Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s The Cover-Up

There is a reason why the saying “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” has become a truism in these high profile political scandals. In the first place, no matter who does it, when someone covers up a crime they tend to make it more difficult to prosecute it, obviously. For instance, suppose that Novak and Rove conspired to get their stories straight. You can’t prove what was originally said because they’ve decided to lie about it. But if you can prove that they lied to the authorities or took affirmative measures to obstruct an investigation in which it could have been found that they committed a crime, you prosecute. Committing a crime to cover up something that may or may not be a crime is still a crime.

In the political world, it happens all the time because people are as concerned about appearances as they are about legalities — maybe more. They will cover-up actions that might not be technically illegal, but will make them look bad because they are unethical or just plain slimy. But covering up slimy political activity by lying to the authorities is illegal and you aren’t allowed to do it. This is particularly true when the underlying slime would have been prosecutable if you hadn’t successfully covered it up.

The Republicans abused the legal system shamelessly during the Clinton administration by financing the Paula Jones lawsuit and holding endless phony congressional investigations into arcane, trivial and lurid tabloid matters that had nothing to do with the administration’s behavior in office. They forced the appointments of an endless string of independent prosecutors and actively “criminalized” politics for partisan gain. The alleged crime and sleazy behavior in the Lewinsky case involved the prosaic and ordinary act of a middle aged man having an affair with a younger woman and lying about it. The American people understood it for what it was and rejected the notion that it was criminal. It is typical of the Modern Republican Party to now accuse the special prosecutor of doing what they themselves did. The GOP truly is Projection R Us.

However, the Fitzgerald investigation is not a partisan witchhunt and the underlying crime may have been awful — David Ensor on CNN says that his sources in the CIA report that there was real damage in Plame’s outing. This is meaningful. If the crime was covering up the purposeful or accidental revelation of a CIA operative for purely political purposes, it deserves to be prosecuted.

These are people with tremendous power to shape events. They are answerable only to the public in a relativist world in which media manipulation and marketing have made it very difficult to persuade people that there is any sort of objective truth. The legal system is the only forum left in which people are held liable for lying and in which there are rules and procedures for hearing all sides of the story in a coherent fashion. Sadly, epistemic relativist Republicans and their media helpmates have managed to pretty much eliminate all other avenues for finding out the truth.

And may I second Tristero’s post below:

Traitors simply cannot be permitted to continue to serve at the highest levels of goverment. And that is a principle worth defending, no matter what it takes.

When playing with national security for mere political purposes and personal grudges becomes politics as usual, this country is in serious danger. These people must be stopped. Even Nixon didn’t stoop this low.

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2000

Thirty-four years old:

The Pentagon said Staff Sergeant George Alexander, 34, had died on Saturday of injuries sustained eight days ago when a roadside bomb set by insurgents blew up near his vehicle in the town of Samarra.

[snip]

In the Iraq war, which began in March 2003, more than 15,000 U.S. troops also have been wounded in action.

Casualties among Iraqis have been far higher, first in the invasion and then the insurgency that elections and October 15’s constitution referendum have failed to calm.

Traitors, Technicalities, And Crises

Kristof’s op-ed which I ridiculed below, represents the elite media CW about Traitorgate that is now going public. I heard these same arguments from journalist friends over the summer. They are quite wrong. The issue of whether a crime can be legally proven is a technicality. An important technicality to be sure, but nevertheless not the real point.

It’s quite clear what happened: Treason was committed at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Can it be proven? Yes, in fact it has been proven. The convergence of already available evidence makes treason the most plausible conclusion. Is there enough evidence to stand up in a court of law and prove treason in a legalistic, technical sense? We don’t yet know, but that doesn’t mean that treason wasn’t committed, just as OJ Simpson’s acquittal doesn’t mean he was innocent of murder. Of course, the law must presume innocence in order to function. The civil community, meaning among others the mass media, doesn’t have to operate with that presumption. That doesn’t give anyone the right to sling around reckless charges. In this case, the accusation of treason rests, already, on an enormous amount of evidence that leads to that conclusion.

This case, like Simpson’s, is very simple, if perhaps difficult to legally prove. A CIA agent was deliberately exposed by people who had sworn never to do so. That has the potential to undermine the safety and intelligence gathering capability of the US. By exposing a CIA agent, they have aided this country’s enemies. That is a betrayal of country, in a word: Treason.

