1 Boring Old Man

If there’s anyone that has passed before us in this last 6+ years that embodies the total horror of it all, it’s this man – Douglas Feith. I guess he’s a smart person. He’s a Magna Cum Laude graduate from both Harvard College and Georgetown Law. But if ever there were a person who ought to have questioned the influences of his background on his political ideas, he’s the one. His father was a victim of the Holocaust Tragedy who lost both parents and seven siblings to Germany’s Concentration Camps. His father was an active Zionist and a political Republican Conservative.

Douglas became an expert on the Middle East, but his proIsraeli Zionist ideas have pervaded everything he’s ever done in government [and elsewhere]. In 1982, he left the National Security Council under suspicion for passing information to Israel. He denies that allegation. He left his post at the Defense Department’s Office of Special Planse in 2003 as one of his underlings was convicted and jailed for passing information to Israel. If you look at his career, it’s hard to decide whether he works for Israel or our government. Most of us think he worked for both. There’s nothing wrong with being a Zionist. Given his family history, it’s easy to understand. But it’s hardly the policy of the U.S. Defense Department, and that’s what he made it into.

What did he do? He set up an alternative intelligence operation inside the DOD, where he concluded that Iraq and al Qaeda had a "mature symbiotic relationship" and presented his ideas as a briefing to top level governmental officials, and then he personally leaked it [his own top secret memo] to the Press [sort of the Press – The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative rag].

In February, the Inspector General’s report of Feith’s Office of Special Plans was released in summary. Today, they released the whole report and the slides he used for his presentations.  Feith’s rebuttal to the report is included [longer than the report itself]. I wouldn’t bother reading it, but I would look through the slides. I’m reminded a lot of Joseph McCarthy from the 50’s. It’s all innuendo presented as fact. Nobody with any sense believed it at the time. Now, it’s known to be complete baloney.

Douglas Feith is a tragic figure. He’s a smart man whose ideas are so colored by his ideology that his conclusions and life work are just garbage. He’s running around claiming to be some kind of hero. Truth is, he’s lucky not to be in chains in some dark prison. No one is going to bother to really go after him right now because there are much more powerful crooks to contend with, but let us at least mark down for the record that Douglas Feith betrayed this country, on purpose, and to our great detriment.

Douglas Feith is a traitor, and that’s how he will be remembered for all time…

Investigators Eye Broader White House Email Trail

Last week, Justice Department documents turned over to a Congressional committee investigating circumstances behind the selective firing of seven US attorneys revealed that some Bush administration officials have primarily used email accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee to conduct official White House business. This appears to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The revelation that White House staffers used outside email accounts to conduct administration business comes on the heels of a report in the National Journal alleging that Karl Rove uses an RNC email address to conduct a majority of his duties as White House political adviser.

Now Congressional investigators are taking a second look at public corruption cases it closed the books on. They’ll try to determine if current and former White House officials were more deeply involved in scandals than previously known, and if so, whether administration officials used outside email accounts to cover up their involvement in cronyism or other malfeasance.

>Congressman Henry Waxman (D-California), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, intends to get to the bottom of the issue.

Citing Congress’ investigation of White House contacts with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff as an example of apparent misuse of outside email accounts, Waxman is seeking the deposition of Susan Ralston regarding communication she had via email with Abramoff. Ralston is a former assistant to White House political adviser Karl Rove. The questioned emails between Ralston and Abramoff concerned official White House business conducted through Ralston’s RNC email address, according to documents released by Waxman’s committee.

…

In letters sent last week to the RNC and the Bush/Cheney 2004 Campaign, Congressman Waxman urged the two groups to preserve all emails sent by White House officials from their servers, because of their relevance to Congressional probes, including the US attorney scandal.

