Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Oversight

Hmm. I'm not sure what it says about me when I realize how much credit I'd give the President if he said: "Yes, I broke the law. I take full responsibility and have been working to fix the situation" as opposed to "I didn't break no laws! My lawyers say that the Constitution says I didn't! Nu-uh!"

Several of our conservative friends are under the misapprehension that there was indeed Congressional oversight over the project. This is understandable, as the President keeps saying it. That, sadly, doesn't automatically make it true. I know there's a certain percentage of people who sleep better believing the President has magic powers, among them the ability to shift reality through sheer force of his will, but, um, no.

And yes, I know that many times only a select few members of the Intelligence Committee are briefed on certain issues. But in this case, as this letter from Senator Rockefeller indicates, the Senators were told what was going on, told there was no way they could approve or disapprove, and then sworn to secrecy.

That's not oversight. Oversight means "watchful supervision". It means some level of control. Please pardon the crude metaphor: but if telling someone you're about to do something but they have no ability to moderate it or stop it gives them oversight, then a rape victim has "oversight" on her rapist. I call bullshit.

Oh, and for the inevitable "When will you people realize we're in a war" post: Yes, I realize that. But a war to preserve ... what? The Founding Fathers had Britain breathing down their neck. They didn't blink. I recently saw a Congressman on TV say "If Washington DC goes up in nuclear fire, the Constitution burns with it." If you want to reduce our freedoms to historical scraps of paper, that makes sense, I guess.

This isn't a war -- there's no "winning" until you eliminate every dissatisfied wingnut with a cellphone and C4 on the planet, and that ain't gonna happen in the next two hundred years. (Hell, we can't even police our own wingnuts. Remember Oklahoma City? ... You don't. No, that doesn't tend to come up much, does it ...) I mean, go ahead -- give me a definition of an operational victory in the "War on Terror". Impossible. We can't even nail down operational goals in Iraq.

No, what we're in is a long, hard struggle between order and chaos, freedom and fundamentalism, with all four sides often cross-pollinating. We are in a struggle that will every day challenge our sense of justice and identity, challenge us to rise above our fear. What's really amusing, in a grim way, is that such a struggle has a name out there in the languages of the world. It's usually mis-translated as "war", too.

We're in a jihad, folks.

Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor. The Bastard.

38 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love how they are parsing that the Senate "knew" about this. I can imagine that briefing to the Intelligence Committee:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have the NSA spying...er, monitoring...ok, maybe...detecting? Yeah, let's run with that. Anyway...we've got domestic intel. We've told you about it, but you can't tell anyone else. Pinky swear. No fingers crossed. Especially you Feinstein, we may make you take the blood oath..."

I feel so glad knowing that maybe a dozen or so people in the Senate know this is going down but can't do a *thing* about it.

I think Bamford is going to get another book of material about this.


(And if this website is being swept, I love baseball, apple pie, and Marilyn Monroe.)

Anonymous said...

Step away from your laptop. The coffee shop is surrounded.

s.warren said...

I love the latest excuse that they're pimpin'. We knew we could get warrants afterwards, but it was a lot of paper work, man.

Doctor Memory said...

Actually, we don't call the ongoing struggle between freedom and totalitarianism "jihad". We call it fucking life on earth. This has been the narrative of history going back since before the written word, and anyone who thinks that 9/11/01 marked some epochal turning point in that struggle needs to check themselves, quick.

The point about Britain needs some amplifying, since "the bill of rights is not a suicide pact" has become a common talking point among the mouth-breather crowd. It's literally amazing to me to watch people nod their heads and agree to this nonsense. Not a suicide pact? In 1776, the Empire of Great Britain was the greatest military power the world had ever known. They controlled a swath of the planet so large that Ghengis Khan himself would have wept with envy. The British Navy was not just the dominant military force of the times, it was the single most powerful military in human history. And a bunch of upstart colonists, who had at the time a mere handful of irregular troops and not a single ship of the line, signed their names (pledging "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor") to documents which said, in sum: "Dear George III: fuck right off." A suicide pact was exactly what it was. And now we're supposed to cower in our homes and abandon all we've achieved because a bearded nutball in a cave in Afghanistan might, one day, try his luck again.

(Um, sorry, this turned into a rant somewhere along the way. These things happen.)

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