Category: Intelligence

Pelosi/CIA Update

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It turns out that some of the people’s notes on the briefings could not have been made contemporaneously, as the term enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) was used extensively throughout, and this term was not used before 2004, and the briefing was given in 2002.

This does not mean that anyone at the CIA is lying, though my guess is that some of them are, but it means that the notes used are not those made at the time.

So, you have every Dem who was briefed on that day saying that the CIA did not say then that it was torturing, and you have numerous errors in attendance, staffers being called present, Rep. David Obey challenging the accuracy of the documents, and notes that Porter Goss was briefed along with members of Congress after he became head of the CIA.

As Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman would say, “This one’s busted.”

Pelosi Says that CIA Is Lying

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I’m inclined to agree, since, as I have already noted, both Senators Rockefeller and Graham confirm her account of CIA briefings.

In any case, Nancy Pelosi has upped the ante now, and she has specifically called the CIA out as liars:

At a contentious news conference Thursday, Mrs. Pelosi said that during the 2002 briefing, “we were told that waterboarding was not being used.” Mrs. Pelosi acknowledged that as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, she was briefed on Sept. 4, 2002, about waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that critics, including President Barack Obama, call torture. But she said CIA officials told her and other lawmakers only that the Justice Department had concluded the procedure was legal.

This is interesting, because it may force Obama, whether he likes it or not, to put his support behind an investigation of the torture issue, as opposed to his desire to cover it up put it behind us.

It would be amusing if ‘Phant attacks on Pelosi end up precipitating a full investigation of this matter.

More Support for Pelosi’s Version of the Non-Briefing

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Both former Florida Senator Bob Graham, and current Senator Jay “Spine of Jello” Rockefeller have categorically stated that they were not briefed on waterboarding at the time that the CIA docs implied that they were brief on the procedure.

Graham is significant, because of his obsessive record keeping. This guy has been diarying his meals for something like 20 years, so he is not the sort to “forget” what happened at a specific date and time.

Pat Roberts’ (R-KS) silence on this is deafening.

L’Affaire Harman: In Which a Journalist Accuses the Bush Administration of Law Abiding

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I’ve been following this for some time, and now we have a credible explanation from Laura Rosen as to why a further investigation might have been quashed by Alberto Gonzales, that you did not break the law until Dick Cheney and His Evil Minions™ told you to break the law:

3. Did Goss no longer have authority to certify the FISA Warrant when the call in question happened? The Time 2006 magazine piece on Harman coming on the radar in the Aipac case says that the tapped conversaation in question in which the possible alleged-by-some quid pro quo occurred was in “mid 2005.” A former intelligence official familiar with the matter told me that Goss had certified a FISA warrant to target Harman based on that intercepted communication, but didn’t know exactly what time it had occurred.

But a former intelligence community source tells me that DCI Goss no longer legally had the authority to certify FISA warrants at all beginning January 1, 2005 when the law creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence went into effect. So if Goss did try to certify a FISA warrant to target Harman in 2005, sources tell me that would be unkosher at best, and legally suspect. That authority was no longer in the Director of Central Intelligence’s hands and had gone to the Director of National Intelligence.

(Emphasis original)

The idea that the Bush White House was paranoid about various players pursuing their own agendas is not hard to believe, since both paranoia and ignoring the law was SOP for them, and they would naturally assume that everyone else would do the same.

On a note regarding the coverage of the coverage, it gets more interesting.

BTD at Talk Left notices that Jeff Stein who broke the Harman wiretap story for CQ, threw a hissy fit over suggestions that he was spoon fed self-serving leaks from Porter Goss’s staffers when he was in Congress and the CIA, aka the “Gosslings”.

Of note is that he complains about Ron Kampeas at JTA, and Laura Rosen at Foreign Policy magazine, but studiously ignores Zachary Roth at TPMMuckraker, who actually lists the most prominent “Gosslings”:

  • Patrick Murray
  • Jay Jakub
  • Michael Kostiw
  • Merrell Moorhead

Who are a veritable rogues gallery of weirdness, as Roth makes clear when he notes that, “It says something about this crew that perhaps the best-regarded of them [Michael Kostiw] had his career derailed for shoplifting pork products.”

Stein does not deny that they are his sources in his rant, and given his studious avoidance of the article that names the “Gosslings” even while not outing them, it certainly reasonable to conclude that one of his major sources, and more likely most of his major sources for his initial story, are these “Gosslings”.

