.S. intelligence, warned
recently that Congress has lost control of the intelligence community.
“You can’t get any oversight or checks and balances,” he said. “Congress
is protecting the White House, and the White House can do whatever it
wants.”
Consider the following
nuggets drawn from Sunday’s Washington Post article by R. Jeffrey Smith
about the firing of senior CIA analyst Mary McCarthy. Apparently McCarthy
learned that at least one “senior agency official” lied to Congress about
agency policy and practice with regard to torturing detainees during
interrogations.
According to Smith’s
article, one internal CIA study completed in 2004 concluded that CIA
interrogation policies and techniques violated international law. This is
said to have come as something of a shock to agency interrogators who had
been led by the Justice Department to believe that international
conventions against torture did not apply to interrogations of foreigners
outside of the United States. McCarthy reportedly was also chagrined to
learn that the CIA’s general counsel had secured a secret Justice
Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the creation of a category of
“ghost detainees,” prisoners transported abroad, mostly from Iraq, for
secret interrogation—without notification of the Red Cross, as required by
the Geneva Convention.
No problem, said
senior CIA officials. We’ll just lie to the committee leaders about the
torture; they will wink and be grateful we did. The lying came during
discussion of draft legislation aimed at preventing torture. As deputy
inspector general, McCarthy became aware that CIA officials had misled the
chairmen and ranking members of the congressional “oversight” committees
on multiple occasions. Neither of the committees seemed interested in
taking a serious look at the torture issue.
It will be highly
interesting to see what the intrepid chairmen of the House and Senate
intelligence committees do, if anything, to followup on Smith’s report
that “a senior CIA official” meeting with Senate staff last June lied
about the agency’s interrogation practices. Or that a “senior agency
official” failed to provide a full account of CIA’s policy for treating
detainees at a closed hearing of the House intelligence committee in Feb.
2005 under questioning by Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat. Will
Roberts and Hoekstra hold those agency officials accountable, or will they
let the matter die—like some of the detainees subjected to “enhanced”
interrogation techniques to which the chairmen have so far turned a blind
eye?
Hoekstra is a master
at Catch-22. On the one hand Hoekstra insists that those in intelligence
who have information on illegal or improper behavior report it to his
intelligence committee; then he refuses to let them in the door. Russell
Tice, a former NSA employee, has been trying since last December to give
Hoekstra a first-hand account of illegal activities at the NSA. He has
rebuffed Tice, with the lame explanation that the NSA will not clear
Hoekstra or any of his committee members for the highly classified
programs about which Tice wants to report. With the door locked to the
intelligence committees, Tice has turned to the Senate Armed Services
Committee and said that he will meet soon with committee staff in closed
session to tell of “probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts” at the
NSA while Gen. Michael Hayden was in charge.
Amid the recent
revelations of secret CIA-run prisons abroad, torture and illegal
eavesdropping, Hoekstra has chosen to express outrage—but not at the
prisons, torture or eavesdropping. Rather, the House Intelligence
Committee chairman is outraged that information on these abuses has found
its way onto the public square. Hoekstra has turned his full attention to
pursuing those who leak such information—never mind that is the activities
disclosed, not the leaks, that are the real outrage.
The executive branch
is “walking all over the Congress at the moment,” complained Sen. Arlen
Specter, R.-Pa., last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee which he
chairs. Unlike Roberts and Hoekstra, Specter seems genuinely troubled at
the president’s disdain for the separation of powers and particularly his
end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which
prohibits eavesdropping on American citizens without a court warrant.
But when Specter meets
a stonewall, he caves. He may ask telephone company CEOs why they
surrendered records to the government, but—illegal eavesdropping or
no—Specter will likely remain a spectator, as Pat Roberts greases the
skids for Big Brother Gen. Michael Hayden, architect and implementer of
eavesdropping on Americans in violation of FISA, to become the next
director of the CIA. Hayden’s disingenuousness in his testimony before the
intelligence committees has been clear, but the committee chairmen are as
much to blame for winking at it.
Meanwhile, the Justice
Department has told Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D.-N.Y., that it is stopping its
months-long investigation into who approved the NSA’s
eavesdropping-on-American-citizens initiative (now euphemistically dubbed
“the terrorist surveillance program”). Justice explained to Hinchey that
the NSA would not grant Justice department investigators the appropriate
security clearances to investigate the NSA program. Kafka would smirk.
Rep. Hoekstra’s speaks
of “vigorous oversight” of the NSA, but the evidence of that is lacking.
