It was asassinations of Al Qaeda operatives. Okay, awesome! Who doesn’t want to hunt down and smoke out and hang high our nation’s fearsome enemies? Tell Congress all about it! It’s not like any of them have Osama on speed dial, no matter what Rush says, so for fuck’s sake, what’s the problem here? Right after 9/11 congressmen were falling all over themselves (and most of them still are) to cross the finish line of Most Hardcore first. You really think they’d have had an issue with it?
It was even more illegal spying than the illegal spying we already knew about. Well damn, hooker, shit. That clearly would have been tough for Congress to accept, considering that they totally gave retroactive immunity to everybody who went along with the illegal spying we knew about and have prosecuted exactly no one for any of the previous lawbreaking. A little more might have pushed them over the edge? Honestly? They might have used adjectives in their sternly worded letters? You might as well tell Congress basically as a DARE.
I realize that I am presently arguing that Congress is such a bunch of stupendous pussies that it really doesn’t matter what sick and twisted shit Herr Cheney was up to in his secret bunker, that they would have agreed to it completely. Yet, no one who has been paying attention could argue this wasn’t the case.
Sure, a couple of speeches might have been given, and Feingold might have told the entire U.S. Senate to suck him once your mom was done, but in the end anything and everything would have been authorized lest Bill O’Reilly make fun of Democrats or some imaginary voter living in Chris Matthews’ head have concerns you might be the kind of pansy who drinks the wrong thing at the diner. They should have just owned up to it. Nobody would have stopped them.
Even with this major scary new revelatory whatever, no matter what it ends up being about, in about two weeks we’re going to have a resolution declaring it’s all okay, and nobody needs to go to jail or apologize or anything. I’d love to be proved wrong, by the way, but I don’t think I will be.
A.
It’s AG Holder’s choice to make. If he appoints a special prosecutor it’s out of Obama’s hands and he has to live with the political hits one way or the other. I don’t expect Congress to ever do the right thing in a responsible manner because they are, as you say, stupendous pussies. They can’t pass a fucking public health care option without having fainting spells and more than half of REPUBLICAN voters want that shit done.
Read the big NEWSWEEK profile on Holder. Rahm and Axelrod are political badasses but this about governing, not politics. Here’s what Holder’s wife had to say about him in the profile, “Eric sees himself as the nice guy. In a lot of ways that’s a good thing. He’s always saying, ‘You get more out of people with kindness than meanness.’ But when he leaves the ‘nice guy’ behind, that’s when he’s strongest.” If that’s what he’s hearing at home he’s going to tell Rahm and Axelrod to go Cheney themselves on this and do what Obama appointed him to do, be independent and enforce the laws. And that’s all good.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300/page/2
Hi A. It was all about the principle with Cheney. He didn’t tell Congress because he wanted to enshrine the theory of the unitary executive. It wasn’t that he thought it was wrong or illegal (who knows – or cares – what’s rattling around the fetid swamp of his brain) but that he thought the executive branch had no obligation to tell Congress what was going on. He’d have taken the same stance towards revealing the place settings in the dining room at his undisclosed location. It wasn’t “boy will this cause a fuss if it gets out” as much as “fuck you, I don’t have to tell youANYTHING.
Only thing I can think of worse than domestic spying is domestic torture/assassination
It sounds like some mix of the CIA doing domestic surveillance and/or the US military forming hit teams to operate in allied countries without permission. Emptywheel linked to a story in the Guardian (see link below) about some US sponsored hits in Kenya that went all kinds of wrong. I also remember some kind of controversy within the State Department during Bush’s two wonderful terms about US military personnel running ops out of various US State Dept. stations without alerting the stations. All this talk about assassinating Al-Qaeda is pure spin. Bill Clinton was assassinating Al-Qaeda. That ain’t no scandal. This is about Fourth Branch acting as commander of military hit units on foreign soil on his own authority and not telling anybody.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/13/cheney-cia-al-qaida-assassinations
If ever there was a doubt about just how totally unconstitutional the Bush Administration was, this should cinch it. The Vice President’s only legal job is presiding over the US Senate. Anyone who would take any order given by the VP, beyond, “all in favor say aye”, is just outright spitting on the US Constitution. And, that document has a very brown gooey appearance today.
I will grant that if Cheney had not acted as President the country would have had no president. But, that was the obvious, from the beginning, consequence of electing Bush. Still, at no time did Cheney have the authority to order anyone around other than the sergeant of arms of the US Senate.
We were, and may still be, a disfunctional nation.
I’ll go into broken record mode on this. With all the he said / she said / I said / I didn’t say / … (see just the last weeks news).
We need to have some sworn depositions here.
And if we don’t clean it up, we need to visit Nurenberg (or the Hague). Otherwise, we’ve lost all our credibility. (Not to mention that the good ole covert ops set the stage for the mess we’re in anyway. That is, how did our support and grooming of the Shah and Saddam Hussein work out?)