juxtablog

The Problem With Alberto
    By Elizabeth de la Vega
    t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

    Sunday 22 April 2007

    After a day of testimony that showed Alberto Gonzales to be so self-contradictory, so conveniently vacant and – at times – so simply risible that even radio listeners could feel the disgust that permeated the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, we are all waiting to learn the attorney general’s fate: Will he be pushed over the side, take a dive off the plank or simply hang onto the railing of the wreck the Bush administration has made of the Department of Justice?

    Certainly, Gonzales is unfit to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. We knew that before he testified on April 19. We knew that before he was even confirmed. No one who signs off on tortured legal memos authorizing torture, kidnapping and illegal detentions is fit to be the attorney general of the United States. But the departure of Alberto Gonzales will not right the listing ship that is the Justice Department.

    Why? Because the problem with Alberto is that Alberto is only part of the problem.

    The real problem with the Bush administration’s Department of Justice right now is that it is run by the Bush administration. Gonzales’s Justice Department is the Bush administration’s Justice Department. Therefore, Gonzales’s story about the US attorneys scandal is the Bush administration’s story. And even though the Bush White House has come up with some fabulous tales over the past six years, this one is a corker: Amazingly – the White House would have you believe – the list of US attorneys who should be “pushed out” was spontaneously generated without the benefit of human agency! Can you believe it??

    Actually, no. Not even the most credulous – or biased – audience can suspend disbelief to that extent, which is why Gonzales struggled so mightily yesterday to convince everyone to stop obsessing about the facts of his account. Rather, Gonzales, as the spokesman for the White House, wanted us all to understand that, notwithstanding the considerable effort that was put into “reviewing” and then replacing US attorneys around the country, the US attorneys are, in fact, irrelevant.

    Utah’s Sen. Orrin Hatch had apparently been clued in on the talking points. From time to time, he would lob questions to the attorney general along the lines of “Do the US attorneys actually handle the public corruption cases themselves?” The well-coached and grateful Gonzales would then explain that, no, the work in the US attorneys’ offices is done by the career prosecutors, who will keep doing their cases no matter who the US attorney is. Indeed, Gonzales offered plaintively, the Office of the Attorney General didn’t really even know “that much” about what was going on in the US attorneys’ offices.

    As one who worked as an assistant US attorney from 1983 through 2004 – in two districts, under four presidents and roughly ten different US attorneys – I can say that virtually every clause, and certainly the overall implication, of Gonzales’s claim is false.

    It is not true, for starters, that the AG’s Office does not know “that much” about what is going on in individual districts. US attorneys’ offices have traditionally had to submit to Washington a frustratingly large number of reports, but the Bush administration has tripled those requirements, mandating weekly, monthly, yearly and sometimes even daily reports about every conceivable category of prosecution. Assistant US attorneys must now obtain prior approval from DOJ for indictments, plea agreements and sentencing recommendations in an unprecedented variety of cases. In some instances – the cases that arose out of the pre-Christmas 2006 mass arrests of illegal aliens, for example – the Bush administration Justice Department simply mandates exactly what the charges, plea agreement and sentence must be.

    Then there’s the “Urgent Report” system instituted at DOJ in recent years. Section T3-18.200 of the US Attorney’s Manual requires US attorneys’ offices to send immediate reports to the highest levels of the Attorney General’s Office whenever there are “major developments” – defined to include even procedural motions – in “important cases,” which include any cases that present a “high likelihood of coverage in news media, or Congressional interest.”

    For cases involving public figures, the US Attorney’s Manual requires that “appropriate officials, including the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, the associate attorney general, the deputy attorney general and the attorney general” be advised of the initiation of any case “in which public figures or entities are subjects of the investigation.” Bottom line? The attorney general is notified immediately, not just when charges are brought in a public corruption case, but when the file is opened and every time that any activity, even procedural, occurs in the case. It was precisely such an Urgent Report that former San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam used to notify the Attorney General’s Office on May 10, 2006 that search warrants were going to be conducted in the Randy “Duke” Cunningham case. The next day, of course, was when Alberto Gonzales’s top aide wrote an email talking about the “very real problem we have right now” with Carol Lam.

    It is equally untrue that the replacement of a US attorney could have no effect on public corruption cases because those will continue under the steady hand of career prosecutors. Before an assistant US attorney can issue even a single subpoena in a case, he or she has to fill out a “green sheet” – a case initiation form that is actually white – in order to cause a file to be opened. Given that opening a file in a public corruption case triggers the “Urgent Report” requirement, and knowing that the Bush administration has apparently removed its own Republican appointees for investigating Republicans, anyone with a brain and a mortgage would think twice – heck, even three times – before filling in the blanks on that theretofore innocuous form.