All the “yes, buts” are just so many “gloves that don’t fit” and the like. It doesn’t matter whether Ames had leaked her name to the Russians, or even if Plame had worn a button saying, “Kiss me! I’m CIA!” No one working in government had the right to mention her name outside highly classified circles, even if it was “just to confirm” info from other places.

Legal, schmegal, these slimeballs are traitors. That the MSM is falling for the GOP line, that blatant treason is being seriously discussed as “maybe just a policy dispute” and “no big deal,” just “politics as usual,” and “not a crime” should probably not surprise anyone. And it is not surprising that anyone who calls these traitors by their proper name will be more or less banned from the mainstream media. That is how low this country’s media have sunk. That is how low this country’s “public intellectuals” have sunk.

It hasn’t always been like this. The little secret about most of “Left Blogistan” is that we’re not that far left: actually most of the folks I read are moderates or moderate liberals. Need an example? Atrios will do, not to mention the brilliant Digby. In truth, many of us in “Left Blogistan” don’t have much patience with radicalism, socialism, revolution, class analyses. As for social mores, few of us live the frisky, often reckless, lives enjoyed by so many rightwing priests and GOP bigwigs. It is an indication of just how far right the discourse has become that Kristof is considered a thoughtful left-wing commentator and that Krugman – a pro-globalization Reagan official – is dubbed a radical leftist.

Now back when moderate liberals were actually provided regular access to the mass media, there would have been no problem labelling treasonable behavior as exactly that. Today, since no one “reasonable” can use that word -unless you’re on the right, of course- the moral outrage all Americans should feel about this exposure never happens. And so it goes.

These traitors are not, and never were, the state, despite what DeLay boasted. This government is no man or woman, this is not the United States of Cheney/Libby/Rove/Bush, et al. These are merely people who work for the state and the state is us. And some of them have betrayed us and aided our enemies. They are traitors. Given what we already know, it is high time those who betrayed us resign, all of them, regardless of whether treason technically can be proven in a court of law. The very hint that a high government official may have been involved in the exposure of a CIA agent should be reason enough to go, and go now.

Since we are dealing with scoundrels of the highest order and they will never resign, they nevertheless must be brought to trial on whatever legally admissible evidence, if any, Fitzgerald has. A constitutional crisis might result, but that is not Fitzgerald’s doing. That is what these traitors have been spoiling for since the 2000 election fiasco; that’s what Schiavo was about, what the torture condoning was about, what the filibuster rule change was about. Such a crisis would be as wracking to this country’s psyche as Katrina was to its citizens. But they have made it all but unavoidable.

There is absolutely nothing to be gained by a constitutional crisis and no sane opponent of the Bush administration should welcome one. But there is no longer anything to be gained by appeasement, either, and much to lose. Traitors simply cannot be permitted to continue to serve at the highest levels of goverment. And that is a principle worth defending, no matter what it takes.

(Edited slightly after original posting, to fix typos, mostly.)

[Update: Larry Johnson notes:

This scandal is about destroying and diverting national security resources for petty political gains and using the power of the White House to attack American citizens. If that is not justification for impeachment than nothing meets the test.]

Helping Nick Kristof

I’ve decided that Nick Kristof needs help, my help. He seems to have Attention Deficit Disorder and has not been taking his Ritalin. After a very promising start to his op-ed today on Traitorgate, Kristof starts to ramble, finally degenerating into total incoherence, something about Les Miserables or some other Broadway musical he once saw a long time ago.

Anyway, I’ve decided to help him refocus. Now, here is how Nick’s column begins, before it goes off the rails:

Before dragging any Bush administration officials off to jail, we should pause and take a long, deep breath.

Not bad, eh? I agree. Now, here’s how he should have continued, but didn’t:

Before dragging any Bush administration officials off to jail, we should pause and take a long, deep breath.

Then, we should firmly grasp their arms and legs, and, being sure we lift from our knees, toss them into a nearby tar pit, cover them in feathers, and frog march them into the closest federal penitentiary for a very long, hopefully lifelong, incarceration.

Classy

“He’s a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he’s been tapped by God to do very important things,” one White House ally said, referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

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Ooops

I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program to justify the war.

