How Cheney's Illegal Domestic Spying Programs Almost Sunk The Bush White House

Not even waiting for the Supreme Court to halt the vote count in Florida and award the White House to Bush, Cheney moved with incredible speed to fill every position in the national security apparatus with his own people and claim that part of the government as his own turf. If there is one person who can be blamed for dereliction of duty in the events that led up to 9/11, it is Dick Cheney. And if there is one person who can be blamed for the overreaction to that unmitigated disaster-- think about the gutting of the Constitution and warrantless domestic spying, etc-- it is also Dick Cheney. (Cheney also laid claim to Energy Policy and The Economy; he felt Bush could handle education, which he had shown some interest in over the years.) Barton Gellman's fantastic book, Angler> makes it more than clear who was running the show.

One of the worst Cheney-made disasters for Bush was centered around Cheney's illegal directives to the NSA which led to a crisis that could have doomed the blithely unaware Bush. Aside from putting Bush in very serious legal jeopardy with his insane theories about a presidency being tantamount to a monarchy-- what Cheney called the "unitary executive"-- he let a dispute with the Justice Department turn into a catastrophic confrontation which had the Attorney General, his top officers and their top officers, including the head of the FBI, all ready to resign en mass.

James Comey, who is today head of the FBI, was Deputy Attorney General under John Ashcroft this is the resignation letter he told Bush he would submit because of Cheney's illegal domestic spying programs:

March 16, 2004
George W. Bush

President of the United States

The White House

Dear Mr. President

At my confirmation hearing, I was asked what I would do if I concluded that a course of action was fundamentally wrong and I could not convince my superiors of that fact. I replied:

You are asking me to imagine an apocalyptic situation that I don't expect to encounter. I would not take this job if I thought I was going to be working with people who didn't share my love of the law and love of the institution. So I don't think I'll ever find myself in that position. I can commit to you though, that-- because I talk so much about integrity and about this great group behind me-- that's what I really care about. I don't care about politics. I don't care about expediency. I don't care about friendship. I care about doing the right thing. And I would never be part of something that I believe to be fundamentally wrong. I mean obviously we all make policy judgements where people disagree, but I will do the right thing.

Over the last two weeks I have encountered just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be a part of something that is fundamentally wrong. As we have struggled over these last days to do the right thing, I have never been prouder of the Department of Justice or of the Attorney General. Sadly, although I believe this has been on of the institution's finest hours, we have been unable to right that wrong. I would give much not to be in this position. But, as I told you during our private meeting last week, here I stand; I can do no other. Therefore, with a heavy heart and undiminished love of my country and my Department, I resign as Deputy Attorney General of the United States, effective immediately.

Sincerely yours,

James B. Comey

A few minutes later, FBI Director Bob Mueller told Bush was going as well. His Administration was about to fall apart and Cheney had kept it secret from him and, worse, persuaded him against the advice of his own legal and security counsel to sign patently unconstitutional orders that certainly would have led to impeachment had their been the political courage to have pursued it.

This was a rule-of-law question [Mueller] told the president, and the answer was in the Department of Justice. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could not operations that Justice held to be in breach of criminal law. If those were his orders, he would respectfully take his leave. As for others at the Bureau, they would speak for themselves.

…One week later, Bush amended his March 11 directive. The legal certification belonged again to the attorney general. Over the next weeks and months, the program changed. It stopped doing some things, and it did other things differently. Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the chief FISA judge, got a fuller briefing and established new rules to keep warrantless evidence out of her court

One of Bush's most trusted counselors from back in his Texas days, Dan Bartlett compared what nearly happened to Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre. Mark Corallo, Ashcroft's communications director (and before that the chief spokesperson for the RNC during Bush's first presidential run, indicates that Bush didn't understand how close to the abyss Cheney had pushed him. "You don't have to be the smartest guy to figure out that [mass resignations] would be pretty much the most devastating thing that could happen to your administration… Tell me how your presidency survives."

