1 Boring Old Man

So, now how do we judge what they did? Are they victims of the vicious attack on the World Trade Towers going to extraordinary lengths in an extraordinary situation – pulled into the world of "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" by necessity? Or were they perpetrators of cruel and unusual vicousness themselves?

In my last post, I tried to frame the actions of the President and the National Security Council’s Principals Committee [Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Powell, and Ashcroft] in the context of the post-9/11 period and their awesome responsibility at the time in which their meetings occured. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in their shoes. I’ll bet some of them felt that same way. I expect that they would mount the argument that these were cataclysmic circumstances requiring dramatic measures.

Dick Cheney had a preconceived idea about what to do. He’d made that clear years before in the Minority Report on the Iran-Contra Affair. He felt, back then, that the Congress had no right to limit the President in matters of National Security. Congress had forbidden Reagan to support the Contras, and yet we’d supported them anyway by selling arms to Iran. Cheney argued against Congressional Oversight or review. The President was the Commander in Chief. His opinion [bias] both before and after 9/11 was the same – Congress should not tie the hands of the President. He had some other opinions going into this situation. He thought Clinton was on a wild goose chase going after al Qaeda. He was convinced, along with the body of Neoconservatives, that it was the Arab "States" that were the problem – that they were in league with, or even the creators of, the terrorist groups like al Qaeda. Cheney focused particularly on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

We know for sure that Dick Cheney was looking for more from our intelligence operation than simply where would al Qaeda attack next. He wanted to prove that Iraq was specifically involved wiith al Qaeda. So, this intelligence gathering was not just a national security operation, it was a hunt for the Hussein/bin Laden link. Vice President Cheney’s two biases, the "unitary executive" and his convictions about Iraq were amplified by another Cheney-ism. Cheney was a former Congressional Whip. He had years of experience wielding power in Congress, often behind the scenes. He was a master of the art of power leverage and the "dark arts" of political manipulation. He is not a man of principles. He is rather a "get-‘er-done" power broker – a tactician in the theater of Washington politics.

Cheney’s biases, his political skill, and 9/11 were the Perfect Storm. The leagality was requested from the Office of Legal Counsel and John Yoo [in colsult with David Addington] provided a blank check via his Memos. Yoo didn’t say "do it." He didn’t really even say, "you can do it." He said, "here’s how you justify it." That’s his current defense for the horror reaction we have when his secret memos see the light of day. It’s an absurd defense, claiming that the Memos are just a legal exercise, in light of their wording and his subsequent writings. Like Cheney and Addinton, he was on board and riding that train long before he wrote the first Memo – as they say in the Law, that’s a "fact."

So we’re in a  position of having to deal with a messy situation. On the one hand, we cannot refute the argument that the President and the National Security Council’s Principals Committee were in a unique situation dealing with very bad actors. We can understand their bending rules in a frantic attempt to prevent further tragedy and carnage. On the other hand, they went way beyond our established legal, moral, and behavioral limits, they kept it way too secret way too long, and we’re all painfully aware of the idiosyncratic biases that informed their course of action. Where do we draw the lines in reacting to the decisions they made in those days? My own answer to those questions follow in the next post, but first I’ll dispense with the mid-level people involved in the piece –  the lawyers.

John Yoo, William J. Haynes, Jay Bybee, and David Addington: John Yoo is a political ideologue who should have never written the Memos in the first place. He claims powers for the President that approach absurdity using arguments that are already there – absurd. William J. Haynes of the DoD and Jay Bybee of the DoJ OLC are less well known to me, but what I know suggests that they are in the same category as John Yoo – political hacks. David Addington seems less a lawyer, and more "Cheney’s Cheney," a get-‘er-done type with the legal principles of a Nicola Machiavelli. Guilty of criminal distortion of our Constitution and Laws.

Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Miers, and the rank and file at the DoJ: Lightweight Losers…

Jack Goldsmith, James Comey, and Patrick Fitzgerald: Heros in a time of cholera. Some Good Republicans, all Good Lawyers who did the right thing against a gradient. All three deserve Medals of Honor for courage in battle.

John Ashcroft: The verdict isn’t in yet on John Ashcroft. Not for me. There was a part of him [more apparent when he was delerious] that suggests that he is a man of substance. On the other hand, he assured all the president’s men [and Condi] that the illegal things they were doing were legal. Even taking the most permissive of stances, he still didn’t do the job of an Attorney General – uphold the Laws of the Land.