That being said, the problem with what appears to be ass covering and political vendettas is that there appears to be no way that they can all lose.

As Atrios notes when he rightly excoriates Harman for her new found discovery of the potential for abuse of surveillance, there are no good guys here:

The absurdity is obvious. Dirty f@#$ing hippies like me were horrified at the illegal warrantless wiretapping program and general expansion of the surveillance state in part because of the potential for political abuse (frankly, given the rubber stamp FISA court and rubber stamp Congress what other point would there be?). Jane Harman and her pal Joe Klein heaped scorn on dirty f@#$ing hippies for such crazy views. Harman gets caught up in what appears to be a perfectly legal wiretap not aimed directly at her, though the release of the details of it might be evidence of the kind of political abuse possible in any surveillance program. Suddenly Harman is a staunch defender the right of People Like Jane Harman to not be wiretapped.

(@#$ mine)

Update on Goss, Harman and AIPAC

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First, Laura Rosen has a convincing, but not definitive account that the wiretap of Harman was part and parcel of a hit job by Porter Goss and his “Gosslings”.

Some data points:

  • It appears that people are arguing that Gonzalez backed off the investigation of Harman almost a year after the the New York Times had published its story on the wiretaps.
  • The leak of this information to Time Magazine in 2006 came 3 days after Harman released a report under the auspices of her being the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) on the Randall “Duke” Cunningham affair, and both Goss and his “Gosslings” frequented Cunningham’s booze and prostitute laden soirees:

Indeed, my read of a more recent CQ piece about then DNI John Negroponte also telling Goss not to brief the House leadership about Harman caught on the wiretap is that Negroponte was also trying to shut down what he thought was a rogue effort to pursue investigation of Harman. One now wonders if the reported Negroponte-Goss tensions that ultimately ended in Goss being forced to resign were also fueled by his concerns about Goss’s and the Gosslings’ actions on the Harman matter, and not just the Foggo matter. As we now know, by the way, the Foggo matter is not at all unrelated to the Cunningham case and the HPSCI report that Harman released. Remember: Foggo got the number 3 job at CIA because Goss’s staff recommended him to Goss. Indeed, many members of Goss’s staff had played poker with Foggo and the Cunningham case defense contractors for years (remember the Watergate poker parties?). And my understanding is that when Goss was chairman of HPSCI, Foggo had served his staff as a kind of mole against Tenet and other suspected-unloyal-to-Bush types inside the CIA. So Team Goss and the Gosslings had reasons to squirm when Harman released that report. I need to check when the Foggo indictment actually came down, but I don’t believe he was indicted yet at the time Harman released that report in October 2006. So that case against Foggo and the wider Cunningham investigation still moving may have unnerved people in Goss-land for multiple reasons when Harman released that report.

….
October 2006 is one month before the midterms when the Democrats would retake the House. And with the Democrats expected to win, who would get the chairmanship of HPSCI would have been a live issue for those who cared about these things, including about what kind of oversight even of past actions at CIA might have occurred. Oversight – and in particular Democratic-led oversight – that might have included looking into actions taken during Goss’s tenure as CIA director from 2004-2006. That tenure included, as Marcy Wheeler has pointed out, the CIA’s destruction of videotapes recording harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects — which Harman may have been briefed about. The episode is serious – it’s now the subject of investigation by a special prosecutor. Goss’s tenure also included the whole Foggo corruption matter which was still playing out in 2006, indeed, which played a big role in Goss being forced to suddenly step down as CIA director in May 2006.

So it’s beginning to sound like someone was going after the person most likely to investigate both the torture tape destruction and the connections between Goss staffers and disgraced Congressman Cunningham.

Most of this appears to be moot, because prosecutors are dropping the case against the AIPAC lobbyists, which is a good thing, because the precedent intended by this case was to criminalize the receipt of any classified material by an American citizen without any espionage being involved, and could be very easily extended to journalism.

Harman Update: The CIA is Really the Gang That Cannot Shoot Straight

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As I’ve said before, I’m glad that Harman is not House Intel Chairman, but tht latest from Jeff Stein, who broke the story, is a classic case of the CIA screwing itself up, and f%$#ing itself over:

Frustrated and angry at Gonzales for aborting the investigation, intelligence officials let Pelosi know about the wiretap and its contents, according to the three former national security officials.

‘She knew. We made sure she knew,’ said one of the former officials, chuckling.

The officials would discuss the matter only on terms of anonymity, because even the existence of the wiretap remains classified.

These guys want to be unshackled from the Frank Church era restrictions, and they pull crap like this.