Lawyers said the notes show that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003.

Mr. Libby’s notes indicate that Mr. Cheney had gotten his information about Ms. Wilson from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in response to questions from the vice president about Mr. Wilson. But they contain no suggestion that either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby knew at the time of Ms. Wilson’s undercover status or that her identity was classified. Disclosing a covert agent’s identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent’s undercover status.

Hmmm. I’d have to say that Cheney wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the Monsignor in September of 2003, was he?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson. A question had arisen. I’d heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa, Niger in particular. I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, “What do we know about this?” They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said, “This is all we know. There’s a lot we don’t know,” end of statement. And Joe Wilson—I don’t who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.

I guess the intriguing thing, Tim, on the whole thing, this question of whether or not the Iraqis were trying to acquire uranium in Africa. In the British report, this week, the Committee of the British Parliament, which just spent 90 days investigating all of this, revalidated their British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa. What was in the State of the Union speech and what was in the original British White papers. So there may be difference of opinion there. I don’t know what the truth is on the ground with respect to that, but I guess—like I say, I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him. I have no idea who hired him and it never came…

MR. RUSSERT: The CIA did.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Who in the CIA, I don’t know.

Evidently, when he was chatting with Tenet and Libby about Wilson’s CIA wife he forgot to ask Tenet who in the CIA hired him. Now, that doesn’t sound right, does it?

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East Of The Potomac

Mediagirl reminds us of:

the horrible situation in Pakistan, where tens of thousands have died, and tens of thousands more, including children, still have not received any aid.

Let’s look at the facts:

50,000 dead, maybe more, many of whom were children, who were in school at the moment the quake hit.

10,000 more children are facing imminent death due to injury, infection, disease, starvation, dehydration, exposure to the sub-zero temperatures at night. 120,000 children are at risk.

These figures are conservative. And aid money has not been coming.

Almost two weeks after the quake, less than 14 per cent of the UN’s emergency appeal for £180 million has been received.

Unicef, the UN children’s organisation, yesterday estimated that 10,000 children will die in weeks. The figure was described as “conservative” by a UN field worker.

Although the official death count remains at 49,739, local authorities put it at almost 80,000.

And once again, it is not only simple humanity that cries out for a concerted effort to help. Sheer self-interest points to making the rescue of the abject in Pakistan a major international priority. Guaranteed: if the rest of the world wont help, Osama will.

Liberals With Guns

As of 5:49 am Monday (EST), it seems Jeffrey Goldberg’s already famous article on Scowcroft in the New Yorker will not be posted – you’ll have to buy the zine, unless it gets liberated and posted elsewhere. But the New Yorker did put up an interesting interview with the author.I’ll leave it to others to analyse the political ramifications and content. But I seem to be unusually sensitive to Republican rhetorical hanky-panky (“pro-life,” “tax relief,” etc), and I couldn’t help but notice some spanking new jargon bubbling up into the mainstream:

…the deeper meaning here is ideological: George W. Bush’s father was committed to a realist understanding of foreign policy. This served him well in Iraq, and not so well in Bosnia. George W. Bush, on the other hand, has become a leading proponent of democratic transformationalism; he believes it is America’s job to help non-democratic countries become democratic. The realists don’t believe that the internal organization of another country is any of our business; George W. Bush, evidently, does.

[snip]

Are the conservatives turning against the neoconservatives?

They’ve been doing so for some time. Just read George Will. Their complaint is that neoconservatives aren’t conservative; they’re liberals with guns. [emphasis added.]

You got that? “Democratic transformationalists” are “liberals with guns.” Those are the clowns that got us into that stupid mess in Iraq.

In other words, the term “conservative” has been surgically removed from the failed ideology of neoconservativism and replaced with the word “democratic.” This of course is purely coincidental, no associations to a certain political party should be inferred.

And “democratic” is paired with the brain-twisting neologism “transformationalist.” Only a paranoid mentality would wonder whether the pairing of “democratic” with something invented, something hard to understand, and something hard to say, is intentional.

As for “liberals with guns,” well…what could be a scarier image, given the relentless demonization of liberals that has been going on since McCarthy, if not earlier?

