And The Hits Just Keep On Coming...

by hilzoy

Murray Waas, via TPM:

"Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.

Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.

It is unclear whether the president knew at the time of his decision that the Justice inquiry -- to be conducted by the department's internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility -- would almost certainly examine the conduct of his attorney general. (...)

Current and former Justice Department officials, as well as experts in legal ethics, question the propriety of Gonzales's continuing to advise Bush about the investigation after learning that it might examine his own actions. The attorney general, they say, was remiss if he did not disclose that information to the president. But if Gonzales did inform Bush about the possibility and the president responded by stymieing the probe, that would raise even more-serious questions as to whether Bush acted to protect Gonzales, they said."

In a sane world, Alberto Gonzales would never have been confirmed as Attorney General, and if, by some fluke, he had been, he would have resigned by now. We do not live in a sane world. But it remains to be seen just how insane Bush is prepared to be.

The Department of Justice needs to have an Attorney General who is respected and trusted, or at least not a laughing-stock, in order to function well. It needs Congress to fund its operations, but it will have a very hard time convincing Congress to accept its priorities if Congress doesn't believe a word its officials say. It is greatly helped by not being distracted by endless investigations, to which it now seems certain to be (rightly) subjected. Basically, at all the points at which a Department, or a law enforcement agency, needs to rely on its word, the DoJ will have to deal with having an Attorney General whose words are not worth the breath it takes to form them, and whose commitment to the law is negligible, if it exists at all.

And that's leaving aside all the questions about his competence as a manager.

There comes a point at which someone is too badly damaged to continue to function. Alberto Gonzales has reached that point and left it in the dust. George W. Bush doesn't seem to recognize such points when they're reached, or to care about them. It would be a shame if the Department of Justice had to pay for his blindness.

Comments

[john miller]

"The Department of Justice needs to have an Attorney General who is respected and trusted, or at least not a laughing-stock, in order to function well."

Change Department of Justice to United States and Attorney General to President and the sentence still remains true and relevant.

[cleek]

heckofa job, Alberto

[Minor Ripper]

Quite frankly I've found this Dept. of Justice firings business very complicated, and a bit boring. Thankfully, Jon Stewart explains it to me in this video:
http://minor-ripper.blogspot.com/2007/03/jon-stewart-explains-department-of.html

[theCoach]

"There comes a point at which someone is too badly damaged to continue to function."

This is much more true of GWBush and DCheney than Gonzalez.

[theCoach]

and John's sentence above is more ture as well.

[Brett Bellmore]

"There comes a point at which someone is too badly damaged to continue to function. Alberto Gonzales has reached that point and left it in the dust."

And yet, he certainly looks like he's still functioning. You're just suffering from the same incomprehension I felt over a decade ago, when Janet Reno claimed creditaccepted responsiblity for the hideous flaming deaths of tens of men, women, and children, and then... didn't lose her job.

Eventually you'll figure it out: Outraging members of the other party doesn't threaten an AG's job security. You've got to outrage members of the President's party to be at risk.

[Ugh]

You've got to outrage members of the President's party to be at risk.

And he's well on his way.

[trilobite]

Brett, that upset me too, at the time. I later learned that Reno went on to direct a pretty exhaustive investigation which concluded that, although people from Freeh on down had made mistakes, fault for the deaths primarily lay with the Davidians (The details are long since forgotten, I regret to say). So I think she was saying that she took responsibility for whatever it was that the FBI turned out to have done, not that she took responsibility for the outcome irrespective of who turned out to be at fault. It was clumsy phrasing, at best, but saying in advance of investigation that the FBI was at fault would have made no sense, so it was plain enough what she meant.

[cleek]

more hits!: people in the White House using "outside" (non govt) email addresses for govt business? best idea evah!

[cleek]

more info, new emails are out that put Gonzalez and Rove back into the mix - back when Gonzalez was still White House Counsel. (via Atrios, duh)

[Nell]

So many shoes dropping, it must be a centipede gettin' undressed...

An "overblown personnel matter." Yep. {pops cold one, takes sip.} Yep.

[Jay B.]

And yet, he certainly looks like he's still functioning

Uh, no he doesn't. He looks like he's getting hammered and rightfully so. And not only does his reign look amazingly close to ending, his earlier lies on the matter might have dire implications for Rove too. Which is a neat trick.

Nice try on the "but Clinton did it too" argument, however.

[KCinDC]

Well, I'd say we'll need champagne at Drinking Liberally tonight, but we've thought that so many times before. So just my regular Newcastle.