Late last year the current head of the NSA, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander,
deliberately misled House intelligence committee member Rush Holt, D-N.J.,
on the eavesdropping program. On Dec. 6, Holt, a former State Department
intelligence specialist, called on Alexander and NSA lawyers to discuss
protecting Americans’ privacy. They all assured Holt that the agency
singled out Americans for eavesdropping only after warrants had been
obtained from the FISA court. Later that month, when disclosures in The
New York Times made it clear that Alexander had lied to a member of his
committee, Hoekstra merely suggested that Holt write a letter to Alexander
to complain. The inescapable message to Alexander? Fear not: Hoekstra the
fox is watching the hen house.
When the writers of
the Constitution envisioned a separation of powers to ensure checks and
balances in our government, they were relying on the leaders of those
branches to fight to maintain their own power within the system. Fresh
from the struggle against King George, they could not have predicted that
some of our leaders would voluntarily sign away their own rights to
another George who would be king.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the Church of
the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is
now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
|
|
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006
So here’s the big Republican agenda for the 2006 elections: Other
people’s sex lives (a. k. a. gay marriage ), flag-burning, illegal Mexican
immigrants, tax cuts and Chicken Little. There’s no surprise about the first
few. A GOP campaign resembles a traveling tent show. White House sideshow
barker Karl Rove expects that the rubes who line up every two years to see
the twoheaded calf and the bearded lady will fall for flag-burning again.
Never mind that Republicans have done nothing about it since President
Bush’s father visited a flag factory during his 1988 campaign. Flag burning
as a protest all but disappeared after 9 / 11. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.
Y., also has joined this crusade, the surest sign that she’s contemplating
running for president in 2008.
Amending the Constitution to forbid gay marriage is another election-year
shell game. Finessing it shouldn’t be too hard for Democrats. If your church
refuses to solemnize same-sex marriages, that’s its undeniable First
Amendment right. Forbidding people to enter into domestic partnership
contracts due to sexual orientation, however, would be un-American.
No, that won’t persuade obsessive homophobes, but they’re fewer all the
time.
Illegal immigration’s something else Republicans have ignored for six
years. Ironically, Bush’s stance reflects the “compassionate conservatism”
he campaigned on in 2000 but abandoned, maybe because Mexican immigration is
a very old story in Texas that he actually knows something about.
Ironically, that’s got the GOP’s Knothead faction all riled up, helping
GOP congressmen in safe districts distance themselves from an increasingly
unpopular White House, but also hurting Republicans among Hispanic voters in
swing districts.
Ditto tax cuts. Even the most credulous are getting uneasy with the GOP’s
ongoing war on arithmetic and worried about spiraling debt caused by Bush’s
profligate spending.
Influential conservative author-activist Richard A. Viguerie recently
wrote a Washington Post op-ed predicting that “without a drastic change in
direction, millions of conservatives will... stay home this November. And
maybe they should. Conservatives are beginning to realize that nothing will
change until there’s a change in the GOP leadership. If congressional
Republicans win this fall, they will see themselves as vindicated, and
nothing will get better.”
Which brings us to the Chicken Little theme on which Republican hopes
appear to hinge. Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N. C., first raised it in a recent
fund-raising letter on behalf of the party’s Senatorial Campaign Committee.
If Democrats regain Congress, see, they’ll act the way Republicans acted
toward Bill Clinton, calling for “endless investigations, congressional
censure and maybe even impeachment of President Bush.”
And then the terrorists would win !
Many pundits who helped publicize the 1, 000-odd subpoenas that
congressional Republicans dispatched to the Clinton White House find the
prospect of Democrats issuing subpoenas terribly alarming. Slate’s John
Dickerson worries that a Democratic-led House might “get bogged down with
investigations and embrace the worst Bush-hating tendencies of its members.”
Time columnist Joe Klein, a. k. a. “Anonymous,” author of the novel
“Primary Colors,” who’s grown adept at advancing GOP themes while affecting
to deplore them, laments that the likely succession of Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.,
to chair the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats win in November gives
Republicans a chance to play the race card.
Because Conyers is African American and has sometimes used the words
“Bush” and “impeachable offense” in the same sentence, Klein fears that Rove
will have a field day depicting the veteran Detroit congressman as Kenneth
Starr in blackface.
The idea that irrational hatred of Bush motivates most Democrats is a
favorite topic on the talk-radio right. Psychologists call it “projection,”
attributing to others motives that mirror your own.