But never mind, as so many expert Democratic consultants are quick to tell us, it’s not the language that matters, but the ideas. I mean it’s not as if you can easily redefine failed Republican strategies as liberal and Democratic, y’know. That’s preposterous. No one would fall for that and repeat it. LIke if you tried, people would just get confused about what things mean and then they wouldn’t listen to anyone. What good would that be?

(By the way, reporter Jeffrey Goldberg shouldn’t, necessarily, be blamed for the terminology. It’s likely he’s probably just repeating jargon that’s getting tossed up into the air. As for passing it on, shame, shame, shame!)

{Update:} Content edited somewhat after original posting to focus the sarcasm.

Paterfamilias

I have often felt that the real story of this time will be written as a family history between a father and a son. If only Shakespeare were alive to write it.

Steve Clemons has excerpts of the New Yorker’s Brent Scowcroft article that has everyone on pins and needles. Scowcroft is 80 years old and has apparently decided that he should speak out clearly. And he does:

The first Gulf War was a success, Scowcroft said, because the President knew better than to set unachievable goals. “I’m not a pacifist,” he said. “I believe in the use of force. But there has to be a good reason for using force. And you have to know when to stop using force.” Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force.

“I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes,” he said. “You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it.”

The neoconservatives — the Republicans who argued most fervently for the second Gulf war — believe in the export of democracy, by violence if that is required, Scowcroft said. “How do the neocons bring democracy to Iraq? You invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize.” And now, Scowcroft said, America is suffering from the consequences of that brand of revolutionary utopianism. “This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism,” he said.

The underlying narrative, however, is the subconscious rivalry between the father and the son, Scowcroft becoming the stand-in for 43’s resentment toward 41. You wonder how many of the tragic blunders of the last five years are the result of crafty neocons playing into Junior’s desire to gainsay his father:

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay. “There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out,” he told me. “But he wasn’t really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn’t recovered from sanctions.” Scowcroft’s colleagues told me that he would have preferred to deliver his analysis privately to the White House. But Scowcroft, the apotheosis of a Washington insider, was by then definitively on the outside, and there was no one in the White House who would listen to him. On the face of it, this is remarkable: Scowcroft’s best friend’s son is the President; his friend Dick Cheney is the Vice-President; Condoleezza Rice, who was the national-security adviser, and is now the Secretary of State, was once a Scowcroft protege; and the current national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is another protege and a former principal at the Scowcroft Group.

[…]

According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son, “Forty-three,” and his former national-security adviser to no avail, according to people with knowledge of these intertwined relationships. “There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren’t conducive to talking about substantive issues,” a Scowcroft confidant said.

George H.W. Bush was a bastard in many ways. He was one of the first to bring the new generation of operative thugs into national politics. Lee Atwater ran his 1988 campaign. But his spawn took it to a new level. This is but one of many good arguments against monarchy and succession. Think of the average family Thanksgiving table and imagine that it’s the ruling elite of the most powerful country in the world.

I recommend that you read all of Clemens post and the New Yorker article when it is posted. This on top of the Lawrence Wilkerson speech from last week shows that things are breaking down in a most serious way for the Bush administration.

Lambert at Corrente notes that Wilkerson even predicts some very dangerous times ahead — not from terrorists, but internal revolution:

WILKERSON: We have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina… we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city [“Reckless Indifference to the Nightmare Scenario”] , or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again. … Read in there what they say about the necessity of people to [inaudible – background voice] tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do.

And you’re talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don’t get our act together.

Shakespearean indeed.

Update: Matthew Yglesias makes the important point that this would have been oh so much more courageous if they had backed up the likes of Richard Clarke instead of waiting until Junior was tanking in the polls. And he points to this op-ed by Richard Holbrook on Wilkerson’s speech, which points out that Colin Powell is a putz.

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Perjury Smergury

Lying is a moral wrong. Perjury is a lie told under oath that is legally wrong. To be illegal, the lie must be willfully told, must be believed to be untrue, and must relate to a material matter. Title 18, Section 1621 and 1623, U.S. Code.

If President Washington, as a child, had cut down a cherry tree and lied about it, he would be guilty of `lying,’ but would not be guilty of `perjury.’