Corallo mapped the road to ruin. "You know, one guy resigns on principle and it can be uncomfortable, it can even be damaging. If six or seven of your top lawyers… If John Ashcroft resigned, the entire political leadership of the Justice Department goes with him. That means the heads of all the divisions, the deputies-- every political appointee of the Justice Department would have walked. We would have all walked out the door, because we would have said, 'If this is big enough for Ashcroft to resign over, we're all out of here.'… The rush to hearings on the Hill, both in the Senate and the House, would be unbelievable. The media frenzy that would have ensued would have been unlike anything we've ever seen. That's when you're getting into Watergate territory."

White Man Speak With Forked Tongue

By Noah
 
As that glorious day when Commander-in-Thief George W. Bush exits fast approaches, we have seen his dervishes of spin go out across the land with their pathetic, transparent list of White House legacy polishing lies that only those most in denial about the wretched effects of the Bush debacle could possibly adhere to. Notice that I didn't say believe because anyone that is not 100% delusional, based in reality, lying through their clenched teeth or simply completely brain damaged could buy into the tide of utter crap that we have been hearing from these current day morlocks. The question is: Which is George W. Bush? 

Sure, we know he's a pathological liar and probably has been for his entire life. However, evidence exists that points to an all of the above scenario regarding the brain that our country has been forcibly hitched to by a corrupt Supreme Court during the last eight years of national nightmare. The Bush appearances of this past week were the crescendo, the ultimate, the cherry on the top. First we had the press conference that even my conservative hometown tabloids described as "wacky" and "baffling". Baffling and wacky, yes; surprising, no. Then, I heard that on Thursday he would address the nation! Oh, man. It just gets weirder and weirder. "Hello, nation!" Quick, someone send the first goofball a bag of pretzels, I thought, and let's be done with it! Eat the pretzels, Georgie. Eat the pretzels, preferably alone.

In my mind, I kept seeing him at his desk in the oval office, looking very disheveled with about 4 days growth of beard and several empty liquor and pill bottles tipped over on his desk as the cameras came on. Now, as a general rule, my TV does not receive Bush broadcasts, just as it only turns to CNNFOX and the like when I'm looking for evidence of propaganda or feeling really perverse. We also have a rule in my house that we keep our shoes on when Bush shows up on the telly. Herewith are my impressions and my running commentary that I jotted down as El Heinousio appeared and proceeded to murder the language and maul credulity one last time. God, imagine if some little kids somewhere saw TV for the first time and this is what they saw. There would be no saving them.
 
1. First of all, who are you, Mr. So-called President, to use the words 'moral clarity'? Oh the irony! Moral obfuscation and habitual lying are more accurate when discussing your legacy. You keep saying that history will restore your reputation while, on the other hand, you tell us that there's nothing that needs to be restored, that you are a gift from God. I've heard of being the Queen of denial and I've heard of 'defense mechanisms' and 'escape mechanisms'. You have no hidey-hole in this life, in this world to go to where the consequences of your actions can't find you but, taking refuge in a future neither you nor anyone else will see, breaks new psychological ground. I doubt that even John Gotti thought of that one. Future doctoral candidates will be the only people who will ever give thanks to you, unless you count Osama (for letting him go and for helping him recruit more crazies) and those who have benefited from your largess at the expense of the U.S. Treasury.
  
2. No attacks since 9/11? What about the anthrax mailings? Oh, that's right. That was probably the government itself. Sen. Leahy still wants to know who tried to kill him. What a coincidence that the mailings just happened to have arrived as the "Patriot Act" was coming to a vote and Leahy was skeptical of the bill. A lot of suckers bought it in 2004, not so many now. What took them so long? I don't know. The misplaced desire to believe, I guess. 
 

 
I guess I could also call Eric Rudolph and what he did a terrorist attack but then, you and he tend to be on the same page, on his issue.
 
