Tag: Obama

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Obama’s Biggest Mistake

If we do turn into a police state some time in the future and everyone is feeling safe and secure and watched, Obama will not be remembered as a hero of that movement: there are no heroes of that kind of future. No one will brag, in the future, that they were so frightened of terrorists that they acquiesced to the erosion of one of our most fundamental of civil liberties: the right to not be watched.

They will be ashamed. We know this because neither George Bush or Obama or any other leading politician was willing to campaign on a platform that included the idea of instituting massive warrantless surveillance of every U.S. citizen.

But if America comes to its senses in the next few years and realizes just how awful the consequences of the surveillance state is, Obama will certainly be regarded as a jerk, who made one of the worst decisions in U.S. Presidential history, who suffered the most profound failure of imagination of a Democratic leader since Lyndon Johnson forgot to end the Viet Nam war after he realized it could never be won.

Yes, Obama will be known as the Lyndon Johnson of the 21st century, a smart, dynamic leader who made numerous good decisions and one or two incredibly horrible decisions that permanently scarred the perception of his administration. Johnson achieved many remarkable things, including landmark civil rights legislation and anti-poverty programs. But he could not bear to make himself vulnerable to conservatives who would paint him as a coward if he did the right thing and withdrew from Viet Nam. He sent 55,000 Americans to their deaths to pay for his ego. Obama could not bear to make himself vulnerable to conservatives who would accuse him of having blood on his hands if any Americans died in a terrorist attack which, in their fantasy world, could have been prevented with the NSA’s massive surveillance program.

This is not an exaggeration or hyperbole: 55,000 American young men died because Lyndon Johnson couldn’t bear the thought that Republicans would call him a coward or a defeatist. And that is the essence of Republican politics: they didn’t require that Johnson put on a backpack and boots and go into the jungles of Viet Nam and shoot a few Viet Cong to prove his manhood. No, no, no, because Republicans would never send themselves there to do that. No, what they demanded is that he be big and brave and send someone else to get shot at and killed and maimed, so he could sleep at night knowing his manhood was secure.

Obama’s motivation is similar: he can’t bear the idea of being soft on terrorism, so he is extra harsh, assassinating targets without the slightest process, due or otherwise, and refusing to act against administration officials who conducted torture and arbitrary seizure and imprisonment– and there are a lot of really repulsive former administration officials in that category. He just couldn’t bear it. But nobody says, “I can’t bear to prosecute people who look like me and live like me and work in the same buildings”. They say, “it would be too complicated, too difficult. It would raise constitutional issues. Executive privilege. They had good intentions. It would set a bad precedent. It would tie up prosecutors for ages”. The same reasons they give for not prosecuting individuals at the big banks and brokerages who clearly defrauded Americans of billions of dollars.

What makes it all even more stunning is the fact that so many people in the Bush administration — conservative Republicans all!– were absolutely convinced that the program was illegal and unconstitutional. Many of them even resigned posts at the NSA rather than participate in a program they absolutely believed was wrong. The Bush Administration persecuted them, sending the FBI to search their homes and confiscate their home computers and terrorize their families.

And then the Democrat, the liberal progressive Democrat, comes into office and not only tolerates the continued violation of the constitution– he increases it! He goes further. He even approves the assassinations of Americans living abroad.

The contrast between Obama’s complete and abject surrender to the paranoids who run the intelligence services and his campaign speeches is heart-breaking. It is heart-breaking because he raised the hopes of people who believed passionately that it was possible to bring decency and good sense and wisdom to the White House by electing this elegant, articulate, visionary young senator. Raised those hopes so high, and then crushed them.

So even if some politician launched a campaign for the presidency next year and vowed that he would stop the NSA from warrantless spying on every American, you could never believe that he would actually do it. He might believe it himself for a while, but then there would be a moment when he realizes he might actually win the election, and a meeting in the White House before he takes office, and he would be surrounded by high-ranking officials in the intelligence gathering community and they would solemnly insist that Americans will die and he will be blamed if he doesn’t immediately reverse himself, and a moment at home alone at night when he considers a headline blaming a terrorist attack on the inadequate manhood of the man in the hood.