    Even if the intrepid career prosecutor completes the case initiation paperwork, a US attorney who is either fearful of – or beholden to – the Bush administration, rather than to the laws and Constitution of the United States, can simply fail, for no particular reason, to sign off on the form. Without leaving a single shred of evidence, in other words, the US attorney can stop a controversial investigation before it has even begun. At almost any stage, the ways to stymie, or even completely kill off, a prosecution are unlimited. Here are a few: Give the assistant US attorney a slough of additional cases that require immediate action because the defendants are in custody; insist that the FBI agents on the case be reassigned to an investigation the US attorney claims is more pressing; make unreasonable and never-ending demands about investigative leads that have to be pursued before the proof is considered sufficient; deprive the assistant US attorney of all prosecutorial discre tion or – and this is an extremely creative one – promote him to a supervisory position so he has no time to work on the case.

    It is not just public corruption cases that are negatively impacted by the Bush administration’s promotion of loyalty to the president and to individual US attorneys as the highest values in the Department of Justice at the expense of integrity and the prudent exercise of independent judgment on the part of its lawyers. This distorted ethos affects all of the cases, because what happens to career prosecutors under such circumstances? They leave. Indeed, that is precisely what happened in the Northern District of California. There, the US attorney, Kevin Ryan, was decidedly a “company man” who, like those in the inner circle of the Bush administration’s Department of Justice, equated dissent with disloyalty. During Ryan’s four-year tenure, 50 of the office’s 100 lawyers – including myself – left, taking with them a total of approximately 500 years of experience. In the end, because of the intervention of the district’s chief judge, Ryan himself was asked to resign, but the office will take a very long time to recover.

    So no one should be fooled by the White House’s current attempt, through Gonzales’s Congressional testimony, to suggest that its unprecedented firing of US attorneys for partisan political reasons was a trifling matter with no real consequences. No one should be fooled by their current attempt to save themselves from drowning by suddenly grabbing onto the very career prosecutors they’ve been throwing overboard in droves during the past six years.

    Most important, however, no one should be fooled into thinking that shoving Alberto Gonzales into the drink will get the Department of Justice back on course. The Department of Justice, like the Department of Defense, the Department of State and every other agency of the federal government, has lost its way because of the motley crew that is commanding the entire fleet: Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, in no particular order.

    Congress, please maintain your watch regardless of the fate of Alberto Gonzales.

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Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor with over 20 years’ experience, was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. A regular contributor to Tomdispatch as well as the author of “United States v. George W. Bush et al.,” she will be appearing in the Boston area and Seattle in the coming months. (see schedule at www.sevenstories.com) Ms. de la Vega may be contacted at Elizabethdelavega@Verizon.net.

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Source: The Problem With Alberto

The American Tragedy of John McCain
    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist

    Friday 06 April 2007

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

- T.S. Eliot

    Arizona Sen. John McCain took a walk through a Baghdad market on April Fool’s Day, and may well have burned his presidential campaign down to the ground in the process. That little stroll has visited upon his head a deluge of humiliation and shame vast and astonishing enough to beggar imagination, and that was before the bodies started hitting the ground.

    Translated into mathematical terms, McCain’s walk was Pythagorean in scope, squared hypocrisy added to squared idiocy equaling squared disgrace. In political terms, McCain’s Baghdad walk was a full-blown, bull-moose, train-wreck disaster of truly galactic proportions: a veritable Hindenberg of campaign photo-op debacles. It was so mind-bendingly ugly and deranged and disgusting that the once-iconic “Dukakis in the Tank” blunder now seems quaint by comparison.

    The genesis of this catastrophe, in case you missed it, was a verbal gaffe by McCain during a widely broadcast interview last week. After enduring several minutes of sharp interrogation regarding his staunch support of Bush, the war and the “surge,” a neuron within his logic circuits apparently misfired. He claimed, with an entirely straight face, that the streets of Baghdad are today entirely safe for an American to walk down. This whopper made even the most shamelessly craven war apologists shake their heads in public, and forced McCain to undertake a desperate face-saving lunge to recover some shred of credibility.

    McCain traveled to Baghdad to prove his claim correct, and the pictures appeared shortly thereafter. In the first available frames, the senator was shown walking through a Baghdad marketplace wearing a Kevlar vest, a general on his right and a troop on his left, and a second troop three steps ahead brandishing his rifle. While this kind of protection detail seemed to undermine his claims of safety, the escort and the vest could easily be understood as normal and necessary precautions taken to protect a visiting dignitary. For a time, McCain appeared to have made his point.

    It didn’t last. On the heels of those narrow-scope photos came reports of what McCain’s entourage was actually comprised of. That “safe” Baghdad market had been flooded with more than one hundred battle-ready troops and armored Humvees. Three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache attack helicopters roared overhead, and sharpshooters were posted on the surrounding rooftops. Simply put, McCain’s “safe” street was one overly loud mouse-fart away from being paved with flaming lead during every step of that little walk.

    To compound the calamity, a report emerged two days later describing the abduction and slaughter of 21 Iraqis who worked in the marketplace McCain’s mini-Normandy force had stormed the previous Sunday, an obvious act of retribution for his visit by a violent Baghdad militia. Already belied by the revealed firepower he brought along, McCain’s “safe” walk in Iraq led directly to yet another horrific Baghdad bloodbath. There is bad, there is awful, and then there is this thing, this quantum singularity of ignominy that bends the very light now shining upon it.