3. First invasion of America? Gee, I would think the Brits invading Washington and burning down the White House was pretty bad and counts as an invasion! I also know that President Madison led troops against the Brits himself. And, Dolly Madison took the portrait of George Washington with her as she fled. What would you do in similar circumstances? What would you take? "Laura, bring the liquor cabinet! Where's my BIG BOOK OF LIES? Quick, let's get to the undisclosed location!"
 
4. And what about you completely dropping the ball leading up yo 9/11, even after you were repeatedly warned? You keep blaming Clinton (who was one of the people who warned you). I guess, by that logic, we should blame your daddy for the attacks on the WTC in February of 1993, shortly after he left office. You OK with that, genius boy? 
 
5. You spoke of regretting that there weren't any WMDs in Iraq. Yes, I guess this once I can believe you. You probably do regret it. There not being any removes one of your contrived excuses for invading the place. But, you know what I think of when you mention not finding WMDs? I remember you joking about not finding them while tens of thousands of people, including our soldiers, were being maimed and killed. You sure are one damn funny asshole!
 
6. The inauguration? I hear that you are being flown by copter to Barack Obama's inauguration. Is that because at your inauguration, protesters started to break through the security line, your limo had to speed up, guards' guns were drawn, and your limo was covered with eggs by the time it got to the dais? None of this was shown on TV, of course. Instead, we got nothing but happy-happy views of better placed pro-Bush supporters as soon as it looked like all hell might break loose and your car might get turned over.
 
7. You say that your Medicare prescription drug plan is bringing peace of mind to seniors. I know this is one of the current Repug talking points but please explain. You can explain your legislation, can't you? Maybe I should just consider your twisted definition of 'peace'.
 
8. Why is Hank the Grifter Paulson (former head of Goldman-Sachs) handing out our taxpayer cash to his Wall Street criminal buddies with no strings attached just like Cheney gave no-bid taxpayer cash to Halliburton? And, don't go expecting me to believe Bernie Madoff was the only one of his kind and that there aren't even bigger slight of hand artists among your base of contributors on Wall Street. Unlike Madoff, they get the cover of their institutions. Is he just a sacrificial lamb? An example of the sacrifices even Obama says we have to make; a bit of raw meat for the masses? Maybe we should keep Gitmo open for a while. After all, we spent a lot of money on training people in waterboarding techniques. Hey Wall Street! Come on down! You like the Caribbean, don't you?

So, when will some arrests be made on Wall Street? You say you have "kept us safe." Have you kept us safe from Wall Street terrorists who are putting a gun to our heads? I know it's a lot of tough questions but please elucidate. Time will be granted for you to look up the word "elucidate."
 
9. What drugs enable Laura to stay married to you?
 
10. I believe I heard you use the phrase "enjoyed working with the media" or words to that effect in your recent press conference. Not surprising, since they seem to have enjoyed helping you out, too. In a better world, they would be something other than an American version of Pravda.
 

 
Of course, we don't get comments like this in the MSM. Instead, we get smarmy slimebags like Larry King fawning and drooling all over Dubya and Laura on his show, verbally masturbating Dubya while probably thinking of his neighbor's german shepherd that he allows to mount him every morning before he picks up the paper on his doorstep ("That's a good doggie. What advice on the world do you have for me today? Have you ever been dressed up in suspenders? I will always do your bidding. Where did you learn how to speak English so well? Do you know my friend Lou Dobbs?").
 
11. Finally, if your "Mission Accomplished" banner refers to your devastating economic meltdown, your disastrous war for oil money and war profits, being a divider not a uniter, magically creating a $1.2 Trillion deficit out of a surplus, ushering in the biggest redistribution of wealth upwards that we've ever seen, escalating the class warfare on the middle and working classes, gutting the FDA to the point where e.coli infested food kills Americans, relaxing enforcement of mining safety regulations that led to dead miners, tearing up that damn "quaint" Constitution, and your dropping the ball on everything from Al Qeada to Katrina, all I can say in summation is Heckuva job, Bushie. Now you and your gang of thieves and cronies can go straight to hell, immediately. We're still cleaning up the mess of the Civil War. The mess you're smirking about will probably take as long.