Are you listening, Rand Paul? He says what Obama said, but I can picture Michael Hayden sitting in an office while an aide discusses Paul’s vision of a surveillance-less future… and laughing.

More on the NSA warrantless surveillance program.

How the FBI really protects Americans from “terrorist threats”.

Canadian law on “unreasonable” search and seizure.

A brilliant documentary on the NSA’s warrantless surveillance programs.

Very, very depressing to see that the New York Times had the story about the secret surveillance program and was about to publish it when the White House called senior editors and the publisher to a meeting and used the old “blood on your hands” canard to convince them not to publish.

South Carolina is considering a law prohibiting law enforcement agencies from collecting GPS data from cell phones without a warrant.  This is a news item.  It should not be.  It is absurd that any state should pass a law to protect a right that is already guaranteed in the constitution (the prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure).

I read about this this evening– in Reddit, I believe– and then I couldn’t find it in any news source anywhere.  Maybe it was an error.

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Obama’s Failures

It is not easy to sort out the points at which Obama has failed and the points at which a ridiculously venal and disingenuous opposition has succeeded in thwarting all government, all policy and all strategy. The clearest point was the earliest: Obama had a majority in both houses for the first two years of his first term and failed to conclude a number of legislative initiatives, including budget and tax measures, that could have been the foundation for the rest of both terms.

In fairness, not even everyone in his own party would have supported it. The fact that he was only able to squeeze through Obamacare with a bare majority, in spite of the fact that it is essentially the Republican Plan from ten years ago, gives you an indication of just how dysfunctional U.S. national politics is.

Nobody will ever be able to prove, convincingly, that the Republicans had a better strategy for dealing with the 2008 financial crisis than Obama– and, any way, the strategy they did have was same: bail out the banks (and the big contributors to your election campaigns) and string the mortgage holders out to dry, and then cut taxes for the rich. It is easy for Republicans to claim that the economy would have performed better under a McCain or Romney Administration because it is impossible to show that it wouldn’t have. There is no laboratory of economics that can isolate budget policies from all the other factors that go into making up the economic performance of any given country. What evidence we do have suggests that cutting taxes and reducing over-all spending (Republican policies) has a negative effect and that, in fact, we would be worse off today if the Republicans had had their way. Check Wisconsin for comparison.

Obama pressed a little for more help for those hurt the most by the ruthless greed and amoral practices of the big banks, but he didn’t push very hard. Obama’s Justice Department did very, very little in the way of punishing the people responsible for inflicting more peacetime misery on more people all around the world than anyone else before or since. Almost no one was held to account.

Eric Holder was not up to the task. Timothy Geithner was always one of them, as was Ben Bernake.

The Obama administration came to the conclusion that it would be too difficult to prosecute them. That’s a typical “liberal” response to complexity. It was a moment I would have liked a hard-bitten tough-as-nails conservative like Teddy Roosevelt (there’s nobody in the current Republican Party who is anything like that) to come along and just do it. Just let people know that you are going to do it whether they like it or not. Liberals are always trying to get everyone on board and compromise. And usually, that’s a wise strategy. But not when dealing with these Republicans who always ever only had one goal, to prevent Obama from any legislative success whatsoever, no matter what the cost.

So Obama gets elected on the promise of change but the first thing everyone noticed was how many familiar faces there were in his administration, all holdovers from Bush and Clinton and Reagan, all establishment figures, and almost no real outsiders. He tried to get Elizabeth Warren appointed to the Consumer Protection Bureau but caved quickly to hysterical Republican attacks, which is about the highest compliment anyone has recently paid to anyone on either side.

What is it about Elizabeth Warren that they are so frightened of?

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The Red Line

Is it too much to ask that the U.S. point to a single success story before embarking on a new adventure in disruptive interventions in the Middle East? What is Obama’s model for this enterprise? Has anybody in this administration asked about five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now? Does Obama live in an echo chamber wherein his advisors seek advice from their adviser’s advisers? Does he ever hear from anyone with a genuinely dissenting view?

There is raging hypocrisy in all the blather right now coming from Obama and Hagel and Kerry on Syria: after doing nothing while 100,000 people have been killed and thousands more tortured and millions made refugees, now— now! — we cannot stand by anymore, because Assad has used chemical weapons. Now, our integrity is at stake. Now, the world wonders if we have any principles. Now, our hearts are wrung with compassion for the victims of violent, repressive governments.

