Obama Accessorizes

The other bullshit thing that happened on Obama's watch this last week is actually more fundamentally wrong than botching up the stimulus—Obama's DoJ argued before a Federal Judge that Bush's "State Secrets" defense in a rendition case be upheld.

Glenn Greenwald poured out a 13,000-word column I just couldn't find the front door to. And with Greenwald, he's been known to get a little shrill and idealistic on some things...But today I found a great, concise, and brutal assessment of what just happened...

You Cover It Up, You Own It
That's assuming the secret should rightfully be kept in the first place. Nobody doubts that there are legitimate state secrets -- but the Bushies, and now apparently the Obama/Holder DOJ, thought that anything that makes the U.S. government look bad should be a state secret. The theory is that disclosing government crime or misconduct would embarrass the government in the eyes of the world, and whatever embarrasses the government in the eyes of the world harms national security. This misbegotten theory holds that sunlight isn't the best disinfectant, it's the source of hideous wasting disease. Government wrongdoing must be concealed because, well, it's government wrongdoing.

The state secrets privilege, used to cover up wrongdoing rather than to protect legitimate national security secrets, is an all-out assault on public accountability and, ultimately, on democracy. By now, it's well-known that the state secrets privilege was born in original sin. The 1953 case in which the Supreme Court established it, United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953), turned out, when documents were declassified nearly half a century later, to be a cover-up of gross negligence under a false assertion that the documents contained national security information.

Andrew Sullivan is right to observe here that "with each decision to cover for their predecessors, the Obamaites become retroactively complicit in [their deeds]." Retroactive complicity is an important, and underexamined, moral category. People cover up for others for many reasons, not all of them bad. But the longer and more involved the cover-up becomes, the more deeply implicated you get -- not only in the cover-up, but in the original misdeeds that you're concealing as well. Little by little, you come to own the deeds yourself. Or they own you. It's time to throw away the Ring, Frodo, before it hooks you and enslaves you.

I have to hope that this is just a punt on the first case so the Administration can reassess going forward. After all, that column is from Marty Lederman's old blog, Balkinization. LEderman is a longtime outspoken critic of pretty much everything about the Bush Administration—from torture to executive privilege, and one would assume, bullshit "State Secrets" claims. Marty Lederman is not teaching law or blogging anymore because he now sits at John Woo's old desk working for Obama' Office of Legal Council.

Tim F [h/t] at Balloon Juice put it thusly:

Marty Lederman must be shitting a two story colonial townhouse right now. I have to assume that Lederman and other principled hires at the DoJ will either ensure that decisions like this do not happen again or else he will resign.

Let's hope so. There is 8 years of crooked bullshit to dig through, and I'm not asking for everything to be back in order in four weeks, but this was indeed a disappointing decision, and warrants keeping an eye on.

Venn-detta

Slate.com has a chart that illustrates the different people involved in the Bush Administrations scandals crimes. It's more clever and cute than actually revealing or engrossing, but it does point out the common thread in all of them—Alberto Gonzalez.

It does, however, omit the one circle I would lay across the whole diagram...the complicity of the Democratic Congress.

I Might Be Moving, But I Haven't Packed My Shitlist Yet

Tomorrow seems to be the day when Steny Hoyer and the House Democrats sell-out on Telcom Immunity in a "compromise bill" that actually gives the President everything he asked for.

Livid doesn't begin to describe me.

Steny Hoyer and any Democrat that supports this is fucking dead to me. Done. I will will join the thousands of bloggers/online people who have already poured $225,000 to fund challengers for Hoyer and the rest of these motherfuckers.

Soon-to-be-President Obama, it is time to lead your party. You have long held the right position on this, but that ain't good enough. As the party's Presidential nominee, you have the power to impact this.

Now.

Do it.

Not simply a vote "NO" next week when this is in the Senate, but a forceful fucking stand. These cowardly fucks need the Lieberman treatment—let them all know that you—and the rest of us—are paying attention. Remind them that Hillary Clinton's War Vote bit her in the ass five years down the road.

Prove to me that you are actually CHANGE I CAN BELIEVE IN.

[As usual Greenwald has the ugly details]

Too Pissed For a Clever Headline

The FISA Court and statute is no longer the exclusive governing authority for how surveillance can be conducted in America. It’s wide fucking open now.

Oh, and telecoms get immunity.

Fucked over retroactively and going forward. Nice job Reid and the rest of you fucking clowns.

And a special “Fuck You!” to Hillary for making sure she got a 21-day jump on building her Texas sandbag wall and skipping the vote altogether.

Also, Debbie Stabenow is now twelve feet down she is so fucking dead to me.

Much more on this to come. Trust me.

Executive Privilege = Anything Embarrassing

Seriously, is there anything the Bush Administration won't try to conceal behind claims of "Executive Privilege?" ANYTHING?

White House, Pentagon cite executive privilege to hold up documents on friendly fire victim Tillman

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) revealed on Friday afternoon that the White House and Pentagon were holding up a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigation into the friendly fire death of former professional football player and Army Corporal Patrick Tillman.

"[T]he Committee wrote to White House Counsel Fred Fielding seeking 'all documents received or generated by any official in the Executive Office of the President' relating to Corporal Tillman's death," noted a press release from the Committee.

But the White House has apparently again invoked its executive privilege to hold up the documents sought by Waxman and Ranking Minority member Tom Davis (R-VA).

"The White House Counsel's office responded that it would not provide the Committee with documents that 'implicate Executive Branch confidentiality interests' and produced only two communications with the officials in the Defense Department, one of which was a package of news clippings," the Committe noted. "The response of the Defense Department to the Committee's inquiry was also deficient."

In their letter to Fielding, Waxman and Davis doubted that the two documents were the limits of White House-Pentagon communication over Tillman's death.

I cannot imagine what possible legitimate claim to privilege they have here. Bush, Cheney and Fielding seem to think that "Executive Privilege" is for anything that might prove embarrassing or compromising to them. As far as I understand it, it can't be used to cover up illegal activity or abused to conceal innappropriate activity. There is no other explanation for this claim about Tillman—what possible communication could they be hiding other than a White House-directed campaign to mislead the public and use his death to their political advantage?

This is perhaps the clearest, most textbook case ever of "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" turned on it's head. There was no communication necessary except for doing something wrong and then covering it up.

UPDATE: Steve Benen has a nice recap on the Tillman story if you need refreshing. Mark Mleiman and Emptywheel agree that this is a good place for Dems to put up a fight. This case has the capability of holding the attention of the media and casual observers far better than more intricate or obscure Bush scandals.