1 Boring Old Man

In the lead-up to the night visitors attempt to get Ashcroft to sign off on the renewal of the program, Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith were called to the White House to a meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney. The obvious purpose of the meeting was to convince them to sign off on the program. We have become so accustomed to our leaders’ ethereal relationship with the truth that it’s easy to overlook what happened, it was such a regular occurrence:

"critically important" "thousands of lives" Where did that statement come from? Later in the report, each of the Intelligence Agencies has a section where they discuss the efficacy of the PSP [President’s Surveillance Program]. None of them found convincing evidence that the program was effective. But more than that, none of them reported on any survey of the effectiveness of program that came before the meeting under discussion here. There was no information about efficacy when Dick Cheney was speaking to Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith.

There are so many things wrong with this whole story. The Vice President and the President’s Counsel are meeting with the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Legal Counsel – people in charge of certifying the legality of the program. That isn’t how things are supposed to work. What happened to ‘justice is blind?’ Why are they directly lobbying the DoJ? What kind of legal argument is Cheney’s assertion that "thousands of lives" were at risk? And where did Cheney’s assertion come from? It came from his mind. It’s either something he thought, or something he made up to get his way, but it was for damned sure not based on any data:

In the IG Report, they couldn’t even cite examples where this program helped. They mention several cases where it may have helped. So, in this meeting [which shouldn’t have occurred], Cheney argued that the DoJ decide to ignore their duty to uphold the Law because the program in question was vital to National Defense [’cause Cheney said so]. And we’re still unclear "why?" Why was this ineffective program such a big deal?