"I am writing about email records in the possession of the Republican National Committee. Congressional investigations have revealed that White House officials have used nongovernmental email accounts, including those maintained by the RNC, to conduct official White House business," Waxman’s letter states. "The Committee has questions about who has access to these email records and how the RNC protects them from destruction or tampering. The Committee also directs you to preserve all such records because of their potential relevance to Congressional investigations."

Waxman added that emails released by the Justice Department in connection with the US attorney probe appeared to demonstrate that White House officials were using their RNC email accounts to circumvent the archives system.

We often comment on their arrogance – their feeling of being above the law. But it goes further than that. They actually seem driven to live in the loopholes; to create loopholes where none were previously known; and if possible, find some secret way to break the laws outright. In the last post, I evoked that complex psychiatric diagnosis – "bully." But there’s another diagnostic category that also comes to mind – "criminal."

Bush scoops up Fox using recess powers

 President Bush named Republican fundraiser Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Wednesday, using a maneuver that allowed him to bypass Congress, where Democrats had derailed Fox’s nomination.

The appointment, made while lawmakers were out of town on spring break, prompted angry rebukes from Democrats, who said Bush’s action may even be illegal.

Democrats had denounced Fox for his donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign. The group’s TV ads, which claimed that Sen. John Kerry exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in the Massachusetts Democrat’s election loss.

Recognizing Fox did not have the votes to obtain Senate confirmation in the Foreign Relations Committee, Bush withdrew the nomination last week. On Wednesday, with the Senate on a one-week break, the president used his power to make recess appointments to put Fox in the job without Senate confirmation.

This is just something to show that Congress can’t push him around. Exercising power just to show you have it is pretty sick, or pretty mean, or both. Whichever you call it, it is diagnostic of a particular kind of person – known in the psychiatric literature as "a bully."

Swopa of Needlenose posts pictures frequently as a "caption contest." This one needs no caption:

 Robert F. Kennedy

In 1968, my father, running for President, addressed in a speech, the White House’s proposal for a troop surge in Vietnam.

"I do not want — as I believe most Americans do not want — to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians] slaughtered; so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: "They made a desert, and called it peace." …

"The reversals of the last several months have led our military to ask for more troops. This weekend, it was announced that some of them–a "moderate" increase, it was said — would soon be sent. But isn’t this exactly what we have always done in the past? If we examine the history of this conflict, we find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time — at every crisis — we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issued more confident communiques. Every time, we have been assured that this one last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just one more step up the ladder. But all the escalations, all the last steps, have brought us no closer to success than we were before… And once again the President tells us, as we have been told for twenty years, that "we are going to win"; "victory" is coming… It becoming more evident with every passing day that the victories we achieve will only come at the cost of the destruction for the nation we once hoped to help…

"Let us have no misunderstanding. [They] are a brutal enemy indeed. Time and time again, they have shown their willingness to sacrifice innocent civilians, to engage in torture and murder and despicable terror to achieve their ends. This is a war almost without rules or quarter. There can be no easy moral answer to this war, no one-sided condemnation of American actions. What we must ask ourselves is whether we have a right to bring so much destruction to another land, without clear and convincing evidence that this is what its people want. But that is precisely the evidence we do not have…

"The war, far from being the last critical test for the United States, is in fact weakening our position in Asia and around the world, and eroding the structure of international cooperation which has directly supported our security for the past three decades… All this bears directly and heavily on the question of whether more troops should now be sent — and, if more are sent, what their mission will be. We are entitled to ask–we are required to ask — how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams? But this question the administration does not and cannot answer. It has no answer — none but the ever-expanding use of military force and the lives of our brave soldiers, in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything yet…

"But the costs of the war’s present course far outweigh anything we can reasonably hope to gain by it, for ourselves or for the people of Vietnam. It must be ended, and it can be ended, in a peace of brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing he and he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop…

"You are the people, as President Kennedy said, who have "the least ties to the present and the greatest ties to the future." I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our misguided policies–and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best hope of man. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America… I ask you to go forth and work for new policies — work to change our direction — and thus restore our place at the point of moral leadership, in our country, in our hearts, and all around the world."