I would love to ask Obama if he feels the allies fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and other Japanese cities, using M47 oil gel bombs, during World War II crossed any kind of red line?

Now we support democracy in Egypt. Now we don’t.

Now would be a good time, in fact, for the United Nations to vigorously assert that no government has the right to slaughter or repress or abuse their own peoples, whether it be Zimbabwe, North Korea, China, or Iran. But that would be a dramatic change from the prevailing doctrine, which is, what happens in your country stays in your country. Ever since the world community decided, when it formed the United Nations (from the ashes of the failed “League of Nations”), that it was more important that all states be represented and have some investment in the world order than it was to insist that all of them be democracies, we have lived with this devil’s bargain: we will not interfere when you commit atrocities within your own borders. We will only interfere if you cross the border to commit atrocities.

In fairness, one could make a cogent argument for the idea that the UN has actually been effective in reducing the number of wars on the planet.  That’s no joke.  We are all appalled at Egypt and North Korea and Syria, but at least they are not at war with Israel or each other.  That is nothing to sneeze at.  In the 1960’s, there were numerous wars at any given time, with an appalling cost in human lives and material destruction.

What is needed at the moment in Syria is not more U.S. intervention, but a cease-fire.

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The $37,000 Voice

President Obama recently flew to Chicago to attend a fund-raising dinner. The trip cost $175,000 an hour for Air Force One. The President gets to fly on Air Force One because he is the President and he is not “allowed” to fly on a commercial jet. To attend this dinner you need to give $37,000 to the Democratic Party. The money is not for Obama– he can’t run again. It is for the 2014 mid-term congressional elections.

[By the way, “not allowed” is bullshit.  Politicians love it because they can claim that they are just plain folk, humble and unpretentious, but those damn Secret Service guys insist.  The President and Congress are the government.  They create this policy and then pretend they didn’t even know it existed.]

There are a lot of people– some of them rational– who will insist that it is reasonable to insist that the President fly on Air Force One to any function no matter how private or personal or partisan, because the chief executive of the mighty United States of America must remain in constant contact with his generals and cabinet ministers and congressional leaders and such at all times.

I don’t care how many people insist this is true: it is not. Nor is it true that the President cannot go to a restaurant or park or bar without huge pre-arrangements, security details, block closings, and other ridiculous efforts. Did you know that if he goes into a book store, the Secret Service must clear everybody else out in advance? Is this a genuine security issue, or because the President might be uncomfortable having to chat with a real, live citizen for a change?  Or, more likely, because the President and his acolytes just adore the prestige of being so important, so amazing, so precious, that everyone else must leave the store.

People do believe the security and the privilege are necessary under the pervasive delusion that the President of the United States is a kind of supernatural magical leader of indescribable talent and judgment who cannot be replaced. They believe he is indispensable because it is in the interests of the President and of the Secret Service and the entire security-industrial complex to convince us that he is indispensable. They also believe the security benefits of the President flying around in a gigantic 747 all to himself outweigh the disadvantages.

“The cemeteries are full of people the world could not do without. ” Elbert Hubbard.

The disadvantages are this: your leader is completely out of touch with reality. He exists in a marvelous bubble of insular gratifications and illusions. Every detail of day to day life for most Americans becomes theoretical and abstract.

The truth is that, in a pinch, any number of cabinet officials or Senate or Congressional leaders could fill in for the President without doing any harm to the nation. The truth is that most decisions are are made by functionaries and high-level civil servants and presented to the president mainly for the official imprimatur of an elected authority. Does the president ever, out of the blue, suddenly say something like, “hey, let’s take a look at tv advertising — I’d really like to limit the number of ads that can be shown every hour”? No. It’s more like, “Mr. President, this proposed oil pipeline is generating a lot of opposition from environmentalists. We recommend you sit on it.”

Would I have him take a commercial flight? Absolutely. But I’m a reasonable person. A small, private jet supplied by the Democratic Party would do. He could still be accompanied by a few Secret Service agents, and the local police at his destination could do the rest. Does he need a motorcade to the hall? No, damn it, he does not. And yes, I would have the President of the United States of America get stuck in traffic once in a while because that would tell the world that, first of all, we are democracy and everyone is equal under the law, and, secondly, our leaders are in touch with the concerns of the average voter.

