John Ashcroft's Shameful Defense of Waterboarding

John Ashcroft cements his legacy as a public servant.



You have to give him credit for being more forthcoming that Michael Mukasey--but then you have to remember that this is a man defending the practice of waterboarding:

"The reports that I have heard, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, indicate that they were very valuable," Ashcroft said, adding that CIA Director George Tenet indicated the "value of the information received from the use of enhanced interrogation techniques -- I don't know whether he was saying waterboarding or not, but assume that he was for a moment -- the value of that information exceeded the value of information that was received from all other sources."

Waterboarding is a technique designed to simulate drowning. The agency has acknowledged using it on terror suspects. Some critics regard it as torture; others say it is a harsh interrogation technique, and proponents say it is a useful tool in the war on terror.

Ashcroft, who stated his opposition to torture, said the Justice Department has determined that waterboarding -- as defined and described by the CIA -- doesn't constitute torture.

"I believe a report of waterboarding would be serious, but I do not believe it would define torture," Ashcroft said, responding to questions from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California.

Only, we now know that the practice drove the men insane. We now know it killed men. We know that there were people arguing against it, touting the proven method of building rapport. We have defined deviancy down to the point where monstrous things are commonplace discussion. Flippant, ridiculous, self-serving and intellectually bankrupt defenses of waterboarding signal many, many years of batshit crazy discourse ahead.

Yep, the worst times in our country's history are upon us. We're living them and we're seeing the deviancy up close, and it's truly an awful thing. Awful.

[video below the fold]

The Agenda of the Next Attorney General

On Day One of the next Attorney General's tenure, provided they're a Democrat, of course, they need to do one thing. Fire everyone the Republicans hired, whether it is legal or not, and base it on the fact that since partisanship was used to evaluate candidates, they are ineligible to continue working for the Federal Government. Issue a signing statement if someone complains. Claim Executive Privilege or the War Powers Act or something like that.

High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department's ranks, according to an inspector general's report to be released today.

The report will trace the effort to 2002, early in the Bush administration, when key advisers to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft moved to exert more control over the program to hire rookie lawyers and summer interns, according to two people familiar with the probe.

The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials. Shifting control of the program to Ashcroft's advisers prompted charges of partisanship from law professors and former government lawyers who had worked under Democratic administrations.

[SNIP]

Critics in the department had argued that hundreds of high-quality applicants had been rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, according to correspondence at the time. One Harvard Law School graduate said that when he applied for the honors program a few years ago he was warned by professors and fellow students to remove any liberal affiliations from his résumé.

If the newly-removed individuals want to re-apply, then let them re-apply and be considered just like everyone else.

You can't let this practice go unpunished. Fire every single unqualified person who was hired because of their affiliation to conservatives, and if they want to apply for their old jobs back, consider them based on their merits and hire them back if they are qualified.

There is no way--no way--the Republicans are going to allow a Democratic administration to function in this same way, so you might as well take the Liberty University hires and throw them out on day one before they can continue to infect the government like the viral strain of shitheadedness that they carry. Not unless we beat them down into a minority of 150 House members and 20 Senators. Even then, they'll still find a way to disrupt and obstruct in order to get their way.

--WS

It's a sweet little scam if you happen to be connected

Just when you thought this crew couldn't possibly be more corrupt, a new depth is plumbed.

The latest scam to enrich cronies and former cronies of the Bush administration goes by the name of "Monitorships." Monitorships are unique and unusual contractual arrangements under which an outside entity (headed by a former administration crony) is given broad powers to "expose corruption and change business practices." The arrangements allow the companies to avoid criminal charges while giving prosecutors cover - the companies have to clean up their act and the prosecutors can move on to more important matters than white collar crime - you know - like getting back to pissing away money losing that misguided futile "war on drugs."

Last month I wrote about one such arrangement with former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which somewhere between $29 and $52 million dollars - to be paid by the company in question - for serving as corporate watchdog for a mere 18 months. The no-bid contract was bestowed upon Ashcroft by the US Attorney for New Jersey - who was Ashcroft's employee when he was the head of the Department formerly known as Justice.

But the Eagle isn't the only one cashing in. Several former Bush administration officials have snagged similar deals, which are paid using corporate funds, and there are minimal checks on spending.

Now these spurious deals are being scrutinized.

But legal experts and lawmakers are expressing growing concern about inconsistency and secrecy surrounding the appointments.

The chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary committees last week demanded that Justice Department leaders provide a list of all such deals and the fees they have generated. The Project on Government Oversight watchdog group has questioned whether the agreements reward "cronies" who share political affiliations or backgrounds with the U.S. attorneys handing out the deals.

The arrangements raise alarms about "potential favoritism and political interference that can undermine our judicial system," said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr . (D-N.J.). Pallone has been critical of U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie, the New Jersey prosecutor who chose Ashcroft and a possible GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state.

The number of corporate monitors has risen more than sevenfold since 2001, researchers said, a move that reflects a shift from lodging criminal indictments against businesses for fear they will collapse and cost employees their jobs. Instead, the government has taken a different path: forcing companies to submit to outside oversight at their own expense as a condition of settling fraud and corruption cases. Major companies from AOL and Bristol-Myers Squibb to Merrill Lynch have yielded to such oversight after recent financial scandals.

So - companies with deep pockets can fork over a few million, and buy their way out of indictments and public humiliation - and prosecutors all but get a seat in the boardroom. Monitors have virtually unlimited authority to interview employees, pore over contracts, expose violations and force companies to change their cheating and kick-backing ways - none of which is a bad thing, by the way.

But - as the number of monitorships has grown in recent years, they have usurped more and more power, enlisting high-priced accountants of the monitor's choosing and even making recommendations on who to fire - and who to hire. Typically, the monitors send their reports to prosecutors and their bills to the companies being monitored.

As a general rule, monitorship fees are not made public, but those 'in the know' say it is common for such fees to exceed tens of millions of dollars over two or three years. The fees rarely, if ever, involve any court approval, and defense attorneys say that they are hardly ever questioned by the companies being monitored out of fear of reprisal. Executives at companies that were monitored years ago still decline comment.

Richard C. Breeden, a former Republican chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, engineered a nearly complete overhaul at WorldCom after its top executives faced criminal charges in one of the largest fraud schemes in the nation's history. After being appointed by a federal judge from a different political party, Breeden and his team helped reshape WorldCom from its board of directors to its executive ranks, before guiding the telecommunications company, which emerged from bankruptcy protection as MCI, into a 2006 merger with Verizon.

"People should be very careful to make sure that monitorships do not become political plums," said Breeden, who stressed that he was not speaking about specific cases. "The key is the person who is monitor has to have a very good understanding of the business they're dealing in."

In the past few years, U.S. attorneys in Alabama, New York and Virginia have turned to corporate monitors to keep companies clean, hiring various former prosecutors and SEC officials with ties to President Bush, his father and other Republican luminaries. Some prosecutors hammer out with companies a short list of candidates from which to choose, while others have retained veto power over a business's choice. A smaller group has given corporate executives little input on the selection.

You can call me a crusty old liberal with a mean streak and a fetish for openness - go ahead, it has the advantage of being true - but damnit! I do not like the idea of privatizing justice and sure as hell not for a profit! And anyway, isn't that sort of oversight supposed to fall to the purview of the courts?

Comey: Cheney kiboshed career of Justice official who opposed domestic spying

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s written responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee are as dramatic and revealing as his testimony before the committee. Via his written responses, the Washington Post reports on a meeting that took place the day before at the White House:

"Mr. Comey has confirmed what we suspected for a while -- that White House hands guided Justice Department business," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "The vice president's fingerprints are all over the effort to strong-arm Justice on the NSA program, and the obvious next question is: Exactly what role did the president play?"(emphasis added)

According to Comey, the hospital visit was preceded by a March 9, 2004, meeting at the White House on the Justice Department objections. It was attended by Cheney; Gonzales; Card; Cheney's counsel then, David S. Addington; and others, Comey said.

Comey also named eight Justice Department officials who were prepared to quit if the White House had not backed down, including FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, current U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg of Alexandria and Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel and led an internal legal review of the surveillance program.

Comey said that the review "focused on current operations during late 2003 and early 2004, and the legal basis for the program." He declined to answer detailed questions about the program or the review, citing restrictions on classified information.

Bush confirmed the existence of the surveillance effort after news reports in December 2005, saying it was authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was vital to protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. The program has since been put under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees clandestine eavesdropping in the United States.

What exactly were they doing? Ashcroft is no civil libertarian – so what line did they cross and how far over it did they go? I shudder to think.