If we must pick a legacy for our President – somebody’s son, or somebody’s wife – we’ve picking the wrong legacy…

The Honorable Alberto Gonzales Attorney General of the United States U.S. Department of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530 Dear Attorney General Gonzales: As you are aware, Monica Goodling has indicated that she will assert her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination before the Senate Judiciary Committee rather than testify. You must know that her testimony would be important to the Judiciary Committee, since you offered her as a Department witness and agreed in your meeting with Judiciary Committee Senators on March 8 that the Department would cooperate with the Committee in providing her testimony along with that of others. In the ordinary course, the Committee would discuss this with your Department to determine the best course of action with respect to a witness who has asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, so as not to unwittingly hinder a prosecution by the Department. While it is premature to presume that any criminal prosecution will result from this inquiry now, it is also premature to presume one will not.  It therefore seems advisable to have discussions between the Committee and the Department regarding how to proceed with regard to Ms. Goodling. Our question to you is: Who do we talk to at the Department of Justice? The office of the Attorney General appears to be hopelessly conflicted. We would appreciate hearing from you whether a special counsel is necessary for us to speak with, or how you suggest creating appropriate firewalls so that a non-conflicted person with appropriate knowledge and authority can have the customary discussions with the Committee regarding Ms. Goodling’s testimony. On a related matter, we understand that you initially ordered an investigation by the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility and that a joint Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility investigation is now under way. Is Ms. Goodling cooperating with that investigation? It is our understanding that career Department employees are required to cooperate with OIG and OPR investigations. We are told by the Department that despite Ms. Goodling’s unwillingness to testify, she nonetheless remains on your payroll. Has it ever happened in the history of the Department of Justice that an attorney has refused to cooperate with OIG or OPR or asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and remained an employee of the Department? Please provide information regarding any precedent for these extraordinary circumstances. We would appreciate hearing from you promptly on these matters. Sincerely,

PATRICK LEAHY Chairman

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE United States Senator

This isn’t at all funny to me. The situation that Monica Goodling, Senior Counsel to the Attorney General and White House Liason for the Department of Justice, creates with her refusal to testify [see her lawyer’s letter] is so ludicrous that one is tempted to make jokes about it. She remains employed by the government and is "on leave." The Administration is so into their take-over of government that they feel no obligation to even participate in our Constitutional Democracy.

Among the myriad of scandals swirling around the Bush Administration, the active subversion of the Department of Justice for political gain trumps all the rest. We can get over a bad war, we can unelect bad officials, but it the judicial system become an arm of a political Party, there is no Democracy. There is more than enough evidence that the Justice Department itself mounted a campaign to influence elections. Now high ranking officials are developing epidemic amnesia and refusing to testify.

So, to me, this letter is more than a Democratic political ploy. It goes to the heart of the matter at hand. How can we investigate the very Agency that regulates investigations, particularly when a central figure in the investigation, an ongoing employee, refuses to testify. If you read her lawyer’s letter, it says that the Congressional Investigation might lead to a criminal investigation, so Ms. Goodling doesn’t want to talk to Congress, and she wants to keep her job, and, by the way, nobody did anything wrong.

Not funny at all. Tragic… 

Donate Your Personal Tragedy to the White House

Bartlett told Bob Schieffer on CBS’s Face the Nation that the cause of longtime senior Bush strategist Matthew Dowd’s break with the President was the "personal turmoil" in Dowd’s life. In recent years, Dowd has lost a child and a marriage, and now his son is being deployed to Iraq. No wonder, says his good friend Bartlett, Dowd no longer toes the Bush line; emotions can cloud your thinking.