And most importantly: the average person’s idea of what is truly exceptional about famous people is completely and utterly false and needs to be corrected. And once people once again have the impression that leaders are a lot more like you and me than they are like gods, democracy would be healthier.

One More Thing

Once again the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court, who claim a passion for keeping big government out of our lives when it comes to safety or health, think it would be marvelous to let the police collect and store your DNA even if you haven’t been charged with a crime.

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American Secret Police

The hypothesis is this: the NSA’s secret telephone and internet surveillance program will reduce the chances of a terrorist attack on U.S. citizens.

As Karl Popper lavishly demonstrated, a hypothesis can only be considered proven if it is theoretically possible that it could be proven false. Now, there are two possible outcomes to the NSA’s secret telephone and internet surveillance programs. 1. There continue to be terrorist attacks. 2. There are much fewer or no terrorist attacks. And here’s the problem: if the result is 1, Obama can and will argue that the surveillance program is even more necessary because we have terrorist attacks. If the result is 2, the surveillance program is successful. Either way, we keep the surveillance program (does anyone seriously believe that, barring the election of Rand Paul, it will ever go away?).

This is an argument Obama cannot lose because it cannot be, in Popper’s phrase, “falsified”.  That is, no matter what the evidence shows, the program is considered a success.

I have not heard anyone yet refer to something I would call “the secret police”. That is in fact exactly what the tens of thousands of employees of the NSA and Homeland Security are. They are governed by secret laws, authorized by secret courts, and conduct all their operations in extreme secrecy. The argument that, well, Congress has oversight, is so patently ridiculous it must be regarded as a rather preposterous, offensive joke.

John Oliver on The Daily Show made an excellent point with a brief joke. He suggested we combine cell phones with guns. That way, the Republicans and the NRA would be sure to resolutely oppose even the slightest inclination to list, register, track, or document cell phone calls.

Which leads me to another interesting thought: why didn’t Obama, being in favor of gun registration, simply create or empower a secret agency to record every gun sale in the U.S., registration number, bullets, and names and social security numbers of the purchasers? Then he could assure Americans that the government will never look at the data unless an absolutely genuine authentic warrant is approved by a secret panel of judges appointed by, oh, say, the President? I’m sure the NRA, which is so concerned about the safety of Americans, would roll over very quickly on that. Especially since the justification for the NSA surveillance program is 3,000 American deaths ten years ago, while guns kill 30,000 people every year.

Just how effective do you think this data collection program is, anyways? Both the hysteria and the apologetics serve the same function here: to glamorize the operation and suggest power and efficiency and authority. Here are a few things I think of when I consider just how effective the program might be:

  • it is run by the same government that had virtually no Arab speaking agents in any of its intelligence agencies before 9/11
  • it is run by the same government that blatantly lied about Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s capabilities and culpabilities before the invasion of 2005
  • almost all of the recent terrorist arrests and convictions were the result of paid informants providing dubious information, false confessions, or outright lies or agents provocateurs who goaded naïve young fanatics into going along with manufactured plots
  • about half of the people incarcerated in the Guantanamo prison are regarded by the CIA itself as innocent (but they are still there)
  • officials in the government and military regarded torture as an acceptable strategy for obtaining information from suspected terrorists (who often turned out to be completely innocent)

When NSA or Homeland Security officials, and Republicans, claim that they have thwarted several dozen terrorist attacks (as they do claim, in fact), I find it depressing to consider that many Americans will believe them. I don’t. Firstly, we know that they see terror plots everywhere and have charged and convicted individuals on the flimsiest evidence imaginable. Secondly, they say they can’t prove it because that would compromise national security, which is the first thing I can think of that I would say if I were trying to hide the pathetic failure of an incredibly expensive program, in terms of money and civil liberties. I would lie. I would say, the program is a great success but I can’t prove it to you because that would compromise the effectiveness of the program. You can’t lose.