[cleek]

my regular Newcastle

i'm gonna fight it out with a mixed-12 of Magic Hat... after i finish this Warsteiner.

[Carl Gordon]

What tomfoolery are they up to now? I don’t mean to engage in paradiddle, or to make light of the encroaching darkness, but as I haven’t heard anything in the form of strong language coming from the drooling crippled gobs of the once mighty now impotent Congress in the immediate interim, it certainly makes me nervous and jacks the angst-o-meter past the red and into the black. People aren’t treating other people very nice around here, hitting things with other things, a groundswell of grumbled withering remarks as to a persons true proclivities, misinterpreted intentions, callous self-serving nepotism, and the throwing of good brickbats after bad – there’s bile a-rising and it’s all too much for me to even kid myself about accepting let alone use as a point of action.

I don’t know but I’ll throw my beret into this Congress’s attempts at impartiality against the charging yak of Neo-con degradation if it gives me only a few cherished seconds of opaque meaning to what is becoming a miserable trudge in my journey to find some plateau of relief from all this mentally painful incompetence. Come back Sheba and the good Doctor Feelgood, all is forgiven, although no trespasses were filed against you on my behalf. We’ll empty flagon after flagon of high alcohol content ale and curse the moon until the inevitable shoe comes whizzing by. It’s scary standing on the edge contemplating the void, but it’s even more of a vacuous gaping maw when you observe the daily pratfalls and missed synapses at Casa de Bushbrain, which is in full stoopid bloom now that Georgie the younger is ensconced there like a suppository. I am in extreme optic discomfort from too much eye rolling. DICK is the brains of the outfit if that gives you a clue.

[Nell]

Carl, the high-alcohol-content ale seems to have done its work.

[Brett Bellmore]

Tril, that old "Feds investigate Feds' actions, and find that Feds didn't do anything wrong." bit is a bit tired. The Davidians would still be turning decomissioned grenades into "Compaint department, take a number" novelties to sell at flea markets, if the feds had left them alone; It's ALL the feds' fault.

All the feds had to do to end it peacefully was agree to the Davidians' demand that the press get to come in and photographically document things in the compound before the Feds had a chance to destroy and recreate the evidence the way they tried to at Ruby Ridge. It doesn't take a genius to guess why that demand was unacceptable.

[kvenlander]

How about some facts about Waco and Reno? What about the following dates:

Feb 28, 1993: FBI and ATF raid the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX.

March 11, 1993: Janet Reno confirmed as AG.

Brett, can you explain how exactly Janet Reno is culpable in that tragedy? Did she travel back in time to give orders to the FBI?

[Brett Bellmore]

Janet Reno is not, and I would dispute this with anybody, responsible for the intitial raid. That can be laid at the elder Bush's feet, he's the one who took a BATF Reagan had put on a tight leash, slipped the leash, told them to "sic 'em, boy!" He's the one who took federal agents responsible for Ruby Ridge, and promoted them, sending an unmistakable message.

OTOH, "tens of men, women, and children" did not meet with a hideous flaming death on Feb 28th, and when Reno claimed to be responsible, she was not talking about the original raid, she was talking about the catastrophic end to the subsequent standoff, which damned well did take place under her watch, and at her orders.

Clear?

[cleek]

The Davidians would still be turning decomissioned grenades into "Compaint department, take a number" novelties to sell at flea markets

and to let Koresh and his lieutenants have sex with as many young girls as they could get their hands on. and to murder those members who questioned Koresh's divinity. and to teach six year old how to use weapons so that they could fight the upcoming battle at the end of the word. yes, that poor, innocent, child-molesting, doomsday-cult that had been 'training' to fight exactly the kind of battle they ended up losing.

[Brett Bellmore]

Come on, Cleek, which of those charges did the government prove in a court of law, before a jury?

You libs can be so gullible when it comes to trash talk about people you're inclined not to like. The government traps some people behind a wall of soldiers, cuts their phone lines, jams the airwaves so they can't use ham radio to speak, and even moves the press out of line of sight once the Davidians start hanging banners from their tower, spends a couple of months demonizing them, and then kills most of them.

And you believe every word the government had to say about them. Just like you believe everything else the government says about people it makes sure are not in a position to contradict it.

[Hartmut]

If unproven in the legal sense (which I do not know, I thought survivors testified about that) it is at least quite plausible. There are more than enough examples of this type of behaviour.
Clarification: This is no statement concerning the veracity or lack thereof of officials during the Clinton administration and should no be construed as such.

