What Else is New?
Richard J. Garfunkel
Culled from The NY Times Editorial and Op-Ed Pages – February 9, 2005
NASA’s top climate specialist, James Hansen called for accelerated efforts to reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming. After his speech he was threatened with “dire consequences.” His statements have been edited or censored in entirety, and by whom? The censor was young George Deutsch; a functionary in NASA’s public affairs office whose chief credentials had been his service to the Bush re-election campaign. On his resume, Mr. Deutsch claimed a 2003 bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas A & M, but the university, alerted by a blogger, said that was not true. He has now resigned. (How about that!) Not only was he not vetted, if that was bad enough, but this young politico (horse’s ass) was able to impose his ideology on other agency employees.
How about the report from Bob Herbert on Alberto Gonzales’s idiotic testimony in front of Senate’s Judiciary Committee the other day.
Senator Joe Biden suggested that Al Qaeda operatives have been aware for some time that the government is trying to intercept their phone calls.
Mr. Gonzales agreed. “You would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged is some kind of surveillance,” he said. “But if they’re not reminded about it all the time in newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget.” (Can you imagine that this moron is the Attorney General of the US.) Senator Biden managed to laugh, probably to keep from crying.
Senator Biden asked Mr. Gonzales whether the program had achieved any results. Mr. Gonzales said it had helped identify “would-be terrorists in the United States.” “Have we arrested these people?” asked Mr. Biden. “Have we arrested these the people we have identified as terrorists in the United States?” The Attorney General’s reply left people shaking their heads and rubbing their eyes. “When we can use our law enforcement tools to go after the bad guys,” he said, “we do that.” Senator Biden tried to push the issue, but Mr. Gonzales would not elaborate. (Is this guy for real? Or isn’t it a fact that almost all of the 1000’s of eaves-dropped conversations of Americans have amounted to nothing!)
But how about Kori Schake, a fellow at the Hoover Institute and a professor at West Point, who on the same op-ed page stated, “Mr. Rumsfeld disparages his opponents as industrial age dinosaurs. Yet this is precisely the approach of this latest defense budget: it continues programs and practices that have been made obsolete by technology, innovation and field experience.” (Again, who is kidding whom? This is no leftist red talking here!) Of course our “defense budget is larger then the next 18 defense budgets in the world!”
Or how about conservative GOP member of the House from Arizona, Representative Jeff Flake, who complains about “earmarking- in which members of Congress secure federal dollars for pork-barrel projects by covertly attaching them to huge spending bills – has become the currency of corruption in Congress. It is just not the rising number of earmarks (more than 15,000 last year – up from 1200 a decade ago) or the dollar amount ($27 billion) that is troubling. More disturbing is that the earmarks are used as inducements to get members to sign on to large spending measures.” What is the consequence? “By the time appropriation bills reach the House or the Senate floor, passage by a lopsided margin is virtually assured because every member who got earmarks is obligated to vote for the entire bill.”
So what is the answer to all this insanity? The Attorney General has spent untold millions listening to “would be” terrorists and hasn’t arrested a one! If he did they would be crowing about it to the whole wide world. The conservative think tank, the Hoover Institute is up in arms over what is called “Jurassic Pork,” a defense budget out of control, but not enough body armor for our troops and for sure, vehicles that have been death traps for out soldiers as the insurgency’s use of IED’s blows them up on the roads!
Lastly a President that proposes a $2.77 trillion budget without the cost of the continuing war in Iraq and Afghanistan or the rebuilding of New Orleans and a Republican Congress that has no clue to where all the money is going. It has taken one of their (the GOP’s) own; Representative Flake (that’s a perfect name) from Arizona to wake up and state, “There’s gambling going on here!” Well its Jack Abramoff’s style gambling. Only bet on a sure thing, greed!
By the way here’s Sidney Blumenthal’s take on Alberto the Great!
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The President, the Stripper and the Attorney General Thursday 09 February 2006 The extraordinary legal defense of George Bush's domestic spying reads like a blend of Kafka, Le Carré and Mel Brooks. In 1996, Governor George W Bush received a summons to serve on a jury, which would have required his admission that 20 years earlier he had been arrested for drunk driving. Already planning his presidential campaign, he did not want this information made public. His lawyer made the novel argument to the judge that Bush should not have to serve because “he would not, as governor, be able to pardon the defendant in the future”. (The defendant was a stripper accused of drunk driving.) The judge agreed, and it was not until the closing days of the 2000 campaign that Bush's record surfaced. On Monday, the same lawyer, Alberto Gonzales – now attorney general – appeared before the senate judiciary committee to defend “the client”, as he called the president. Gonzales was the sole witness called to explain Bush's warrantless domestic spying, in obvious violation of the foreign intelligence surveillance act (Fisa) and circumvention of the special court created to administer it. The scene at the Senate was acted as though scripted partly by Kafka, partly by Mel Brooks, and partly by John le Carré. After not being sworn in, the absence of oath-taking having been insisted upon by the Republicans, Gonzales offered legal reasoning even more imaginative than that he used to get Bush off jury duty: a melange of mendacity, absurdity and mystery. The attorney general argued that Fisa did and did not apply; that the administration was operating within it, while flouting it; and that it didn't matter. The president's “inherent” power, after all, allowed him to do whatever he wanted. It was all, Gonzales said, “totally consistent”. His explanation, observed Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee, “defies logic and plain English”. Congress, Gonzales elaborated, had no proper constitutional role, but in any case had already approved the president's secret program by voting for the authorization of the use of military force in Afghanistan – even if members didn't know it; or even, when informed years later that they had approved the secret program, objected that they hadn't known that that was what they were doing. The legislation that was ignored, Gonzales declared, shouldn't be amended to bring this domestic spying under the law because the secret program was already legal, or might be legal; and anyway it doesn't matter if Congress says it's legal. The all-powerful president should be trusted, but when Bush states wrongly that he goes to court for warrants, it's all right that he doesn't know what he is talking about. “As you know,” said Gonzales, “the president is not a lawyer.” Who was or wasn't being spied on couldn't and wouldn't be explained. When Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked whether the program could be used to “influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media”, Gonzales replied: “Those are very, very difficult questions, and for me to answer those questions sort of off the cuff, I think would not be responsible.” When Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, asked for assurances that only al-Qaida or suspected terrorists were subjected to surveillance, Gonzales answered: “Sir, I can't give you absolute assurance.” Nor would he say what the program really was. “I am not comfortable going down the road of saying yes or no as to what the president has or has not authorized,” Gonzales said. “I'm not going to respond to that. I'm not going to answer.” Gonzales's ultimate argument was an appeal to history. George Washington, he pointed out in a display of erudition, “intercepted British mail”, footnoting a 1997 CIA report on the subject. In the civil war, the telegraph was wiretapped. And during both the first and second world wars, communications were intercepted. Gonzales's a historicism about technology aside (George Washington had no cell phones to tap, no computers to hack), Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt could not have broken a law that did not exist. Through his convoluted testimony, the attorney general represented “the client” as a useful factotum again. But in his tour of history, he neglected the disclosure by the Associated Press on February 3 of about 200 pages of documents from the White House of President Gerald Ford. These papers highlighted the objections made by Ford's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, to getting court warrants for domestic surveillance. It was partly to thwart such unaccountable executive power that Congress enacted Fisa in 1978. Once again Cheney, the power behind the throne, has found a way to relieve the frustrations of the past. But he is fulfilling more than the curdled dreams of the Nixon and Ford era. The Bush presidency is straining to realize a pre-Washington ideal – unconstitutional monarchy. Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars.
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