The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
consortiumnews.com
By Robert Parry
July 10, 2008
Even Sen. Charles Schumer, whose vote last year ensured Michael
Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, was left sputtering as
Mukasey returned the favor by rebuffing Schumer’s concerns about the
Bush administration’s political prosecutions.
At the end of his round of Senate Judiciary Committee questions,
Schumer referred to allegations that White House political adviser
Karl Rove had pressed for the selective prosecution of Alabama’s
Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman, who was viewed as a threat to
Republican dominance of the South.
“Do you think that someone in the Justice Department should ask Karl
Rove whether he was involved, whether he did the things that are
alleged – someone somewhere – or is there a possibility that no one
should ever ask him?” the New York Democrat said, his voice rising.
Mukasey responded coolly that he would not endorse the questioning
of Rove. In disgust, Schumer said, “I find these answers very
disappointing.”
But Schumer was not alone. At the oversight hearings on July 9, the
committee’s Democrats and the ranking Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter
of Pennsylvania, voiced varying levels of disappointment at
Mukasey’s refusal to look back at the misconduct – including
criminal acts – that had occurred earlier in the Bush
administration.
Indeed, Mukasey’s evasive answers recalled the stonewalling of his
predecessor, Alberto Gonzales. Mukasey’s vague and meandering
responses made two things clear, however: George W. Bush’s hubris
about what he sees as his unlimited presidential powers continues
and Mukasey will serve as Bush's rearguard protector during his
final six months in office.
In a separate confrontation with two House committees, Mukasey has
promulgated a novel legal theory justifying his refusal to release
FBI reports on interviews with President Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney about their roles in exposing the identity of CIA
officer Valerie Plame.
Even though Bush has not asserted executive privilege regarding the
FBI reports, Mukasey has refused to honor subpoenas from the House
committees on the grounds that to do so would threaten “core
Executive Branch confidentiality interests and fundamental
separation of powers principles.”
Mukasey’s theory ignores a variety of precedents, including the
public release of criminal-case testimony by Bush’s three
predecessors (Bill Clinton on the Monica Lewinsky case, George H.W.
Bush on the Passportgate affair and the Iran-Contra scandal, and
Ronald Reagan on Iran-Contra.)
Nuremberg Defense
In his Senate testimony, Mukasey also left no doubt that the Justice
Department would take no action against anyone in the administration
who violated criminal statutes in the “war on terror” if they were
following legal advice from superiors, a modern version of the
so-called Nuremberg defense.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, urged Mukasey to “follow what I think
is the clear standard of the law within your own department and
initiate those investigations” into the Bush administration’s abuse
of detainees, including the use of “waterboarding,” a form of
simulated drowning.
Durbin noted that retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who was in
charge of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse probe, stated recently that
“the Commander in Chief and those under him authorized a systematic
regime of torture” and that “there is no longer any doubt about
whether the current administration committed war crimes, the only
question that remains is whether those who ordered the use of
torture will be held accountable.”
Mukasey, however, responded that anyone who acted in “good faith”
and relied on the Justice Department’s legal advice “cannot and
should not be prosecuted.” The same protection should cover
government lawyers who gave the advice, he said.
“What lawyers have to do is adhere to the law and not concern
themselves with what might be politically acceptable later on, and
if we go after them and prosecute them, then that’s exactly what
they’re going to be concerned with,” Mukasey said.
Mukasey’s point was that the lawyers were adhering to the law – and
acting above politics – when they authorized torture, and that
politics only entered the picture when someone thought they should
be punished for breaking the law.
The Attorney General's disdain for this subject was reflected, too,
when he told the senators that he still hasn’t bothered to determine
whether “waterboarding” is torture, arguing that he doesn’t need to
make that judgment because the technique is no longer part of the
administration’s approved tactics for interrogating detainees.
“I detect a very pronounced reluctance to look backwards into the
problems at the Department of Justice,” said Sen. Sheldon
Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, citing other troubling opinions from the
department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel that granted Bush
virtually unlimited powers.
Whitehouse, who also serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
said that in his review of still-secret legal opinions, “I’ve seen
exaggerated and unreasonable claims of executive authority” as well
as examples of poor scholarship. He called the OLC “George Bush’s
little shop of legal horrors.”
Whitehouse also suggested that Congress had only a vague idea of
other secret assertions of Bush’s powers. The senator cited an
unreleased OLC opinion that would permit the President to violate or
waive existing presidential executive orders without changing them
or disclosing the waiver.
This notion of secret presidential waivers raises concerns that
legal protections contained in executive orders could give false
comfort to Congress and American citizens, Whitehouse said. But
Mukasey endorsed Bush’s right to do whatever he wished regarding
executive orders.
No Surprise
Though Schumer and other Democrats expressed annoyance at Mukasey’s
refusal to hold the Bush administration accountable, the Attorney
General’s biases should not have come as a surprise.
When he was picked in September 2007 to replace Gonzales,
administration officials praised his work as a federal judge in New
York where he approved the indefinite incarceration of hundreds of
Muslims on phony material witness warrants after the 9/11 attacks.
He also signed off on Bush imprisoning an American citizen – and
Muslim convert – Jose Padilla simply on a presidential say-so that
Padilla was an “unlawful enemy combatant.”
Ironically, the Mukasey-approved round-up of Arab cab drivers, pizza
delivery men and students came as the Bush administration was
granting special permission for rich Saudis, including members of
Osama bin Laden’s family, to flee the United States after only
cursory FBI questioning.
The arresting of the “usual suspects” – while the well-connected who
actually might know something were whisked away – was perhaps the
first signal of how Bush’s “war on terror” would proceed, draconian
actions that create the appearance of a serious crackdown when the
reality was quite different.
Before his confirmation, Mukasey demonstrated where his loyalties
lay when he refused to venture an opinion on whether “waterboarding”
amounted to torture, claiming that he had not been briefed about the
program. That led most Democrats to oppose the nomination, but
Schumer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California provided the
Democratic votes needed to send Mukasey’s nomination to the Senate
floor and to confirmation.
After taking over the Justice Department, Mukasey still showed no
curiosity about the administration’s past use of torture or about
the legal opinions underpinning Bush’s theories of unlimited
presidential powers. The Attorney General insisted that his only
interest was in looking to the future.
So, despite the belated fuming by Schumer and other senators at the
July 9 hearing, Mukasey has long seen his role less as the nation’s
chief law enforcement officer than as the chief protector of Bush’s
crimes of state – from torture, to warrantless wiretaps of
Americans, to exposing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, to
unleashing the Justice Department against political enemies, etc.
Michael Mukasey has become the Bush administration’s new “Mr.
Cover-up.”
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two
previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty
from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press
& 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment
about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address
and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to
us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and
publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
Back to Home Page