[CaseyL]

Brett - It sounds like the government hated those guys somethin awful, doesn't it? Now, why would that be; why would Bush I and then Clinton hate the Branch Davidians so much?

[Brett Bellmore]

This much seems to have gotten past the efforts to cover things up:

1. The BATF was going into budget hearings in a very bad light, given the revelations concerning BATF official participation in the racist "Good ol boys roundup".

2. They needed some spectacular good publicity.

3. The Davidians were highly unsympathetic potential fall guys.

So, the BATF plans and executes a raid on them, with cameras rolling, timed so that the footage of heroic BATF agents going after a lunatic armed cult would be available by the time of the hearings, but the resultant trial, which given past records might very well have been a debacle, would have taken place AFTER said hearings.

Only, for a mix of reasons which leave nobody on either side covered in glory, things go horribly wrong, and the BATF is now confronted with a standoff sitution which threatens to make their "nigger hunting license" stand at the Roundup look like good publicity.

So they get rid of the film of the raid, and, belatedly realizing that the situation is beyond their competence, call in the FBI. But feed the FBI a BS explaination of what's going on, because the FBI has no reason to save the BATF's bacon from the fire.

Meanwhile, the Davidians, well aware of how the FBI falsified evidence at Ruby Ridge, and that Weaver only got off because press photos proved it, make one non-negociable demand: That the "crime scene" be photographed by a third party before they surrender, and that they get to surrender in front of running cameras, so they don't get gunned down by Lon Horiuchi. Who, BTW, was indeed there at Waco with his trusty sniper rifle.

Unfortunately, the guys in charge of the FBI's side of the standoff were part of that Ruby Ridge mess, too, and are absolutely determined that there WON'T be any press photos to screw things up this time.

And on things go, with the Davidians getting nuttier as time goes by, because of the FBI's psych warfare sleep denial strategy. And now the FBI are stuck as part of the coverup, because they've gotten too dirty themselves to let the truth out.

Finally, (And this I know because I was invited.) milita groups plan a rescue, and start assembling a few miles from the compound, with a plan to go in with empty hands and cameras rolling, daring the feds to gun down peaceful people on live TV. And so the FBI "resolves" the situation in a hurry before this happens, in such a way as to destroy any inconvenient evidence of what they've been up to while the press were barred.

No, they didn't "hate" the Davidians. They just didn't care if they lived or died.

[cleek]

Just like you believe everything else the government says about people it makes sure are not in a position to contradict it.

interesting ability you have there, Brett. tell me, what am i thinking now ?

[Brett Bellmore]

Oops, forgot to close the html.

[/sarcasm]

There, that better?

[Jeff]

Let's review, shall we?

Janet Reno: Might (evidence is shaky at best) have excerbated a bad situation in which some people were killed, largely due to the illegal actions of their leader.

Alberto Gonzales: Aided and abetted the torture of unknown innocents by the US government and, by extraordinary rendition, it's "allies". Violated the Constitution by engaging in illegal wiretaps, illegal surveilance of ordinary Americans, illegal firings of US Attornies based on loyalty to the President.

milita groups plan a rescue

Good lord, do you really expect us to believe that a bunch of Minutemen / Timothy McVeigh types (oh, not tho militia groups, ours iz different!) would get involved, and we'd expect a better outcome?

[J Thomas]

Good lord, do you really expect us to believe that a bunch of Minutemen / Timothy McVeigh types (oh, not tho militia groups, ours iz different!) would get involved, and we'd expect a better outcome?

Maybe, if they were unarmed.

Witnesses help the truth come out. That isn't bad for anyone except people who're doing unpopular things.

Witnesses can turn into hostages. That's bad for the witnesses, but if they volunteer then who should complain?

I often disagree almost totally with Brett Bellmore, but he makes some very good points this time.

Sleep deprivation is probably not a good negotiating tool if you're trying to keep your negotiating partner from doing something stupid.

It makes sense to cut their private communication (in case they have outside conspirators who would interfere) but it doesn't help much to cut their public communication. Suppose for example that they made a plea to the media and the public started to get on their side. That would encourage them, but it would also make them feel safer to surrender. If nobody gets killed and they can argue it out in court with the public on their side, they're better off than they are in a standoff. The rule is you don't get to defy the police etc, but you do get your day in court. It's a good rule when the police etc follow the rules themselves. Successful surrenders are good for everybody.

