An Army of Straw Men and a Fleet of Red Herrings...
The New York Times editorialized February 2 that "President Bush is not giving up the battle over domestic spying. He's fighting it with an army of straw men and a fleet of red herrings.
"In his State of the Union address and in a follow-up speech in Nashville yesterday, Mr. Bush threw out a dizzying array of misleading analogies, propaganda slogans and false choices: Congress authorized the president to spy on Americans and knew all about it ... 9/11 could have been prevented by warrantless spying ... you can't fight terrorism and also obey the law ... and Democrats are not just soft on national defense, they actually don't want to beat Al Qaeda."
You can read the rest here.
The NYT article on yesterday's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing is also worth reading. It's here.
The hearings were carried on C-Span, one of the few Intelligence Committee hearings that Senator Pat Roberts has called.
It's the Senate Intelligence Committee that undertook to investigate the administration's use of intelligence to justify the war on Iraq, but somehow never got around to actually holding hearings. The reason is obvious: the hearings would be embarrassing to the Bush administration.
More generally, this Republican Congress has rolled over and played dead when it comes to oversight.
One of the few oversight hearings held since Bush took office was the Indian Affairs subcommitte hearing that John McCain called, which broke the Jack Abramoff scandal. Congressional oversight is obviously a dangerous thing for the administration.
It was not always this way, of course. The Republican Congress conducted 16 investigations of Bill Clinton and held numerous oversight hearings during which more than 1,000 government witnesses testified and over 1 million pages of documents were produced.
The Congress even took 130 hours of sworn testimony over whether Clinton misused the White House Christmas Card List.
In contrast there has been no sworn testimony over the $12 billion in no-bid contracts that Halliburton got, nor any investigation of the prestidigitation the admininstration performed in invading Iraq.
Senator Arlen Spector has scheduled a hearing for February 6 on the administration's domestic spying program. The Bush administration will again deploy its "army of straw men and fleet of red herrings," but has already said it won't produce the internal legal memos justifying the warrantless spying.
Executive Privilege is the official explanation, but a more likely reason is that the memos will simply prove embarrassing, the kind that John Yoo wrote to justify torture but the administration subsequently disowned. Hired guns sometimes produce obsequious blather that won't stand public scrutiny.
Like Bush's allegation that he doesn't have to follow the law when it comes to domestic wiretaps.
TM
"In his State of the Union address and in a follow-up speech in Nashville yesterday, Mr. Bush threw out a dizzying array of misleading analogies, propaganda slogans and false choices: Congress authorized the president to spy on Americans and knew all about it ... 9/11 could have been prevented by warrantless spying ... you can't fight terrorism and also obey the law ... and Democrats are not just soft on national defense, they actually don't want to beat Al Qaeda."
You can read the rest here.
The NYT article on yesterday's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing is also worth reading. It's here.
The hearings were carried on C-Span, one of the few Intelligence Committee hearings that Senator Pat Roberts has called.
It's the Senate Intelligence Committee that undertook to investigate the administration's use of intelligence to justify the war on Iraq, but somehow never got around to actually holding hearings. The reason is obvious: the hearings would be embarrassing to the Bush administration.
More generally, this Republican Congress has rolled over and played dead when it comes to oversight.
One of the few oversight hearings held since Bush took office was the Indian Affairs subcommitte hearing that John McCain called, which broke the Jack Abramoff scandal. Congressional oversight is obviously a dangerous thing for the administration.
It was not always this way, of course. The Republican Congress conducted 16 investigations of Bill Clinton and held numerous oversight hearings during which more than 1,000 government witnesses testified and over 1 million pages of documents were produced.
The Congress even took 130 hours of sworn testimony over whether Clinton misused the White House Christmas Card List.
In contrast there has been no sworn testimony over the $12 billion in no-bid contracts that Halliburton got, nor any investigation of the prestidigitation the admininstration performed in invading Iraq.
Senator Arlen Spector has scheduled a hearing for February 6 on the administration's domestic spying program. The Bush administration will again deploy its "army of straw men and fleet of red herrings," but has already said it won't produce the internal legal memos justifying the warrantless spying.
Executive Privilege is the official explanation, but a more likely reason is that the memos will simply prove embarrassing, the kind that John Yoo wrote to justify torture but the administration subsequently disowned. Hired guns sometimes produce obsequious blather that won't stand public scrutiny.
Like Bush's allegation that he doesn't have to follow the law when it comes to domestic wiretaps.
TM
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1 Comments:
You guys keep talking about Halliburton and I find it very amusing. Halliburton recevied billions of dollars in so-called "no-bid" contracts during the Clinton administration. The reason simply is because there are few companies that provide the services to the government that Halliburton provides. There is another company, by the way, that's headed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband which also receives billions in similar no-bid contracts. Incidentally, a no-bid contract is simply a contract between a company and the government to ensure that the company will provide on-going services to the government over a period of time. The reason such contracts exist is because it takes months for the paperwork to go through the system meanwhile the services are needed now.
As for whether the President broke the law, just because you say he did doesn't make it true. In the Supreme Court case you referred to in a previous post, the President could not wiretap domestic groups (not foreign groups calling in to the U.S.). By the way, even Sen. Carl Levin acknowledged that such intelligence gathering prevented the bombing of the Brooklyn Bridge.
As for Democrats not wanting to beat Al Qaeda, what does it say when Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid brags that they (ie. the Democrats) killed the Patriot Act? In fact, only a couple of Democrats stood to voice support for the Patriot Act during the President's State of the Union Address.
There is clearly a debate between the two parties between having a pre-9/11 footing and a post-9/11 footing. Americans could see that debate in action during the SOTU last week.
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