If it actually did thwart an actual terrorist attack, why was no one charged and convicted? I suspect that that is what he is talking about– plots that were thwarted before anyone actually committed an indictable offense, because if anyone actually did commit an indictable offense that could be proven or disproven in court, it would be. Would these Strangeloves miss an opportunity to toot their own horns, to prove the efficacy of their methods, their massive spending orgies, their infringement of civil liberties, just so the could to Congress with their pathetic, anemic, “we’ve had actual cases but we can’t tell you about them”?

Just think about it. Just because a computer has massive amounts of data in its files doesn’t mean that any of it is useful. The concept is probably this: a terrorist is caught (like, say the one Boston terrorist still alive) and authorities have access to his number. They get authorization from FISA (easy-peasy: the FISA court never rejects an application) and look up his number and get a list of all the other numbers he has called. I presume programmers would write a function to scan the data base for any similar numbers being called by other phones and correlate them to numbers used by other suspects. Then what? They go interview the recipients of these calls? They tap the phone?

So, is Al Qaeda so stupid that they would use phones to communicate their evil plots? Does anyone seriously think they didn’t already know that the phone system was being watched? What would prevent them from establishing the basic plans in person and then using code to send any signals that needed to be sent remotely? Who can assure us that the investigators looking at this information are smarter than the ones who were warned about the underwear bomber but ignored the information? Or the ones who couldn’t find a suspect because they had misspelled his name?

In the meantime, how hard would be for a conservative, Republican president to come along and decide that environmentalists or union organizers or animal rights activists were a threat to society, and could engage in terrorist acts, and therefore needed to have their data pulled from the data base for Homeland Security could investigate them more thoroughly?

Don’t laugh: that is almost exactly what happened during the Republican National Convention in 2004.

And More Yet

Are Americans disturbed to find they have a Secret Police force? No, because they are very, very easily frightened. Yes, for all the bluster and bragging of their anthems and monuments and parades, Americans are remarkably easy to throw into hysterics.

And because nobody uses the word “Secret Police”, because that’s what the Communists had, because they were very, very bad, and we’re very, very good. So, no, we don’t have secret police, or secret courts, or Big Brother, or torture, or rendition, or Guantanamo, or Mitch McConnell. We are good people.

Why does “soft on terrorism” have such political resonance but “soft on gun control” does not? If you are soft on terrorism, you would be partly responsible for a small number of casualties in the past five years. If you are soft on gun control, you are partly responsible for 150,000 deaths over the same period of time.

And One More Thing

Gail Collins on FISA

The magical outcome of this scandal is that Rand Paul’s chances of getting the 2016 Republican presidential  nomination are considerably improved.  Think about it– at those primaries and caucuses, where a small number of true believers can have a large impact?

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Tea Party Down the Deficit

So if the real problem is jobs and the real solution is more government stimulus and all you really want to do is cut taxes for those who are already extremely well-off, what do you do? You scream about the deficit. A reasonable solution to the deficit problem probably includes a tax increase on the rich. But your real mission is to get the poor and middle-income people to pay for government services, while you grab a bigger and bigger share of the pie. How do you get that past the rational people?

In other circumstances, the voters could have had choice between the screaming, hysterical mad hatters of the tea party and the rational, measured Reid and Obama. If…. if Obama had immediately counter-attacked the Republican hysterics with a strong, determined insistence that, at a time of 9% unemployment and recession, the government needs to step up.

The minute Obama agreed to make the deficit a priority, Reason went out the window. I think it was a huge mistake. Republicans demanding tax cuts is nothing new. But by endorsing the basic principle, Obama seemed to validate the idea that the deficit is the big problem facing America right now. It’s not. It’s unemployment.

Even so, it’s surprising how many people out there kept their heads. And a little baffling in terms of Obama’s strategy: the majority of Americans still seemed to support the idea that unemployment was the number one issue and that the Republicans were acting like a bunch of spoiled children. And that the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, at least as they apply to the rich. Why, oh why, did he cave?

The biggest irony of all this, of course, is that the Republicans don’t actually give a damn about the deficit. When Bush borrowed billions to finance his tax cuts, throwing the budget into a deficit a scant one year after Clinton (who left a surplus) left office, there was nary a whimper from the mad hatters. (Yes, since his tax cuts put the budget into a deficit, Bush took out a loan, made the taxpayers liable for repayment, and handed the money all over to his rich benefactors.