If, on the other hand, President Washington, as an adult, had been warned not to cut down a cherry tree, but he cut it down anyway, with the tree falling on a man and severely injuring or killing him, with President Washington stating later under oath that it was not he who cut down the tree, that would be `perjury.’ Because it was a material fact in determining the circumstances of the man’s injury or death.

Some would argue that the President in the second example should not be impeached because the whole thing is about a cherry tree, and lies about cherry trees, even under oath, though despicable, do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution. I disagree.

The perjury committed in the second example was an attempt to impede, frustrate, and obstruct the judicial system in determining how the man was injured or killed, when, and by whose hand, in order to escape personal responsibility under the law, either civil or criminal. Such would be an impeachable offense. To say otherwise would be to severely lower the moral and legal standards of accountability that are imposed on ordinary citizens every day. The same standard should be imposed on our leaders.

Nearly every child in America believes that President Washington, as a child himself, did in fact cut down the cherry tree and admitted to his father that he did it, saying simply: `I cannot tell a lie.’

I will not compromise this simple but high moral principle in order to avoid serious consequences to a successor President who may choose to ignore it.

That is from the bizarre incoherent statement Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson gave in the impeachment case against Bill Clinton’s penis. (The cherry tree story is apocryphal — “a lie” if you will — but whatever.)

Today, on Press The Meat, she was not quite so convinced that perjury and obstruction of justice were terrible things at all, much less “morally wrong.” She talked about overzealous US Attorneys and prosecutors abusing the statute and how troubling it all was that people were being prosecuted for lies when there is no underlying crime. She said that the Clinton penis case was different because he was charged with an underlying crime — which is, of course, “a lie.”

If the Republicans are going to use the “perjury and obstruction aren’t real crimes” defense then I think we need to gather all the material that Mr Google (and the Washington Post, here) conveniently provide and bombard the gasbags and the alleged journalists with them. They need to be spoonfed this stuff.

The Democratic defense for Clinton was that Republicans conducted a witchhunt that led their handpicked prosecutor Ken Starr to start digging inappropriately into Clinton’s sex life. The country understood this and agreed with it and the Republicans lost seats in the 1998 election because of it.

The underlying crime here is outing a CIA agent and lying about a war. They apparently believe that this is politics as usual, no big deal. William Kristol wailed this morning:

Scooter Libby or Karl Rove are going to be judged criminals for perhaps acknowledging her name, perhaps knowing, though there’s no evidence they did, that she was a covert operative…That’s a crime?

Tom DeLay is not a criminal…Are we seriously going to pretend that shuffling hard and soft money around which hundreds of politicians have done over the last two decades, before McCain-Feingold was enacted [is a crime]?

This from the whining moralists who screeched like a bunch of deranged harpies for years that lying about 10 furtive blow-jobs in a dismissed civil case was a High Crime that was destroying the fabric of our country.

I just can’t help but reprise again this little gem from the man himself:

Politicians, jittery as they are, may wish to reread the prophetic words of author Mark Helprin, in a Wall Street Journal piece from October 1997. For Republicans, wrote Helprin, “there can be only one visceral theme, one battle, one task” — “to address the question of William Jefferson Clinton’s fitness for office in light of the many crimes, petty and otherwise, that surround, imbue, and color his tenure. The president must be made subject to the law.”

Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp — and, of course, Ken Starr — Helprin’s call to arms carries a new urgency. Starr’s report will reveal, in Helprin’s words, “a field of battle clearly laid down.” The lines have been drawn. What Republicans now need is the nerve to fight. They must stand for, to quote Helprin again, “the rejection of intimidation, the rejection of lies, the rejection of manipulation, the rejection of disingenuous pretense, and a revulsion for the sordid crimes and infractions the president has brought to his office.” (William Kristol, Weekly Standard, May 25, 1998, page 18.)

And now the party who rode into Washington on a promise to “restore honor and dignity” are on television saying that revealing the names of covert CIA agents isn’t a crime and perjury and obstruction are just politics as usual and shouldn’t be “criminalized.”

So much for the Strict Daddy party. Welcome to the Juvenile Delinquent party.

Update: Haha. ReddHedd has a beautiful take down of Mizz Bailey Hutchison, here. Here’s the money quote from her appearance on Press The Meat this morning:

I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars.

Yes, those Republicans hate to waste money on those bogus investigations.

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