The immediate ad hominem response has become standard. Paul O’neill and Richard Clarke? Disgruntled employees. Joseph Wilson? Wife’s boondoggle. Matthew Dowd? Personal turmoil. It appears that the Administration’s critics are beset with an epidemic of neurotic motives. Even whole groups can be afflicted. Democrats? Cut and run. Congress? Not supporting the troops. Media? Liberal Press.

It’s hard not to return the personal attacks in kind. It’s particularly difficult right now. The Bush Administration is "on the stand" and there’s an epidemic of I-don’t-recall-itis At least we won’t have to endure endless memoirs of the Bush years – they’ll forget they were ever in office [See how I’m fighting the impulse to make sarcastic ad hominem attacks].

DOJ Official Brings Storm by Taking the Fifth in Gonzales Flap

As White House liaison, Goodling was part of a small cadre of senior Justice officials responsible for vetting U.S. Attorneys, a position that became far more significant after the 2006 reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, which gave Justice authority to install interim U.S. Attorneys without congressional approval. She played a central role in the appointment of her one-time boss J. Timothy Griffin, who replaced ousted U.S. Attorney H.E. "Bud" Cummins III in Arkansas. Beyond that, she wielded significant power in determining which U.S. Attorneys would go — or stay.

…

Sampson suggested that Goodling also encouraged the last-minute decision to ax New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. The decision, he said, came after Goodling met with some New Mexico Republicans concerned about Iglesias. Asked by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., whether he would fire Iglesias today, Sampson responded: "In hindsight, sitting here today, I would not."

…

Among Goodling’s close associates were Barbara Comstock, head of opposition research for the RNC and later the chief spokeswoman for Ashcroft; Griffin, Comstock’s deputy, whom Goodling would later help to win the interim appointment to replace one of the eight ousted U.S. Attorneys in Arkansas; and Mark Corallo, who in 2003 took the helm of the Justice Department’s Public Affairs Office after Comstock.

Goodling quickly won Comstock’s trust for her hard work and talent for digging up information on tort litigation and judicial nominations. And when Griffin left in 2001, Goodling became Comstock’s deputy. They helped prepare Ashcroft and Theodore Olson for their confirmation hearings to be attorney general and solicitor general, respectively.

When Comstock became Ashcroft’s spokeswoman in 2002, she brought Goodling along as her deputy. Goodling stayed for three years. In no time, Goodling became "indispensable" to the office, says Corallo, who became Ashcroft’s spokesman in 2003. "I have never known anybody that works harder or does better work than her."

…

A few months later, she moved into Gonzales’ office as a senior counsel and soon took on the responsibilities of White House liaison. In that post, Goodling served as the gatekeeper for the White House for all 400-some political appointees in the Justice Department, from U.S. Attorneys and marshals to secretaries.

 

Interviews for U.S. Attorney replacements took place with only a handful of people: David Margolis, the department’s top-ranking career official and a 40-plus year veteran; a member of the White House Counsel’s Office; the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys; and Goodling.

Charles Miller, whom Gonzales appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, interviewed with the panel in the fall of 2005. "They asked me what I’d done to support the president," Miller says. It wasn’t a question Miller expected. He told them he’d voted for Bush.

But a former prosecutor who did not get a U.S. Attorney post was left with a sour feeling after his interview in 2006. "Monica was in charge, in essence, of the interview," recalls the former supervisory assistant U.S. Attorney. "I walked out of that room and thought, ‘Wow, I’ve just run into a buzz saw.’"

These interviews took on new meaning after the renewal of the Patriot Act; Goodling was one of the first to push the attorney general’s new authority to choose replacements, and she pushed particularly hard for Griffin.

Griffin was slated to take over the slot in Arkansas, but by August 2006, the White House had hit trouble with home state Sen. Mark Pryor, D.-Ark. In an Aug. 18 e-mail to Sampson, Goodling proposed a solution: Have Justice pick Griffin for a political position, and then detail him in as an interim.