The best way for Democrats to deal with this Chicken Little theme is
straight on, as Conyers has attempted to do. In a recent Washington Post
column, he correctly identified the “straw-man” logical fallacy that
underlies it: attacking arguments your adversary has never actually made.
Years of one-party government, Conyers said, have left Americans with
many unanswered questions, such as “whether intelligence was mistaken or
manipulated in the run-up to the Iraq war... the extent to which
high-ranking officials approved of the use of torture... whether the leaking
of the name of a covert CIA operative was deliberate or accidental” and who
did it. Any alert citizen can add particulars: the legality of National
Security Agency’s warrantless wiretaps and the constitutionality of Bush’s
740 “signing statements,” as reported by The Boston Globe, in which the
president claims the power to ignore laws with which he disagrees. Conyers
wisely stresses that the GOP-led House impeachment of Clinton proved “that
partisan vendettas ultimately provoke a public backlash and are never viewed
as legitimate.” Nobody wants a government that does nothing but investigate
itself. But the Republican Congress has completely abdicated its
constitutional responsiblilites. Our democracy cannot long survive a
president who claims the prerogatives of a king. That’s an argument the
Democrats must win.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and
recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Copyright © 2001-2006 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. |
By Glenn Greenwald, AlterNet
Posted on May 24, 2006, Printed on May 27, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/36639/
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday essentially
assured that President Bush's nominee to head the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden,
would not only be confirmed by the full Senate, but confirmed
overwhelmingly. That's because a majority of the Democratic Committee
members (along with, needless to say, all of the Committee Republicans)
voted
in favor of confirming Gen. Hayden:
The Senate Intelligence Committee strongly endorsed
Gen. Michael V. Hayden on Tuesday to be the next director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, with all but three members, all Democrats, voting to
send Gen. Hayden's nomination to the Senate floor.
The panel's 12 to 3 vote virtually guarantees that Gen.
Hayden will win confirmation by the full Senate, which is likely to vote on
his selection before the end of the week.
Four committee Democrats joined all eight Republican
members in endorsing the general. Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas
and the panel's chairman, called Gen. Hayden "a proven leader and a
supremely qualified intelligence professional."
The committee's vice chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV,
a Democrat from West Virginia, said Gen. Hayden had shown "the necessary
independence that is essential to restoring the CIA's credibility and
stature."
Given the similarities, it sounds like Pat Roberts and John Rockefeller
drafted their statements together, which is nice. Four Democrats --
Feinstein, Rockefeller, Levin and Mikulski -- voted for Hayden and then
praised him lavishly. Three Democrats -- Feingold, Wyden and Bayh -- voted
against him.
Although it's hardly surprising, this result is still rather
extraordinary. Gen. Hayden ought to have been seen as the most defiant and
inflammatory person possible for the president to have nominated. He was,
after all, the director of the NSA at the time it implemented its illegal
warrantless eavesdropping program, as well as its massive data-collection
schemes, and he is a
True Believer in the theories of presidential power that hold that the
president has the right to violate the law. And he wasn't nominated to be
the agriculture secretary, but the director of the CIA -- probably the very
worst position you would want someone to occupy with that history of
surveillance lawbreaking and system of beliefs regarding the rule of law.
But no matter. Thanks to the generous and always-accommodating Senate
Democrats, this nomination will be trouble-free for the president. This
series of events led John Cole yesterday to make this
insightful observation:
While I miss not spending as much time reading blogs,
writing as many posts, and commenting on other blogs, stepping back from it
all has allowed for some clarity regarding the current political system.
When I was immersed in blogs, I felt that the Democrats were having some
success blocking the current administration, but when I look back, I was
just fooled by the current game. The Hayden nomination is a perfect example.
When he was nominated, a few people had fits, a chorus
of echoes emerged and then there appeared to be a popular effort to block
his nomination. And then time went by, and now it looks increasingly like he
will be confirmed, as everyone has moved on to something else -- "Look, a
Rabbit!" -- as everyone gets all worked up about the FBI raiding Rep.
Jefferson's office or whatever the issue du jour might be.
And if you look back on things, that is how it has been
since the beginning of this administration -- they do what they want,
Democrats throw up an opposition that is of varying degrees of tepidness
(did I just make that word up?), a few "maverick" Republicans cross lines
(briefly), and then the administration gets what they want.
Rinse and Repeat. … In short, while immersed in the
blogosphere, you get the feeling that the political climate is changing, but
if you step back and look at the big picture, it looks much more like the
SSDD.