You are going to have Congressional committees investigating you in a way that is far less pleasant than an unlubed proctology exam now, and you are to blame for this.

Morons….We should have outsourced you lot’s job to the ex-KGB when the wall came down.

This Whole Rep. Harman Thing is Going Very Weird

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First, we have a report that the “Israeli agent” that Jane Harman was having a phone conversation with was an Israeli-American named Haim Saban, if the name sounds familiar, it’s because you watch the credits for Mighty Morphin’ Power rangers.

He’s a producer who made much of his fortune by importing and redubbing the children’s show.

Then we have Ron Kampeas at the JTA noting that the phone call in question happened in the Summer of 2005, which is pre-Katrina, has her discussing becoming Intel committee chairman.

Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. It was around a week before the scope of the incompetence hit, and began destroying whatever remained of Bush’s post 911, so the possibility of a Democratically controlled house was remote. People were still talking about a permanent Republican majority.

In any case, Keampeas points us toward

Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy magazine, who appears to have a line on the personalities, and the machinations therein within the intelligence establishment that might figure in this:

  • That Bush Era intel officials felt on the defensive about the recent torture and wiretap revelations, and might want to push back.
  • Porter Goss authorized the wire tap, and Goss has always, “intensely disliked,” each other. (It is claimed that FBI Chief Mueller was unavailable at the time the warrant was requested)
  • According to an interview with Goss, Harman was the only member of Congress briefed on water boarding whose reaction wasnot , “encouragement,” which included, “Reps Pelosi and Harman, and Sens Rockefeller and Sen. Pat Roberts.”

On the other side, the statement from the Neww York Times editor that Harman did not attempt to influence the publication of the illegal wiretap article may not be true, as Bill Keller has clarified his statements, and it appears that she contacted Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman regarding the matter, at the request of Michael Hayden, who keeps showing up in every bit of evil in the intelligence establishment like a demented Amway salesman.

It also means that Harman was actively working against the election of John Kerry, because if the Times had published before the election, it would likely have swung the race.

Finally, we have Jane Harman asking for the transcripts of her phone calls to be declassified and released.

Here is my older post on this, and try to figure this out.

It’s beginning to read like a John le Carré novel.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??? They Wanted to Wiretap a Congressman Without a Warrant?

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Well, we are seeing new revelations about the NSA warrantless spying program, and this one is a doozy:

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said.

(emphasis mine)

Great googly moogly!

This is why it needs to be pursued, and people need to be prosecuted, because this was not some sort of intelligence gathering operation, it was one of Dick Cheney’s moles trying to wiretap someone for political advantage.

The people who did this need to be rooted out, and have their clearances stripped, and senior folks who authorized this need to go to jail.

Reviewing Dick Cheney’s Security Clearance

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So I was reading this account of a Seymour Hersh interview on Fresh Air in which he says that Cheney loyalists have been “burrowed” into sensitive government positions, and continue to feed him information:

“I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay-behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve been driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay-behind that you can continue to have contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay-behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.”

(Audio at bottom)

And the first thing that went through my head was, “People from the NSA are talking to a guy who orchestrated the outing of a covert CIA agent?”

Then I realized that the real question was, “Why does Richard Bruce Cheney still have a security clearance?”

Based on my reading of the entire Lewis “Scooter” Libby case, it’s clear that Patrick Fitzgerald had concerns that Cheney was aware of the leaks on some level, though he lacked any hard evidence (missing emails anyone?) to go any further.

That being said, a security clearance is not a legal procedure, it’s an administrative procedure, and to a significant degree, it is necessary for the holder of this clearance to show that they not a security risk, either intentionally or through negligence.

There is also an additional duty to report any credible potential security violations to the appropriate authorities.

This is a lower standard of proof than, for example, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, or obstruction of justice statutes.

There is therefore a significant concern that Dick Cheney violated the terms of his clearance, and pending an investigation, his clearance should be suspended pending an investigation.

Unlike a government employee whose livelihood is dependent on having a clearance, this should not provide an undue burden, and a hearing, with witnesses, including Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Mr. Cheney, testifying under oath, would be an appropriate venue to decide whether or not he was either deliberately or negligently cavalier with sensitive intelligence data.

Of course, if Mssrs Cheney or Libby were to make untrue statements in the process of giving their testimony, that would be a matter for the federal prosecutors.


Youtube link

OK, Now We Have Evidence of a Crim

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About a year ago, I noted that the CIA had destroyed 2 of their tapes of their torture sessions interrogations.