"Tim knows nothing about my idea for a solution at this point — wanted your sign-off, and a home for him, before I called him," she wrote in the e-mail. The idea paid off: The Criminal Division agreed to take Griffin on upon his return from his post as a judge advocate general in Iraq in late September.

Goodling continued to work closely to coordinate Griffin’s assignment to Arkansas, organizing his formal December interview with Gonzales.

When the ultimate plan for the firing of the other seven U.S. Attorneys went into effect, Goodling rode the point, directing the public-relations team.

Bush’s long history of tilting Justice

THE SCANDAL unfolding around the firing of eight U.S. attorneys compels the conclusion that the Bush administration has rewarded loyalty over all else. A destructive pattern of partisan political actions at the Justice Department started long before this incident, however, as those of us who worked in its civil rights division can attest.

I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.

Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

It has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.

At least two of the recently fired U.S. attorneys, John McKay in Seattle and David C. Iglesias in New Mexico, were targeted largely because they refused to prosecute voting fraud cases that implicated Democrats or voters likely to vote for Democrats.

This pattern also extended to hiring. In March 2006, Bradley Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. Two weeks earlier, the administration was granted the authority to make such indefinite appointments without Senate confirmation. That was too bad: A Senate hearing might have uncovered Schlozman’s central role in politicizing the civil rights division during his three-year tenure.

Schlozman, for instance, was part of the team of political appointees that approved then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s plan to redraw congressional districts in Texas, which in 2004 increased the number of Republicans elected to the House. Similarly, Schlozman was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the division when the Justice Department OKd a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls. These decisions went against the recommendations of career staff, who asserted that such rulings discriminated against minority voters. The warnings were prescient: Both proposals were struck down by federal courts.

And speaking of "Crime" at the DOJ. It was the rule rather than the exception.

This story doesn’t just have legs. It has deep roots. It’s been called "Purgegate," but the purge isn’t just eight U.S. Attorneys, it’s a systematic attempt to replace the Department of Justice with a cadre of Republican Party Operatives to shut down Civil Rights and purge the voter rolls of poor and Minority voters who might vote Democratic.

Starting Thursday, I took a sabbatical from being politically obsessed. We had a honest_to_god expert dendrochronologist come look at our "trees" – a bunch of crooked trees in our forest we think are Cherokee Trail markers – but it’s never been proven. So we located a young professor who took us seriously and came to "core" these trees to determine their age and when they were "bent." Pretty exciting. Then off we went to Memphis to attend the wedding of a friend’s son. My deepest connection to anything over the weekend was a visit to "Graceland, Graceland, Memphis Tennessee."

But In the political void and the long drive to and from, I had some thoughts. As my friend Al would say, "It’s [my] nature." These people really are "up to no good." This stuff is all premeditated: the War with Iraq, the ignoring the Geneva Conventions, the N.S.A. spying, the F.B.I. spying, the disassembly of the Justice Department and Civil/Voting rights.

I was reminded of Cheney’s first job. He went to work for Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Equal Opportunity in the late 1960’s. Their job was to shut it down during the Nixon Administration. I think they so hate "Liberals" who push Civil Rights for everyone, that they feel like they are doing a good thing getting what they see as "the scum" off the voting registry. They have held people like me in deep disdain so long that they now feel righteous in undermining everything we’ve gained in terms of Civil Rights and government "for all" the people.

They’re dead set on cleansing government of all that "Liberal Crap" and engineering a Republican takeover of America with a systematic and devious program – all under the table – to erase the existence of an F.D.R. and then the 60’s and any remnant of what happened in those times. They see America becoming just another country in the community of the world, and they’re trying to stop that from happening. They think that’s what Liberals want, for America to become a member of a world community. They’re correct, at least in my case. That is what I think is the next right thing. So in a sense, they’re not crazy. But rather than debate the point, they’re bolstering their position by grabbing and consolidating power, bringing off something of a bloodless coup – and it’s all premeditated.

Iraq is not the only Civil War our country is involved in. We’ve got one of our own…