It is very hard to argue with that. There were already ample grounds for
attacking the Hayden nomination when it was announced, and then, right in
the middle of it, an all-new, highly controversial, likely illegal NSA
program was revealed for which he was responsible. But that was barely a
speed bump in the harmonious, smooth sailing of his confirmation.
For all the talk of the weakened and impotent presidency and the split
among Republicans, it is still virtually always the case that the president
gets what he wants and without much difficulty. The few times he fails --
Harriet Miers, the Dubai Port deal, anti-torture legislation -- is because
Republicans, not Democrats, take a stand against the White House.
But by and large, what happened yesterday with Gen. Hayden's nomination
is exactly what would have happened in 2002 and 2003. Democrats are afraid
to challenge the president due to their fear -- always due to their fear --
that they will be depicted as mean, obstructionist and weak on national
security. And so, even with an unbelievably weakened president, and even
with regard to the most consequential issues -- and can one doubt that
installing Gen. Hayden as CIA director is consequential? -- Democrats back
away from fights, take no clear position, divide against each other and
stand up for exactly nothing.
It is quite possible that Democrats would not have been able to stop Gen.
Hayden's nomination. It is true that they are still in the minority and thus
are limited in what they can achieve legislatively. But that's really
irrelevant. Gen. Hayden is a symbol and one of the chief instruments and
advocates of the administration's lawlessness. He
refused to say in his testimony even whether he would even comply with
the law. Opposing his nomination is both compelled by a principled belief in
the rule of law as well as justified by the important political opportunity
to highlight this administration's lawbreaking. Sen. Feingold, as usual,
shows how this works:
The Democrats who voted against the nomination were
Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Evan Bayh of
Indiana. Each cited concerns about Gen. Hayden's role in a controversial
domestic surveillance program he ran while head of the National Security
Agency.
"I am not convinced that the nominee respects the rule
of law and Congress' oversight responsibilities," Mr. Feingold said.
In other words, there are serious questions about whether Gen. Hayden
will comply with the law and whether he believes in the rule of law, so
perhaps it's not a good idea to install him as CIA director. Is there some
reason Democrats were afraid to make that clear, straightforward, critically
important point?
Yet again, Senate Democrats show that they have no more concern for the
rule of law and for the excesses of this administration than Senate
Republicans do. Due to their really pitiful passivity, they are every bit as
much to blame for the excesses and abuses of the administration as the
compliant Republicans are.
I've
written before that, at least to me, the principal if not exclusive
benefit of the Democrats taking over one or both of the congressional houses
in November is that it will impose some checks and limitations on the
behavior of the administration and, specifically, will finally result in
meaningful investigations into what has happened in our country and to our
government over the last five years. But I have serious doubts about whether
that would really happen.
After November 2006, the presidential elections are not far away. The
same paralyzing, stagnating, fatally passive Democratic voices who always
counsel against standing up to the administration aren't going anywhere. It
is not hard to imagine what they will be saying:
President Bush is a lame duck who is out in 2008, and
so it doesn't matter what he got away with or what he did. Conducting
investigations into these intelligence and "anti-terrorist" scandals will be
depicted as obstructionist and weak on national security, and will
jeopardize our chances to retake the White House and will cost us House and
Senate seats. It is best to look forward, not to the past, and not be seen
as conducting vendettas against the lame duck president. What matters is
taking the White House in 2008, and so there is no reason to attack the
president on these matters of the past.
Is there any doubt that the likes of Sens. Feinstein, Rockefeller, Levin,
etc., are going to follow that thinking, as they always do? I don't see how
that can be doubted. I think congressional Democrats will be more cautious
and passive, not less so, if they take over one of the congressional houses
in 2006. People who operate from a place of fear and excess caution become
even more timid and fearful when they have something to lose. The Democratic
congressional chairs are going to be desperate not to lose that newfound
power, and they will be very, very vulnerable to the whiny whispers of the
consultant class that they should not spend their time and energy
investigating this administration or vigorously opposing them on national
security matters.
John Cole is absolutely right that Democrats have managed to change
virtually nothing as a result of the collapse of the Bush presidency. That's
because they think the same and behave the same as they did when they were
getting pushed around by Bush as a highly popular "war president." As a
result, there is no reason to believe they will be any better than they are
now (and have been for the past four years) if and when they take over one
or both congressional houses. One could make a compelling case that they
will be even worse.
Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at
Unclaimed Territory. His forthcoming book, "How
Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok"
will be released by
Working Assets Publishing next month.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. |
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