Wow. The New York Times editorial board calls for Congress to repeal the FISA reauthorization and modifications of 2008:

The 2008 expansion of FISA is a deeply flawed law. Congress needs to repeal it and re-examine, carefully this time, what powers the government really needs to eavesdrop on Americans and what limits and safeguards need to be placed on those powers.

This would be a necessary and needed step to restoring the rule of law in America. Unfortunately I don’t think it will likely happen any time soon. David Waldman at Congress Matters points out that Attorney General Eric Holder just defended that law and the retroactive immunity for telecoms contained there in as “settled law.” Holder did not give any indication that the administration viewed the law, which President Obama voted for, as unconstitutional or going too far in giving the government the power to spy on Americans without warrant. While I’ve heard that Senator Chris Dodd might try to legislate on FISA in the future, I cannot imagine it would happen any time soon, given his leadership on healthcare reform and financial sector reform. That said, I don’t see Congress pushing hard on legislation that reduces the ability of the government to spy on Americans without the support of the administration, which may or may not be forthcoming.

At least the editors of the Times have it right. Hopefully they continue to use their back page as a forum to highlight this issue and create pressure for change.

No one could have predicted that if Congress retroactively legalized illegal domestic surveillance and set up a new legal infrastructure for spying on Americans that the NSA wouldn’t find a way to still illegally spy on Americans without warrant.

The N.S.A. is believed to have gone beyond legal boundaries designed to protect Americans in about 8 to 10 separate court orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to three intelligence officials who spoke anonymously because disclosing such information is illegal. Because each court order could single out hundreds or even thousands of phone numbers or e-mail addresses, the number of individual communications that were improperly collected could number in the millions, officials said. (It is not clear what portion of total court orders or communications that would represent.)

“Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the N.S.A. also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation,” one senior intelligence official said. “That is the kind of problem they had.”

While there may be some further investigating by Congress into how this happened, I wouldn’t hold my breath that either FISA will be returned to its pre-Bush era strength or that the people responsible for illegally spying on Americans will be held to account.

I’ve never been a fan of Jesse Ventura, but he really owns rightwing hack Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View. What makes Ventura so powerful in this clip is that he is absolutely clear about what he believes and does not waiver from his absolute rejection of torture. Hasselbeck looks like the fool that she is arguing against Ventura in favor of torture.

Following a previous post, it’s worth highlighting Jonathan Landay’s remarkable investigative reporting for McClatchy that confirms that Bush-Cheney ordered torture for political purposes.

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn’t true.

Cheney’s 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration’s case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“I’m aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. “That was something they were tasked to look at.”

This goes back to David Waldman’s points on CNN regarding the use of torture for purely political purposes. What makes this so remarkable isn’t that there was torture in itself, but that it was ordered to advance the political prospects of the Republican Party and leadership that had lied the country into a preventive war of choice.

Via Eric Martin, The Editors really do have the quote of the day:

 Now that important figures in Washington have admitted to directly ordering more and worse, however, the question of even investigating whether some sort of crime may perhaps have taken place is fraught with all sort of beard-tugging brain-twisters which no man can untangle, even with the help of modern computer technology.  How can we investigate if we don’t know all the facts?  How dare we enforce laws against things which might possibly be permissible in some highly artificial thought experiment?  What if ‘24′ is FOR REALS?!?  These are the sorts of questions which need to be shrugged at for 50 billion news cycles before we can even think about OH MY GOD A SHARK ATE A WHITE LADY AT HER WEDDING!!!!!  We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.  I’m not sure that’s such a great idea. [Emphasis added]

Sometimes dramatic sarcasm does a better job encapsulating the Beltway media culture than anything else. This is obviously one of those times, because hyperbole isn’t possible when the simulacrum is actually no different from reality.

http://www.dailykostv.com/flv/player.swf

Via Jane Hamsher, David Waldman of DailyKos has an incredible segment where he demonstrates the real issues underlying the torture “debate” in America. Waldman rightly redirects the discussion towards the recent revelations regarding the Bush administration’s use of torture to, after the start of the Iraq War, prove “evidence” of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Jane writes, “Kagro’s absolute moral clarity on the subject is unique in a media landscape largely devoted to normalizing torture as an American value.” Indeed, this is exactly the sort of moral clarity both I and Peter Daou called for last week from the Obama administration. The question remains outstanding as to whether or not it will be forthcoming.

I have an idea for Roger Cohen. If he’s so fundamentally opposed to upholding the rule of law in the United States of America that he would rail against the prosecution of Bush administration officials and intelligence operatives who broke the law by torturing or advised that the law be broken, then we should find an alternative solution. Cohen suggests a Truth Commission, but I think it should be done with a twist. After all, knowing what illegal activities happened (though we already know many when it comes to torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, and secret prisons) is nice, but it’s not the point. Cohen thinks this is a better option, as prosecutions of law breakers would “lacerate” country.

Here’s my suggestion: if people like Roger Cohen think the rule of law in America is so unimportant and slight that we survive as a country when the people who break our laws are not prosecuted, but still wants everyone to know what happened, why not hold trials for the Jay Bybees, John Yoos, and others of the world who should be investigated and prosecuted — but leave them out of the docket. Instead, have media figures like Cohen stand on trial in their place, ready to serve whatever punishment the justice system metes out to Bybee, Yoo, Bradbury et alia. After all, the fundamental problem that Cohen seems to have is that a Democratic administration or Congress prosecuting Republican officials for their illegal actions is that it would be inherently divisive and partisan. Prosecuting non-partisan opinion column writers for the crimes of the people they don’t want to see prosecuted bears none of the same risks.  I’d be curious to see if Cohen’s desire for comity is so great that he would bear the weight of punishment of those people he defends in columns like this.

Criminal penalties exist precisely because maintaining the law does indeed require putative measures when it is broken. The persistent drive by moderate columnists to apologize for the Bush administration’s illegal actions while simultaneously describing out country as a frail thing, incapable of honestly looking in the mirror at was done in our names, is sickening. To go along with eight years where the rule of law was a quaint idea relegated to liberal blogs, having to watch a press corps actively trying to stop the revelation of facts about what happened during the previous administration and resist prosecution for law breakers is almost too much.

Hunter of Daily Kos had what I consider to be a very important piece in the debate on how people who believe in the rule of law and what it means for America should be reacting to the drive to not hold anyone accountable for illegal actions done as part of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 regime.  In his closing he writes:

But for today, I can only say damn you all to hell. Damn you all for making us — us, of all people, average citizens with no positions of power, with no power at all save whatever we can wring out of the thin air, and with nothing at stake but a sense of shared, basic, foundational morality — yet again rail for our own country to exercise a shred of the morality, the justice, the national greatness that it professes for all to hear. I was once outraged; I was, after that, ashamed; now I am only incredulous.

Roger Cohen has the ability to put pressure on those in power to hold  lawbreakers accountable for their actions. Instead he’s yet another voice for forgetting about the rule of law in pursuit of blissful comity. What a sorry situation. The government is supposed to follow the law. The judicial system is supposed to determine what has happened and how people should be punished for their illegal actions. And the press is supposed to always drive for greater transparency, scrutiny, and accountability. The extent to which things are not how they should be in America right now is too great to easily capture with words. At this point, only jaw-dropping shock seems to cover it.