And Brett is right that our government agencies put looking good ahead of getting good results. Ideally we'd like to work things out so the two are highly correlated....

[Phil]

You libs can be so gullible when it comes to trash talk about people you're inclined not to like.

Project much?

[Brett Bellmore]

"largely due to the illegal actions of their leader."

Pray elucidate. 'Cause I'm not aware that the feds ever managed to prove that Koresh had done anything illegal, although they sure as hell made a lot of allegations.

You are a perfect example of the danger of letting the government talk trash about people, while holding them incomunicado. After a few months of that, the government can demonize folks to the point where they can be burned to death, and the average idiot will think they had it coming.

You are also a perfect example of Twain's remark about the problem not being what people don't know, but instead what they know that isn't so. Your ignorance of both the militia movement, and what happened at Waco, could actually be reduced by suffering memory loss...

[CharleyCarp]

Brett, I don't think it's as simple as your version either. The Davidians also had evidence to burn, and burn it they did. They could have let all of the children, and whichever women were not wanted on charges, leave the compound at any time during the stand-off. Once the thing became public, there was no danger of mass assassination, only paranoid delusion by people with persecution complexes.

I'm not saying that the government handled itself well. Blame for the awful end of the thing though can be very nearly completely laid to Koresh.

[CharleyCarp]

And Brett, the assertion that nothing was proved against Koresh in a court of law is pure trollery: we don't prosecute dead people.

[CharleyCarp]

And if we did prosecure dead people, are you suggesting that burning people to death is not a crime? I don't think it's stupid faith in government to believe that the fires were deliberately set by the Davidians.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think it's stupid fath in government to uncritically believe everything the government said about somebody who dies in a government action, and didn't prove in court. Especially given how much they claimed about them, and had rejected in court when they tried the handful of survivors.

There's a principle in law that if you commit a crime, and somebody dies as a result of it, even at somebody else's hands, you're guilty of that death.

When the government stages a paramilitary raid over a potential tax offense, having refused an offer to drop by and conduct a peaceful search, and the end result is a bunch of deaths, I pin it on the government. The feds could have ended that standoff peacefully at any time, if they had been willing to accede to the Davidians' perfectly reasonable (In light of Ruby Ridge revelations.) demand for third party photographs of the evidence.

Evidence, let's not forget, which DID go missing after the feds took control of the scene from the Texas Rangers. So the Davidians weren't being the slightest bit paranoid in their suspicions. The feds DID destroy evidence that the Texas Rangers said was present when they turned the place over to FBI custody.

[Ugh]

There's a principle in law that if you commit a crime, and somebody dies as a result of it, even at somebody else's hands, you're guilty of that death.

Felony-murder (it's kind of ridiculous).

[Ugh]

Ah, it turns out this whole thing is just an attempted coup at the DOJ engineered by Paul McNulty. From (the even more aptly nick-named) Bizarro World.

[cleek]

is just an attempted coup at the DOJ

wow. they're like the National Enquirer of political reporting.

[Ugh]

wow. they're like the National Enquirer of political reporting.

They're just unpaid (for the most part) propagandists for the President. If it makes them look like the National Enquirer, so be it.

[lightning]

Coupla things on the Davidians:

• Koresh was accused of all sorts of nasty things. According to the local sheriff, there wasn't enough evidence to convict him of anything at all.


• Janet Reno "took responsibility" for the results. "Taking responsibility" seems to mean "I'm not going to investigate this further."


• Larry Potts, the Good Buddy of FBI director Louis Freeh, was in charge of both Waco and Ruby Ridge. He is also flamingly incompetent. (At Waco, he "threw away the book" for dealing with religious loons.)


• The FBI accused Koresh of running a drug lab, which they knew to be false


• The Davidian survivors are in prison for the next 40 years or so for a crime that, stripped of the legalese, translates as "conspiracy to commit self-defense". (And one count of having a hand grenade.)

Everybody screwed up in this one. I definately think that Reno should have at least offered her registration. (Being tried for felony murder would have been good, but not in the cards. Again, what does "taking responsibility" mean?)

[Phil]

You are a perfect example of the danger of letting the government talk trash about people, while holding them incomunicado. After a few months of that, the government can demonize folks to the point where they can be burned to death, and the average idiot will think they had it coming.

The extrapolation to Guantanamo Bay is left as an exercise for the reader.