[Crossposted from WTWC]

More Ashcroft Mythbusting

"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to . . . enemies and pause to . . . friends." appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dec. 6, 2001.

Seriously…Let’s hold the phone for a sec. Gonzales is a dangerous Constitutional criminal and needs to be held accountable – and those who touted him for the Supreme Court should be chained in the public square and pelted with overripe produce – but let’s not forget who blazed the trail.

I have not forgotten that in the wake of that horrible day five years ago that stripping away those pesky civil liberties Americans have traditionally held was the default position for the Ashcroft-led Department of Justice. Trampling the Constitution was the first thing they thought to do in their quest to combat terrorism, not the last.

Ashcroft was the chief merchant of fear and he sold that bill of goods to a frightened, weak-minded populace that had actually bought into the myth of American Exceptionalism. His insidious efforts furthered the powers of the FBI to infiltrate every aspect of your life and mine. And he was the first to equate patriotism with marching in lockstep with the authoritarian agenda. Dissenters were unpatriotic and un-American. He planted those poisonous seeds of division, and pitted American against American for political gain. Don't forget his perfidy as you rush to lionize.

It was under Ashcroft that groups like the Quaker's were "infiltrated" - shades of COINTELPRO - by law enforcement agents for the purpose of collecting information on Americans who exercised their Constitutional prerogative to dissent - which pretty much obviates the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

He was the sleazy bastard who first cast aspersions on your patriotism because you had the temerity to value our Constitution and raise questions about the unlawful methods they were so eager to apply.

Let’s take a stroll down Memory Lane before we commission a bust of Ashcroft for the lobby of the ACLU local, whaddya say?

Everyone knows about the Patriot Act, and the abuses that have flowed from that assault on civil liberties, but doesn't anyone else remember TIA?

TIA stands for Total Information Awareness. It was a data-mining operation designed to allow the federal government to track all credit card purchases, listen in on telephone conversations, read your emails, check your medical records and track your movements.

No warrant required. Hell, they didn’t even really need to have a suspicion. They could do it just for giggles. TIA basically set the Fourth Amendment alight. In case you don’t have your copy of the Constitution handy (and why the hell don’t you?) or you can’t recite the Ten Commandments, er, the Bill of Rights from memory (and why the hell can’t you?) let me refresh your memory on just exactly what the Fourth Amendment guarantees:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

And remember TIPS? The spy-on-the-neighbors-and-report-those-Thought-Criminals!!! program that he tried to get attached to the legislation authorizing the creation of the Department of Homeland Security? (That effort failed)

TIPS stood for Terrorism Information and Prevention System (it morphed into the John Doe protection act while you weren’t paying attention to the mendacious authoritarian bastards on the right).

TIPS was designed to encourage citizens to snoop for the government. Mail carriers, UPS drivers, teachers, utility installers – people whose jobs involve interacting with the public, would have received training on *how to spot and report suspicious behavior.* (Like receiving mail from the ACLU or the SPLC, or having an anti-war bumper sticker, presumably.)

Military tribunals, and immigrant detentions in the absence of crime, indefinite detention without due process; these were more than the products of his right-wing authoritarian MO, they were where he went automatically. The Attorney General of the United States default setting was to ignore the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Let’s remember the assaults on liberty that were perpetrated at this mans hand before we enshrine him as a Guardian of Liberty.

Put in perspective just who it is that is looking so good by comparison, and get properly pissed already!

[Cross-posted from the blog you should be reading, Watching Those We Chose]

Calm down everyone...Ashcroft is not a moderate!!!

If anyone had told me five years ago that people on the left would be not merely defending John Ashcroft, but pining for the days when he was the Attorney General, I would quite possibly done myself an injury, so raucous would the laughter have been. And as soon as it subsided, I would have initiated the steps to start your involuntary commitment to a secure mental health facility.

So what did he do that is so rare and unique, that has his former political opponents fawning all over him like he was the second coming? He upheld the rule of law and the Constitution when he was the Attorney General.

That we are all gaga at the very notion is a sad commentary indeed on the tenure of the hapless, inept Gonzo.

Pardon me, but I’m supposed to get all atwitter about this? About the fact that the cabinet level appointment constitutionally charged with overseeing the Constitution actually drew the line somewhere short of total Constitutional abrogation?

Is the bar really that low after two years of the feckless and faithless Alberto Gonzales? I am afraid the answer to that query is a resounding “yes.”