It appears that I was wrong, they didn’t destroy some of their tapes, they destroyed nearly 100 tapes, 92 in fact.

This is going to continue unless this is pursued up the chain of command, and those in authority at the deputy director, director, and presidential levels are prosecuted.

Those below them need their clearances pulled forever if they cooperate, and jail time for those who do not cooperate.

Our intelligence services will continue to create more terrorists until this is rooted out of both the intelligence services and the body politic.

Yes

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Glenn Greenwald asks, “Is Obama embracing the lawless, omnipotent executive?” by endorsing a position that the President, and the President alone has the authority to determine what classified documents it must release under court order.

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions. (apologies to Atrios)

It’s disgraceful, but not unsurprising. After all, how often do you see an executive voluntary give up authority that a predecessor successfully asserted?

Jeebus: Over a Month Out of Office, and Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Still Shock Me

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So, we know that Dusty Foggo, who was installed by then CIA head Porter Goss, was corrupt, but the court files from his trial are stunning.

He went to jail for taking bribes from Brent Wilkes, who was also bribing Randall “Duke” Cunningham, but we now know that he was alwo sleeping around with his wife with a woman who was also sleeping with a Russian spy, and Porter Goss knew this, and hired him anyway.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

Genitals Sliced With a Scalpel; Irritating Liquids Poured in the Wounds

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This is what is alleged to have happened to Binyam Mohamed, and the British courts expunged the reports, because of threats from US intelligence that they would stop cooperating with UK intelligence if the information were released, and the is arguing to continue the complete and absolute privilege that Bush and His Evil Minions™ insisted upon:

“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.

“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.

Judge Schroeder asked, “The change in administration has no bearing?”

Once more, he said, “No, Your Honor.” The position he was taking in court on behalf of the government had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration,” and “these are the authorized positions,” he said.

(emphasis mine)

I Barack Obama decided that since he’s so awesome, we should just trust him.

We also have graphic depictions of what was done to the man (from the 2nd link):

The court papers describe horrific treatment in secret prisons. Mr. Mohamed claimed that during his detention in Morocco, “he was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death.”

(again, emphasis mine)

Note that the precedent here, US v. Reynolds, is in fact based on a lie. There were no state secrets involved, the B-29 which crashed was not, as was claimed, on a secret mission or testing secret equipment.

They claimed privilege because the report indicated that the aircraft was in poor condition because of inadequate maintenance, and the USAF wanted it covered up. It was all a lie.

Mike McConnell in Snap Resignation

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The 2nd Director of National Intelligence announced his resignation today, effective immediately, even though his replacement, Dennis Blair, has not yet made it through confirmation.

This is odd. Giving his history of lying about domestic surveillance and torture, my guess is that someone found something he had done, and he was told that he had to leave the building immediately.

Then again, my gut is frequently wrong, and even if it’s right, this sort of dirty laundry rarely gets aired out.

DNI Would Minimize Contractors

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Adm. Dennis Blair, the nominee for Director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that, “one of his first duties if confirmed will be to transfer to federal employees any ‘inherently governmental’ work being done by contractors:

Blair said the government should rely on contract interrogators only in special circumstances, such as when a suspect speaks an obscure dialect.

“My strong preference is that interrogators in the intelligence world be a professional cadre of the best interrogators in the business,” Blair told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during his nomination hearing.

Committee chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she supported Blair’s call to reduce the intelligence community’s reliance on contractors. She referred to a 2007 Office of the Director of National Intelligence study that found that 27 percent of the intelligence work force is comprised of contractors, and an individual contractor costs the government $80,000 more on average than a career employee.

“I find this unacceptable,” Feinstein said. “Hiring contractors to interrogate detainees and contract psychologists to evaluate [them] is just the wrong thing for the government to do.”

Now if only we can apply this to the rest of the government, particularly the DoD.

What the Panetta Nomination Means (Bigger Intelligence Picture Edition)

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I know a quick trick to determine the priorities in any program, look at the budget.

The US intelligence is $47½ billion dollars, with about 80% of that amount in the control of the Pentagon.

That actually puts the CIA pretty far down on the totem pole of priorities, and with the creation of the Director of National Intelligence, they no longer give the President the most expensive reading material in the world, the Presidential Daily Briefing.

First, we have a letter from a career military intelligence professional to Josh Marshall who makes a very legitimate point, that recently, particularly over the last 8 years, the CIA has been increasingly cast as an organ of the Pentagon, and that this is not the essential role of the CIA.