[cleek]

back to the USAs, John Cole makes a point I don't think I've seen explicitly made anywhere else: the whole idea of "Loyal Bushies" vs. those who get a strikeout makes it look like all of the USAs are political hacks. it puts their ability to fairly prosecute cases into serious question - you have to assume they're always acting in the interests of President Bush, not necessarily of justice or the law.

[Bruce Baugh]

For what it's worth, at the time of the Waco calamity, one of my regular BBS correspondents was a guy who'd help develop training programs in hostage-taking responses, both civilian and military. His view was that the whole situation had been politicized from the start, and that a federal investigation serious about good procedure would have taken Koresh in for questioning on one of his many visits to the town. Looking back, it's worth noting how many of the tactics used against prisoners in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc., were also used against the Branch Davidians: the constant noise, the heavy militarization of threats, the isolation...pretty much all things you wouldn't want to do if you were serious about calming people down and getting a safe, calm, successful resolution to the conflict.

Of course, Janet Reno's whole career is pretty much a moral disaster area, starting with prosecuting "Satanic child abuse" cases and moving on from there. I've always felt that her continued presence was a serious blot on the Clinton administration's moral slate.

[Bruce Baugh]

Very true, Cleek. Digby (or someone at Hullaboo) touched on the same point: given this kind of loyalty testing, we have to watch for active bias in all the ones who weren't fired.

[John Thullen]

I think Janet Reno should have done what Bush 41 did -- leave Koresh alone for the eight years of the Clinton Presidency and drop it in Bush 43's lap.

By now, Koresh would have numerous contracts to rebuild Iraq and would have recently replaced one of the 93 Federal prosecutors as a reward for loyalty. Need we mention his contracts with HHS to look after the religious instruction of young girls and their mums?

Plus he'd be a contributing editor at Red State, that community of vipers, and competing with Erick Erickson for chief spinner of paranoid fantasies regarding nefarious Democrat coups (especially the ones featuring only Republicans)

My faith in government hangs by a slender thread, one the Republican Party keeps hacking at. When it breaks, there will be no government. Then we get to play a game.

[Brett Bellmore]

"The extrapolation to Guantanamo Bay is left as an exercise for the reader."

Indeed. As I've pointed out to some friends, if the government hold non-citizens without a trial, they can hold citizens, just by claiming they're not citizens. And when would they ever get the opportunity to prove otherwise?

Just amazes me that liberals get upset over Guantanamo, and swallow the koolaid with gusto when it comes to Waco.

[J Thomas]

The Davidians also had evidence to burn, and burn it they did. They could have let all of the children, and whichever women were not wanted on charges, leave the compound at any time during the stand-off. Once the thing became public, there was no danger of mass assassination, only paranoid delusion by people with persecution complexes.

I'm real real unclear what you mean here. Are you saying that if the wackos gave up their women and children as hostages, that there was no danger of mass assassination after that? Why would the authorities have been *less* likely to kill them all after there were no officially-innocent civilians mixed among the insurgents?

About Brett's question about paying attentino to Guantanamo and ignoring Waco, I thought there was something wrong about Waco and I didn't see much credible information about what happened. And it was over. I was ready to hope the FBI etc had learned from the experience and wouldn't mess up as badly next time.

With Guantanamo they didn't have the excuse of getting shot at. They had prisoners with no legal rights and they intentionally mistreated them. How many prisoners committed suicide? Was it 5%? 10%? "The prisoner committed suicide in his cell" is right up there with "He died attempting to escape". Both of those happen sometimes but sometimes they're a euphemism for "We just killed him". They tend to indicate at best a poorly-run prison. It's long and slow. No excuse of a wrong decision that goes wrong faster than you can respond. The authorities were in complete control, to the point that they definitely should have been able to prevent some of those suicides. And no oversight whatsoever, even though it's slow and safe. At Waco the evidence was successfully destroyed in one quick event. At Guantanamo the human evidence was dying just a few a week. No oversight. We hear it was only noncitizens, but should we believe it? Could CIA agents accused of disloyalty wind up there? How would we find out?

I could figure Waco might have been things getting out of control. Get a bunch of guys with guns etc and things can go bad by accident, and then the survivors try to play CYA, and no way for me to tell what happened. But at Guantanamo it's completely clear that somebody is *in* control. Definitely none of it is by accident. And if you don't feel like trusting them there's nothing to do about it but trust to -- the legislature? It's just definitely rotten. Not "I just don't know and I just can't find out and it's over". Instead it's "They came out and said Al Qaeda is so powerful and so deadly we have to give up the Constitution forever. Do I believe that?"

[cleek]

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