The Republicans only ever seem to care about decreasing taxes on the rich. That’s it. That’s all. The military, Wall Street, Copyright, Patent Law, Homeland Security— everything is to protect the wealthy from the claims of the poor and lower classes. Everything must maximize the burden on working families to pay for the minimal necessary government services so that the rich can send you to die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and he, how about Iran?

Iran is there waiting. It is waiting for the vacuum that develops when America is not at war with anyone else.

Obama’s only hope for the next election– and it is NOT a dismal one– is that the Tea Party will apply their effluent enthusiasms to the primaries next year and they will nominate a Gingrich or Bachmann or Palin or Perry to run against him.

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Egypt and the freedom nazi: No Democracy for You

At least one BBC reporter on the ground in Egypt insists that the Islamic Brotherhood is not a significant factor in the protests — they are just a canard offered by Mubarak consistently for 30 years to scare the Americans into blindly supporting his dictatorial regime.

So the 85 million people of Egypt– no democracy for you! The U.S. has several important interests in the Middle East– your freedom and prosperity don’t figure into any of them.

No doubt the Obama Administration is giving considerable thought to Iran these days. The U.S. backed the Shah’s despotic regime for 25 years. When protest rallies spun out of control in 1979, the Carter Administration appears to have backed away from their proxy. There was short struggle for a secular, constitutional government, but when Ayatollah Khomeini was allowed to return, the radical Islamacists succeeded in wresting control of the government away from the moderates.

It could be argued that the lesson to be learned is that repression by the Shah would have been better. But you could make an equally cogent argument that the extremists were able to take control because long-term unconditional support for the Shah had weakened the moderates.

It is possible that if Mubarak leaves, the Islamic brotherhood may succeed in eventually seizing power. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. Iran today is really not the caricature that the U.S. likes to present to the public, and Afghanistan and Iraq are not exactly sterling models of the kind of alternative society the U.S. has in mind. But it also may be the result of the U.S. supporting Mubarak for 30 years without pressuring him to democratize gradually, to allow the establishment of a moderate opposition with real power, and to cultivate the institutions of society that moderate political power, like labour unions, universities, and regional governments.

The long sad history of U.S. support of anti-democratic regimes.  [Sorry– the website has been taken down, but my comments still apply.]

I don’t totally buy the list. Yes, we know that U.S. corporations like Standard Oil and ITT continued to do business with the Nazis during the war, and that Henry Ford was a big fan of Adolf Hitler, and it is clear that the U.S. allowed many Nazi war criminals to escape responsibilities for their crimes so they could be used elsewhere for American interests, but I think those complaints are more in the nature of the world being an unjust place than a steaming indictment of U.S. foreign policy.

At a national, policy level, Roosevelt clearly opposed Hitler. That’s different from George Bush Sr. cozying up to Marcos, or Jimmy Carter welcoming the Shah of Iran to the U.S. for medical treatment or Nixon instigating the coup in Chile.

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Now It’s Legal!

I don’t think I’ve read anything in the past five years quite so infuriating as the op-ed piece by John Ashcroft in the November 5, 2007 New York Times. Ashcroft is addressing the legislation introduced by Congress to grant immunity to Telecoms who, obeying the Bush Administration, turned over private telecommunications records to the government without seeing any kind of warrant or court authorization.

Ashcroft says:

Longstanding principles of law hold that an American corporation is entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities. The public officials in question might be right or wrong about the advisability or legality of what they are doing, but it is their responsibility, not the company’s, to deal with the consequences if they are wrong.

To deny immunity under these circumstances would be extraordinarily unfair to any cooperating carriers. By what principle of justice should anyone face potentially ruinous liability for cooperating with intelligence activities that are authorized by the president and whose legality has been reviewed and approved by our most senior legal officials?

My God. John Ashcroft has just asserted that the president has the right to require corporations to commit illegal acts whenever he feels like it, without any regard for the law, the courts, or the congress, just because the people he appointed to high public office, did what he told them to do. Because, it is clearly implied, whatever the president does is legal.

Please notice, if you will, the amazing, magical words missing from that last line: “and the courts”. The Telecoms should obey the President not because a judge or a court has legally issue a writ or warrant on the basis of actual evidence that someone might be committing or has committed a crime— oh no! But just because the President and the officials he appointed (and can fire at will) have decided that they would like to have a look. At your phone records.