The essential role of the CIA is to provide the civilian decision makers, particularly POTUS, with the information that they need to make their decisions, not the provision of targeting data to Predator drones.

So, just who is Leon Panetta, and what does it mean for the intelligence community in an Obama administration?

Obviously, his forceful rejection of torture and warrantless wiretaps is the first thing that comes to mind.

This implies that as DCIA, he will be looking into what happened, and why with the domestic spying and torture, and (hopefully) it will mean the end of these programs. (I’m not enough of an optimist to believe that there will be referrals for prosecution).

Also, there is a bit of almost 20 year old history regarding Panetta and Congressional oversight of intelligence:

And there’s this: in 1990, then-Representative Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced legislation that would have required the president to seek approval from the congressional intelligence committees before mounting most covert operations. (Under this legislation, the president could still stage secret ops to save American lives or rescue American hostages without asking permission from the committees.) The measure failed miserably. Only 70 members voted for it, but one was Panetta. Will that vote come up during his confirmation hearings? One wonders if Panetta still supports the idea of greater congressional oversight of CIA clandestine activities.

He was one of 70 people voting for this, so we can be reasonably assured of his support for Congressional oversight: he is unlikely to “go native,” and start stonewalling Congress.

That being said, his real job will be to fight the 800 pound gorilla in the room, the Pentagon, and its institutional imperative towards total control of the complete intelligence apparatus.

Panetta was Chairman of the House Budget committee, head of the Office of Management, and finally Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff, and this background makes him uniquely suited to dealing with the separation of the CIA from the military octopus.

His background is budgets, bureaucracy, and access to the President, and these are precisely the levers that need to be worked in order for the CIA do its job properly.

Someone like Feinstein’s* favorite Steve Knappes, may very well have more hands on experience with intelligence, but he doesn’t have is the ability to thread the various needles, both in the White House, and with the Congress, to create in voice in intelligence agency that is separate from the Pentagon (and to a lesser degree the State Department), has the resources to collect the intelligence.

More importantly, Leon Panetta has the skills to make sure that this intelligence is presented to, and seriously considered by, the President and the rest of the national security apparatus.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.

What the Panetta Nomination Means (Inside Capitol Hill Baseball Edition)

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First on the inside baseball angle, it appears that some of the intel war horses, particularly in the Senate, are upset at the choice, and how it was made public.

Both Senators Feinstein* the new Intel Committee chairman, and Rockefeller, the outgoing chairman, have strongly expressed reservations about the appointment, based largely on their feelings that he lacks the experience to handle the CIA.

Someone, probably on the one of the two Senators’ staff, stated to NPR (I heard it on Morning Edition), that Leon Panetta was the least experienced appointment to head the CIA since John McCone in 1961.

That is not true.

A quick perusal of the DCIs gives a 1976 appointment who was significantly less experienced: 4 years in Congress, UN Ambassador, and Envoy to China before his appointment, as compared to Pannetta’s 16 years in Congress, his chairmanship of the House Budget Committee, with heading the OMB, and serving as Clinton’s chief of staff.

That relatively inexperienced DCI? George Herbert Walker Bush, who is still viewed with the affection that 6-year-olds reserve for Santa Clause among CIA old-timers.

What is interesting is that it appears that Feinstein* and Rockefeller, were blind sided by this announcement, while relatively less senior Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), was briefed and supports the decision, and this sentiment is mirrored by House intelligence committee chairman Silvestre Reyes and Rush Holt, Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel.

Additionally, you have Senators Pat Roberts Barbara Mikulski (scroll down), and Russ Feingold, , with Evan Bayh (true to form) waffling.

We are now hearing a sort of an apology by Joe Biden, “I’m still a Senate man and I always think this way: I think it’s always good to talk to the requisite members of Congress,” said Biden. “I think it was just a mistake,” but it’s a fairly perfunctory apology.

I do not think that this is an accident. We have a transition team that has professional OCD. They have a job application form that kills more trees than Paul Bunyan, and famously tight lips, people like this don’t “forget” to notify the current and former Chairmen of the Senate Intel Committee.

This is Chicago style payback for something, and it has at least tacit approval from the top (PEBO).

So, they Rockefeller and Feinstein* f^%$ed with Barack Obama over something, and now he’s dropping something on them by way of lesson….It’s not a piano, it’s more like emptying a chamber pot on their heads.

