The last few days have seen some limited but nevertheless remarkable progress in the ongoing effort to expose and rectify some of our government’s 2001-2009 illegality. Not only did we learn that they started breaking the law almost immediately after the 2001 attacks, but that it went beyond merely illegally wiretapping American citizens. (What were they doing? My money’s on massive, indiscriminate e-mail surveillance. Remember these people actually announced something called the “Total Information Awareness” program.) As if that weren’t enough, the orders to break all sorts of laws, including those about informing a few members of Congress about what the CIA is up to, came from Bush the Younger or Dick Cheney himself.
Now comes word from Harper’s Scott Horton (via yet another excellent Glenn Greenwald post) that Eric Holder, our hitherto very quiet Attorney General, may be taking the prestige of his department seriously:
A major consideration for Holder, my sources told me, was the Justice Department reputation for independence—badly tarnished during the Bush administration and perhaps set to face further embarrassments as the U.S. attorneys scandal probes—by Congress and by a special prosecutor—finish up.
In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated.
The piece is worth reading in its entirety, but perhaps the important development here is that the Justice Department is remembering that it’s supposed to be separate from politics. Barack Obama has short term political reasons for wanting the lawbreaking of the previous Administration to disappear down the memory hole. But Eric Holder isn’t supposed to care about that. All he’s supposed to care about are prosecuting crimes; and, while many of the doubtlessly horrifying facts of just what Bush, Cheney, et al did when nobody was looking remain concealed, there is no longer any serious dispute about whether or not laws (lots of ‘em) were broken.
Obama’s look-forward-not-backward approach has always been long term inoperable for the simple reason that the laws about torture, surveillance and all the rest were so openly disregarded. There is simply too much evidence already public to keep things under the rug. Holder’s got to know that whitewashing the crimes committed over the last eight years makes any effort to rebuild his department’s disintegrated reputation impossible. If he’s serious about that rebuilding then he’s got no choice but to investigate seriously.
Oh, and that lying to Congress thing? It turns out they don’t like that, even if you are doing it under direct orders from the President or Vice-President. Now there’s probably going to be another Congressional investigation. Further disturbing disclosures are almost inevitable, either as a direct result of investigation or from work done by bloggers and journalists. Sooner or later this thing is going to come to a head; health care, energy and the economy be damned.
