WASHINGTON -- A day after warning that potentially critical terrorism intelligence was being lost because Congress had not finished work on a controversial espionage law, the U.S. attorney general and the national intelligence director said Saturday that the government was receiving the information -- at least temporarily.
On Friday evening, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell had said in an unusually blunt letter to Congress that the nation "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because lawmakers had not yet acted on the administration's proposal for the wiretapping law.
But within hours of sending that letter, administration officials told lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees that they had prevailed upon all of the telecommunications companies to continue cooperating with the government's requests for information while negotiations with Congress continue.
They keep playing the same hand, and of course, it's all a bad bluff. Bloodthirsty hordes of Muslofacists are massing at our porous borders, and if we don't give the simpleton in the White House the ability to read our emails, they'll come crashing over the newfangled electronic fence and wrap all of our women up in burkhas, and Sharia law will drift over the land like a dark seeping cloud....
Unless it doesn't, which is OK, too. Because to Bush and particularly to Cheney and his awful consigliere, David Addington, the real game isn't about protecting anyone, it is about control of the wheels of governance, about executive overreach, about a bald faced reversal of our constitutional history. They use fear and intimidation towards that end, question the patriotism of anyone who questions their authority (megads! where's Barak's lapel pin??), and when all else fails, just lie brazenly, as the report in the LA Times above points out. Mukasey and McConnell really define the word "tool", in all of its pejorative glory. Once again, Chuck Schumer is exposed as a fool who got played by Bush in the case of Mukasey. Schumer bought the administration's line that Mukasey represented a break with the pervasive cronyism that has been the defining hallmark of this administration, and he should be embarrassed for doing so.
The real question, it seems to me, is how we sanitize this mess going forward. A clue comes from the interview that William Leonard gave to Newsweek last month. Leonard was the poor soul who headed the National Archives and dared to challenge Dick Cheney's office regarding their flagrant disregard for the longstanding policies regarding classified information in the White House. You'll remember Cheney's absurd argument that because he could cast the tiebreaking vote in a locked Senate, he actually belonged to the legislative branch of government, and as such, actually exists in some netherworld between branches (the nebulous fourth branch of government that I don't remember studying, I guess). Leonard, a 34 year veteran of the ISOO, the branch of the National Archives that is responsible for handling the classified information from the executive branch thought that Cheney's argument was, well, insane, and challenged him on it. Cheney responded reasonably, and acceded to Leonard's request. Oh, no, he actually sicked Addington on Leonard, and attempted to have his job abolished. Leonard stepped down at the end of 2007. In the interview with Newsweek, though, he makes this point:
One of the things I've reflected on lately is that I truly believe we need to introduce a new balancing test. In the past, we've looked at it as, 'we have to balance national security against the public's right to know or whatever.' My balancing test would be national security versus national security: yes, disclosing information may cause damage, but you know what, withholding that information may even cause greater damage… And I don't think we sufficiently taken that into greater account.
The global struggle that we're engaged in today is more than anything else is an ideological struggle. And in my mind….that calls for greater transparency, not less transparency. We're in a situation where we're attempting to win over the hearts and minds of the world's population. And yet, we seem to have a habit—when we restrict information, we're often times find ourselves in a position where we're ceding the playing field to the other side. We allow ourselves to be almost reduced to a caricature by taking positions on certain issues, oh , we simply can't talk about that.
And I think that's where the Obama Presidency needs to begin. They need to state firmly that transparency, openness, engagement and diplomacy are critical in winning the struggle against the ideology of islamic fundamentalism. They need to restore us to our role as a beacon and and example, rather than a petulant bully. It's important, and it will work.
Digby thinks that we also need to prosecute all of the bad actors who dragged us into our current state by breaking the laws, and that may be true as well. She says:
The intelligence leadership has been caught in an enormous lie, making false claims about lost surveillance gathering for purely political reasons. This cannot possibly be an isolated incident. Of coure, we KNOW it's not an isolated incident. And indeed, many of the employees in the civil service who directed these lies and misstatements, not those at the top but the functionaries, will still be working in their same posts under a potential Democratic Administration. It needs to be extremely clear from the very beginning that they must be rooted out, expunged and turned over to the legal system for a determination. It should be a key part of the Democratic nominee's platform. Only then can we truly "turn the page," as our front-runner is likely to say.
In the interim, it has to be clearly stated: the Bush Administration overtly and admittedly lied about lost intelligence to bully the House into expanding executive power. This is a memorable episode.
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