12 Jul
Posted by MacRanger as Uncategorized
Newsweak, known for floating false stories to prop up sagging sales – “Flushed Korans Anyone“, floats up this doozy for it’s new issue.
“It’s the morning after Independence Day, and Eric Holder Jr. is feeling the weight of history. The night before, he’d stood on the roof of the White House alongside the president of the United States, leaning over a railing to watch fireworks burst over the Mall, the monuments to Lincoln and Washington aglow at either end. “I was so struck by the fact that for the first time in history an African-American was presiding over this celebration of what our nation is all about,” he says. Now, sitting at his kitchen table in jeans and a gray polo shirt, as his 11-year-old son, Buddy, dashes in and out of the room, Holder is reflecting on his own role. He doesn’t dwell on the fact that he’s the country’s first black attorney general. He is focused instead on the tension that the best of his predecessors have confronted: how does one faithfully serve both the law and the president?
Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall…
Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter.”
Newsweak left out that Attorney Generals also work at the pleasure of the President, and Holder can’t comb his hair without Obama signing off on it. Nevertheless, there will be no investigation, it’s false.
Here’s why. First, note the article comes out while Obama’s out of town, on a weekend. I guarantee you that once he’s back you’ll hear a giant “fizzz” of this story. 1) Obama is banking his entire Presidency on establishing government healthcare, and it’s beginning to look like 1992 again. 2) Obama’s poll numbers are slipping already, and the public polls have already shown a collective “yawn” for a CIA/Congress/Bush/Cheney bash fest, especially in light of growing foreclosures, lost jobs, generally sucky economics.
Lastly, a probe would go no where. As I’ve said many times on good authority because I was there, members of congress were briefed fully on the interrogation techniques from the outset. It’s not the CIA who’s lying, but Pelosi and other members of congress. In fact they were briefed even more than necessary.
But even more, IF such a probe would go forward the Nation would finally find out just how much Democrats politicized national security. As Andy McCarthy notes referencing the just release report, which touts the success of the interrogation program – which is why the Obama administration dumped it into the press on the weekend.
“* Alberto Gonzales did not attempt to mislead Congress in 2007 when he testified that the controversy that erupted at the Justice Department in 2004 was not over what was popularly known as the “terrorist surveillance program” (i.e., the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program to intercept suspected terrorist communications that crossed U.S. borders — the effort the Left smeared as “domestic spying”). In fact, as Gonzales told the Senate judiciary Committee, the controversy was about other intelligence activities.
* When congressional Democrats rolled their eyes, suggested that Gonzales was lying, and groused that a special prosecutor should be appointed, they well knew he wasn’t lying — but they also knew he couldn’t discuss the intellligence activities at the center of the controversy because those activities were (and remain) highly classified. That is, they knowingly badgered the Attorney General of the United States at a hearing in a calculated effort to make him look dishonest and to intimate something they knew to be untrue: namely, that the dispute at DOJ arose because senior officials believed warrantless surveillance was illegal.
* Before Gonzales and President Bush’s then chief-of-staff, Andy Card, went to see Attorney General Ashcroft in the hospital (where he was being treated for pancreatitis), President Bush directed his administration to meet with top congressional Democrats and Republicans (Senate leaders Frist and Daschle, Speaker Hastert and House minority leader Pelosi, Roberts and Rockefeller from Senate Intel, and Goss and Harman from House Intel) to alert them that Ashcroft’s deputy, Jim Comey, had refused to sign off on intelligence activities that Ashcroft had previously approved. Advised of the problem, the Gang of Eight did not agree to a quick legislative fix but, according to Gonzales’s contemporaneous notes, agreed that the intelligence activities should continue. (Three years later, after Gonzales’s testimony, Pelosi, Rockefeller and Daschle claimed that they hadn’t agreed.)
* Only after this meeting with the bipartisan congressional leaders, and with the prior 45-day authorization for all the program’s activities about to expire, did Gonzales and Card go to the hospital to visit the ailing Ashcroft — at the direction of President Bush.
* Between the time the time the collection intelligence activities that came to be known as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was first authorized after the 9/11 attacks until the warrantless surveillance aspect of the program was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005, the Bush administration briefed the bipartisan leadership of the congressional intelligence committees 17 times about the activities involved in the program.
In sum, congressional Democrats knew about the program and knew that the dissent of the Justice Department’s senior leadership in 2004 was not about warrantless surveillance. They knew that if they postured that the dissent was about warrantless surveillance, Gonzales — not an adept communicator — would not be able to rebut them in a public hearing because the details of the dispute were classified. Congressional Democrats also knew that President Bush agreed to make changes in the program in March 2004 to assuage DOJ’s concerns, and they knew that the program activities continued thereafter for a year-and-a-half (i.e., until the Times blew part of the program) without incident and with bipartisan congressional leadership continuing to be briefed.”
Thus there will be no “probe”, for it would blow the cover off the real story of who was really working against the US in a time of war.
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