Bush: Almost Gone

There's a whole page of quotes from Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels. Obviously the first one, his most classic one is:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

In his buh-bye, suckers speechyesterday, Bush repeated the biggest of the Big Lies that were the hallmarks of his tragic regime, the most infamous one of all: "I kept you safe."

In fact, no modern president-- say, post-James Madison-- has presided over as big a domestic calamity of unsafeness as Bush, who can and should be blamed for not protecting us from the events of 9/11-- and who then proceeded to make us less safe every single day for the rest of his horrendous time in office.

“There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions," he blathered, "but there can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.” Funny how he conveniently started the clock ticking on 9/12. I guess Clinton was still technically president on 9/11, right? Bush had been in the White House how long? Not paying attention.

In his last scheduled-- please God-- appearance beefore he finds himself on the ash heap of history, Bush quacked out another pathetic attempt to justofy the worst presidency in our country's history.

With a touch of nostalgia for his accomplishments and an air of defiance to his critics, Mr. Bush took Americans back to the first night that he addressed them from the White House only hours after terror had struck American soil and killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

“We must resist complacency. We must keep our resolve,” Mr. Bush said. “And we must never let down our guard.”

If only he had resisted complacency and if only he hasn't let his (our) guard down between his inauguration and that fateful September day, we might have avoided all the tragedies that followed.

The address was the latest attempt by Mr. Bush to help shape his legacy. But even though Democrats said they had no plans to offer a major response, saying that his time in office speaks for itself, the farewell speech would hardly be the last word on his tenure.

Dan Froomkin's take over at the WaPo, hits the nail squarely on the head. "President Bush bid the nation goodbye last night with a simpering speech that may have appealed to those who still believe in him, but offered nothing to change the minds of the vast majority of Americans who don't."

Bush smirked and twitched while delivering a highly defensive farewell address in which he tried to hearken back to his glory days right after 9/11, sought credit for having made "tough decisions" and insisted his intentions were good.

There was no real attempt to bind the wounds he leaves in his wake. There was no apparent awareness of irony when he held up his administration as a champion of moral clarity and human dignity. He even gave himself credit for his response to the financial crisis he didn't see coming: "When challenges to our prosperity emerged, we rose to meet them," he said.

And he tried one last time to conflate his "war on terror" with the unrelated debacle in Iraq, recasting the American troops perilously occupying that benighted country as "part of a broader struggle" between "a small band of fanatics" who demand "total obedience to an oppressive ideology" and a system "based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God, and that liberty and justice light the path to peace."

In a fitting end for a presidency that has often operated in its own reality, Bush was greeted warmly by his audience-- a hand-picked selection of hangers-on and human props-- even as public-opinion polls show that the nation is way past ready to move on.

Bush's former press secretary, Scott McClellan, listened to the speech too. He didn't seem very impressed.

"It's hard to talk about moral clarity when you have really tarnished the government's moral standing," McClellan said bluntly.

"There are really two problems that they don't seem to get. First of all, the public trust. The president, long ago, sadly, lost the public trust. They are no longer listening to what he has to say or buying what he is selling. You know, unless, he is willing to come out and talk candidly about his own mistakes, his own policy mistakes, and address those issues openly with the American people, then they are not really tuning in. It's the same old song. It's just a different variation of it. It's much like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher.

"The second part of this is... it's terribly mistaken to think that good intentions and your inner decency will somehow outweigh your actions and policies, and the way you went about them with the American people. They are terribly mistaken if they think that the American people are going to look at that as more important than what he actually did while he was in office."

But more important than analyzing Bush's self-serving speech is analyzing the reluctance of the Obama Administration to hold him and his cronies accountable. Paul Krugman summed it up nicely yesterday in the NY Times:

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

...Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.