Gee, I can’t imagine what on earth they could have done to Barack Obama that would have thought that he was being messed with? I don’t know, maybe something that had Keith Olbermann going special comment on him? Something like that disgraceful telco immunity bill that Rockefeller and Feinstein* pushed so hard through the Senate?

We know that Obama voted for the bill, but it was painfully clear that this was not something that he wanted to deal with at that time, it being mere weeks after he cinched the nomination, and it was equally clear that it was a phenomenally bad bill.

Barack Obama, or someone very senior in his staff, believe that Rockefeller and Feinstein pushed the bill to cover their own posteriors. They are accessories to illegal wiretaps and torture, and while Congressional immunity may protect them, they would much rather not have to find out how a judge rules.

I think that this is why you have seen the meticulously botched roll-out of Leon Panetta: It’s botched enough to turn the knife, but not botched enough prevent the nomination from leaving the Senate Intelligence committee.

I’ll post about what I think the bigger picture is in terms of what this means for the intelligence establishment later. (I actually find that bit more interesting)

Anyway, that’s what I think. I could be wrong, and Atrios could be right:

It’s about the club, insider knowledge and privilege, and, yes, crimes, criminals, and their enablers.

Gotta keep it in the family, otherwise who knows what might happen?

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.

What a Twofer from the WaPo Editorial Page

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So today, on the last day of the year, they give us Amity Shlaes and Ruth Marcus.

Let’s start with the skinny on Ms. Shlaes: she is simply the beneficiary of wingnut welfare. After graduating with a bachelors in English, she proceeds to spout the most predictable right wing economic theory imaginable, and following her marriage to the right wing founder the New York Sun, gets herself columns, and becomes a senior fellow at the CFR. As Matthew Yglesias notes:

I have a really, really, really hard time imagining the CFR doing something comparable for a liberal with so little in the way of relevant qualifications or track-record outside an ideological cocoon.

That being said, some of the beneficiaries are not outright stupid, and Amity Shlaes is either naturally or deliberately so.

Because in her WaPo OP/ED, she continues with riffing on her thesis, pulled from lord knows where, that the the 1937 recession was a result of rich people tucking their money back in their mattresses.

Not even Milton Friedman believed that. He blamed then Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles for tightening credit requirements.

The stupid, it burns us.

That being said, Amity Shlaes is in this instance not the columnist most deserving of opprobrium today, that honor belongs to Ruth Marcus, who does not merely set herself up as an advocate for stupidity and ignorance, but instead advocates for the aggressive protection of evil.

After getting what I am sure is hundreds of outraged emails for her last justification of letting the architects of a torturer regime go free, she thinks that she step up to the plate again 11 days later.

How, some readers asked, could future law-breaking be prevented if past misdeeds go unpunished?

First, criminal prosecution isn’t the only or necessarily the most effective mechanism for deterrence. To the extent that they weigh the potential penalties for their actions, government officials worry as much about dealing with career-ruining internal investigations or being hauled before congressional committees. Criminal prosecution and conviction requires such a high level of proof of conscious wrongdoing that the likelihood of those other punishments is much greater.

Second, the looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials. “The Terror Presidency,” former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith’s account of the legal battles within the administration over torture and wiretapping, is replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.

This is because there is already a culture of impunity among Republicans in Washington, DC, and it’s been there ever since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon before even an indictment was handed down.

These people knew that George W. Bush would pardon them, like he pardoned Libby, because he was protecting his own neck.

The cycle of impunity, which appears to extend only to Republicans, needs to stop.

Third, punishment is not the only way to prevent wrongdoing. If someone is caught breaking into your house, by all means, press charges. But you might also want to consider installing an alarm system or buying stronger locks. Responsible congressional oversight, an essential tool for checking executive branch excesses, was lacking for much of the Bush administration.

I’m sure that the guy with the electrodes attached to his genitals is happy that you are considering closing that barn door after the arsonist has set fire to the cow.

There was no good will here. There were no honest mistakes. Waterboarding is torture, and has been considered so for hundreds of years, what’s more, the people with experience in the field have been saying consistently that torture does not work.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were torturing not because there was a ticking bomb, there wasn’t, and not because they were desperate for information, because it wasn’t getting good intel, they were torturing because it made them feel like they were taking it to the terrorists.

They authorized torture because it made them feel good, and they continued it after they were shown that it did not work because it made them feel good, this is a classic definition of sadism, and absent some jail time, the sadism will be institutionalized.*
*No intention to condemn the S&M crowd. Where informed consent is present, the moral equation is different.