    Call it farce, call it folly, condemn it for its drenching hypocrisy and the mortal consequences suffered by 21 innocent people. One must also see this, in the end, as a true American tragedy of historic proportions.

    Once upon a time, John McCain was a man who commanded and deserved great respect. Beyond the awe-inspiring courage and strength that marked his Vietnam service was the integrity he displayed, for the most part, in his political life. While his conservative views did not jibe with many, there was something about his conduct in office, his independence of thought within the rigid confines of his party, that made Americans stand up and take notice. Even the scandals involving him, most notably the embarrassing Keating Five debacle, did not permanently tarnish his image.

    This was the man, recall, who came within an eyelash of derailing the George W. Bush Express during the 2000 race, thrashing the Texas governor by 16 points in the New Hampshire primary. A great many people who knew even then that Bush wasn’t up for the job he sought breathed a huge sigh of relief after that, because even in disagreement, they saw in McCain a man of honor whose politics did not matter as much as the apparent content of his character.

    The roots of this tragedy can be found in the events which took place in the days following the 2000 New Hampshire primary, when all eyes turned to the contest in South Carolina. Bush had all the GOP money and endorsements, but McCain had suddenly made a hash of that seemingly foregone anointment. What followed stands as one of the ugliest chapters in modern American political history.

    Bush’s people deployed a whisper campaign against McCain, mostly within the Christian Evangelical community of South Carolina, that labeled the senator “the fag candidate,” smeared his wife Cindy as a drug addict, claimed their adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually black and the issue of an illicit and interracial liaison, questioned whether his sanity had survived his POW experience, and even went so far as to accuse him of collaborating with the communists in Vietnam to ease his time in that prison. Bush wound up winning the primary by 11 points, and the McCain campaign never recovered.

    McCain’s simmering rage over what happened in South Carolina was manifestly evident; for many political moons thereafter, the senator could not be compelled even at gunpoint to speak a kind word about either Bush or the Evangelical shock-troops who had propelled that slander-fest against him and his wife. Bush, for his part, treated McCain like a puff adder at all times, avoiding even the possibility of a venomous counterstrike from his furious former opponent by keeping him at a distance.

    And then, something happened. It started slowly, with McCain appearing to set aside his anger to defend Bush as the 2004 presidential contest approached. McCain became a Bush campaign staple, and worse, was the respected face and voice who came to defend the administration whenever they made another incredible mess. It was McCain, perhaps more than any other political figure, who helped Bush hold on to the centrists long enough to make it through that second election. The senator’s reputation and good word, for many, were enough to convince folks to wait and see.

    Over the last year or so, that reputation and good word have fallen to dust. John McCain has expended vast energies trying to staple himself to every Evangelical Christian leader with clout in the Republican Party. He has become the most unabashed supporter of the Iraq war, of each failed and foolish policy put forth in the occupation, a process that culminated in the horrorshow at that Baghdad marketplace on April Fool’s Day. He now wears the blinders needed to believe there is hope in Iraq, and there are 21 new bodies in a marketplace over there to prove it.

    McCain has embraced George W. Bush, literally and figuratively, as some sort of long-lost brother. In doing this, he betrayed not only the individualism that once defined him, but gave the American people a demonstration of how insipid politics without principle can truly be. The very people who so viciously attacked McCain and his family in 2000 are now, apparently, his best friends in the world. One wonders if the senator avoids facing himself in the mirror nowadays because he does not want to see the whore’s face in the reflection.

    Even those who disagree with his politics must admit, with hard-won hindsight, that McCain circa 2000 would have been far preferable to George W. Bush. If more Republicans in our government today were like McCain was then, we would all be in a far better place. That distinction has been erased, and John McCain has become just another GOP lickspittle who toes the bloody line and refuses to admit, despite all evidence, that his new best friends have failed us all. This is, simply put, a tragedy for him.

    It is our American tragedy, as well, because McCain became this sad fraud out of absolute necessity. One cannot hope to gain the GOP nomination for president without winning over that party’s hard-right absolutist Evangelical Christian base, and the opinions almost universally espoused by that base are a lot of the reason this nation is in such dire straits. Our tragedy is found in their power over any national Republican candidate, and over the administration currently running the republic into the ground.

    John McCain’s reputation is destroyed. He has become one of T.S. Eliot’s hollow men, bereft by his own actions of the formidable image that once defined him, and is now just another cheaply-bought candidate peddling himself for pennies on the dollar to the very wretches who once savaged his character and family. He is gone, just completely gone.

    Another poet, Yeats, once described a world where the best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate intensity. McCain has become the essence of that listless best and striving worst, and the transformation is a lesson for us all about just how much selfdom must be sacrificed upon the altar of GOP politics to win an election. McCain has proven himself unfit to be president, and perhaps worse, he has shown us all how cheaply integrity dies when power is close at hand.

Source: The American Tragedy of John McCain