Before we enshrine the portrait of John Ashcroft with a square halo on the stationery of the ACLU, let’s remember that Ashcroft oversaw the widest expansion of government power over the lives of ordinary Americans than this country has ever witnessed.

He was a primary force behind the USA Patriot Act, which was used to snoop into the lives and reading habits of ordinary Americans. In the days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 he pushed the INS to use their power to deport foreigners, and he cast the die for the “harsh treatment” of detainees – who had no rights to due process, thanks to Ashcroft.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, John Ashcroft was willing to err on the side of public safety at the expense of the Constitution and diminish our Civil Liberties to a footnote.

Begging John Ashcroft’s forgiveness for all the mean things you said about him is not the appropriate reaction here. The appropriate response is outrage at the perfidy of the Gonzales department of injustice. Outrage that the department has been so sullied by his banality and fecklessness that his predecessor – John Ashcroft!!! – looks like a card-carrying member of the ACLU by contrast…

[Cross-posted from the blog you should be reading, Watching Those We Chose]

What will it take to put impeachment back on the table?

Waiting for impeachment, I feel like I'm eight years old again, schlepping across the country in the back of a station wagon en route to DisneyWorld - Are we there yet???

Just when I start to think that the lowest levels of mendacious chicanery have been plumbed, we learn of the existence of a whole new sub-basement of perfidy. Logic dictates that we have to be nearing the gates of hell.

Is the realization dawning on you yet that your entire fucking country has been hijacked? The ideals that have allowed us to get away with projecting an aura of American Exceptionalism around the globe for the past half-century have been subverted, and the civil liberties that formed the justification for the original perception of exceptionalism were stripped away. The liberties that were not stripped away, were ignored, scoffed at and scorned by the authoritarian elites, whose offenses against liberty and the Constitution know no bounds.

Under the Bush maladministration, the American Way was taken out in the woods, and two were put behind the ear.

I am having a hard time getting my head around the idea that some of these Stalinist tactics actually came to be employed in my country. Mr. Yoo betrayed America when he conceived of the specious NSA domestic spying program.

…Mr. Bush backed down in the face of the threat of mass resignations, Mr. Ashcroft's included, and he apparently agreed to whatever more limited program the department was willing to approve. In the interim, however, the president authorized the program the Justice lawyers had refused to certify as legally permissible, and it continued for a few weeks more, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey's careful testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under the Constitution, the president has the final authority in the executive branch to say what the law is. But as a matter of presidential practice, this is breathtaking.

These are important topics for public discussion, and if anyone doubts that they can safely be discussed in public, they need look no further than Mr. Comey's testimony. Instead of doing so, Mr. Bush wants to short-circuit that discussion by invoking the continuing danger of al-Qaeda.

"And so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people, and programs that we constantly brief to Congress," Mr. Bush assured the country yesterday, as he brushed off requests for a more detailed account. But this is exactly the point of contention. The administration, it appears from Mr. Comey's testimony, was willing to go forward, against legal advice, with a program that the Justice Department had concluded did not "honor the civil liberties of our people." Nor is it clear that Congress was adequately informed. The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen.

Yes, even the normally staid Washington Post has had enough – I may get pissy with the Post sometimes, but that’s because I grew up with it and have Katherine Graham standards for the nation’s local paper, and I simply expect journalistic integrity from them. (I am of the age that my worldview was cast by Walter Cronkite and the Washington Post.) My long-standing fondness for the paper feels justified when they get it right, like when they followed the money and brought down a corrupt president, and Katherine Graham was willing to go to jail for contempt to protect the journalistic integrity of her paper. Like they currently exhibit by employing Dana Priest. Like they just exhibited today by denouncing the subversion of the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

We stand at the precipice people. If you are willing to sacrifice your freedom for a false illusion of safety in an inherently unsafe world, then Ben Franklin was right – you deserve neither safety nor security.

You feel free to capitulate to tyranny and surrender America without a fight.

You may be happy to be relieved of your liberties and responsibilities, but I will never surrender to fear, and you certainly do not speak for me.

I, for one, will never accept tyranny, I will never accept these assaults on my liberty. We knew how to deal with tyrants who abused our civil liberties back in 1776. If our government refuses to honor the will of the people and be set right, will we prove ourselves worthy descendants?

[Cross-posted from the blog you should be reading, Watching Those We Chose]