If the legality of the Executive’s directives to the FBI and CIA have been “reviewed and approved” by our most “senior legal officials”– then there is no need for the immunity legislation. The courts will recognize the legality of the Executive’s actions and the civil actions will be dismissed.

(Has anybody noticed, by the way, that this kind of argument is not accepted by the courts for any other kinds of illegal activity? “A government official said I could.” So how does that change the law? Nor is the argument that any level of government can tell you what is legal accepted by the Federal Government itself: the Bush Administration Justice Department continues to go after marijuana dealers in California even though the State government has made it legal for medical use and allows dealers to operate.)

So if the FBI or the CIA goes to a phone company and says, we’d like to tap a certain individuals telephone, it is no longer incumbent upon the phone company to ask, “and do you have a warrant?” or even, “is this legal”. As long as our “most” senior legal officials– not “some” legal officials, but our “most” senior officials– say it is legal, it is legal.

The trick here, that Mr. Ashcroft wants you to be dazzled by, is the old bait and switch technique of applying one legal principle– that corporations must obey the law– to an action that really has nothing to do with it: the will of the Federal Government– of the Executive Branch, really– to spy on people without having to trouble themselves about getting a warrant and proving they have a legitimate reason to spy.

This is a load of crap. Why does Ashcroft imagine a company like AT&T, Verizon or Bellsouth is too stupid to ask whoever the government sends to their offices: “and where is your warrant? Where is your court order? What judge authorized this breech of personal privacy?”

Which is what one of the telecoms did. Qwest consulted their lawyers who told them that what the government was asking them to do was a felony. Qwest told the government to buzz off. The government, knowing they didn’t have a leg to stand on, did just that. They didn’t arrest Qwest’s chief executive for “breaking the law”. They didn’t seek an injunction from a court (duh!). They went away.

What makes this doubly infuriating is this phrase at the beginning of the quote above: “longstanding principles of law…. ” So Ashcroft is saying that Bush’s actions are already legal. Then why the hell does Congress need to grant anybody immunity! They don’t need it.

If there are lawsuits, they only need to tell the judge: “agents of the Executive Branch of Federal Government told us to do it. That means it’s legal.” And the judge will say, “Oh. If the government did it, that means it’s legal? Let me check the constitution for a minute…”

I think Mr. Ashcroft knows about this problem. Just as Bush is beginning to realize that all the waterboarding… .the torture… the renditions… GEEZ. WHAT IF WE LIVED IN A COUNTRY THAT HAD RULE OF LAW, AND COURTS, AND A JUSTICE SYSTEM… WE COULD BE ARRESTED.

Do you think Rumsveld ever worries? Cheney? Gonzales? I think they do. I think they might just be starting to realize that once the state-induced hysteria is over with and people come to their senses they are going to ask themselves why government officials were authorizing torture and extraordinary renditions and warrant-less surveillance.

The biggest trick here? John Ashcroft knows very, very will that shifting the liability to “senior” (most or not) legal officials will effectively inoculate the Bush administration from any liability at all: I guarantee you that Bush will make lavish, lavish use of the Presidential Pardon in January 2009. He won’t give a damn anymore. There never was any reason to give a damn. There was never the slightest reason to think that accusations of hypocrisy or viciousness would ever detract from that folksy, all-American, evangelistic charm: we are the boys. We handle things. We win.

Someone else will come along and clean all that up. Cash in now, while you have the chance.

In the meantime, John Ashcroft is, hilariously, asking the government to make something legal because it is already legal. He wants it to make it more legal.

If this isn’t disturbing enough, consider the fact that there is some evidence that the Bush Administration initiated at least some illegal surveillance before 9/11. Check this out.

While Ashcroft advises corporations to do whatever the government tells them to do, without question, without regard for the law or morality– Congress chastises Yahoo for turning information over to the Chinese government about the activities of dissident journalist Shi Tao!

2022-05-07:  even more infuriating: the Obama Administration, fearful of provoking a Republican backlash and crying fit, backed away from prosecuting anyone for these crimes.   This, unfortunately, is part of Obama’s legacy: gutlessness.