The last edition of “What Sidney Said”

Goodbye, Mr. Bush. A sad day indeed. I will miss you, Sidney. Good luck.

Joseph Heller meets Franz Kafka

The Bush Administration and the Pentagon find yet another creative way to support the troops. Wounded Iraq War vets are being ordered to return their signing bonuses because they can’t complete their tours of duty.

Studs

This needed to be said, and he said it well. The abuse of the Fourth Amendment under George W. Bush has been staggering, but is unfortunately not without precedent.

In 1920, during my youth, I recall the Palmer raids in which more than 10,000 people were rounded up, most because they were members of particular labor unions or belonged to groups that advocated change in American domestic or foreign policy. Unrestrained surveillance was used to further the investigations leading to these detentions, and the Bureau of Investigation — the forerunner to the F.B.I. — eventually created a database on the activities of individuals. This activity continued through the Red Scare of the period.

In the 1950s, during the sad period known as the McCarthy era, one’s political beliefs again served as a rationale for government monitoring. Individual corporations and entire industries were coerced by government leaders into informing on individuals and barring their ability to earn a living.

I was among those blacklisted for my political beliefs. My crime? I had signed petitions. Lots of them. I had signed on in opposition to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and in favor of rent control and pacifism. Because the petitions were thought to be Communist-inspired, I lost my ability to work in television and radio after refusing to say that I had been “duped” into signing my name to these causes.

By the 1960s, the inequities in civil rights and the debate over the Vietnam war spurred social justice movements. The government’s response? More surveillance. In the name of national security, the F.B.I. conducted warrantless wiretaps of political activists, journalists, former White House staff members and even a member of Congress.

The good news is that the nation’s course can still be corrected. (We need as much good news as we can get.)

More.

What Paul said

Especially this:

I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical care should get it, period. Even if you think adults have made bad choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by punishing their injured children.

Yes.

Sy Hersh does journalism

Curious about the Cheney Bush Administration’s planned Iraq strike? Seymour Hersh has plenty to keep you awake at night.

“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path out,” the former official said.

A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.”

Great.

The details

Once again, Sidney Blumenthal draws on phenomenal access to inside information and blends it with Robert Draper’s biography of Bush to paint a devastating and frightening portrait of a president in denial, in over his head, out of touch with reality and proud of it.

Blumenthal quotes one passage from Draper’s book that is particularly illuminating:

“History would acquit him, too. Bush was confident of that, and of something else as well,” writes Draper. “Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs.”

This explains so much. I’ve often wondered if Bush really believed the WMD line or if he was a willing participant in cynical manipulation. Finding out that he really believed it, and apparently still does, now strikes me as the more depressing of the two possibilities.

More Jack Goldsmith

Slate has another fascinating excerpt of Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. Goldsmith describes meeting with two FBI agents in a cafe on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. They were there to serve him with a subpoena as part of the investigation into the leaking of the secret NSA warrantless-wiretapping program to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times.

“We wanted to serve you in person as a favor because we expected you’d be mad,” Doe said. “We believe you told us the truth,” he added, assuring me that he did not suspect me as the source of the leak. He said he was not sure why the lawyers at the Justice Department had decided to subpoena me, but he suspected it was because of my contact with Lichtblau.

******

What angered me most about the subpoena I received on that wet day in Cambridge was not the expense of lawyers or a possible perjury trap, but rather the fact that it was Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department that had issued it. As Doe and Smith knew, I had spent hundreds of very difficult hours at OLC, in the face of extraordinary White House resistance, trying to clean up the legal mess that then-White House Counsel Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo, and others had created in designing the foundations of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. It seemed rich beyond my comprehension for a Gonzales-led Department of Justice to be pursuing me for possibly illegal actions in connection with the Terrorist Surveillance Program, I told the two wide-eyed FBI agents in Harvard Square.

Gotta get this book.

The Schloz

Would Bradley Schlozman make a good fall guy? Gee, I dunno. Let’s see: he ‘s admitted to violating civil service law , he’s resigned from the Department of Justice and his cranky demeanor combined with his high-pitched nasal squeaks in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee make him pretty easy to dislike. What do you think? Is Brad going down?

Jack Goldsmith on ‘Fresh Air’

Yesterday Terry Gross interviewed Jack Goldsmith, former head of the White House OLC, on her public radio show. Goldsmith is now a Harvard law professor. He was discussing his book The Terror Presidency: Judgment and the Law Inside the Bush Administration. I found some of the interview, such as the part concerning the “torture memos,” truly horrifying.

If he refused to believe it, is that still ‘knowing’?

Hmm…What Sidney said. Passed along without comment.

Lots of new books. For people who read them, about people who don’t…

Where to begin? There are many good books coming out. I’m particularly eager to read Robert Draper’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, for which digby has provided provocative commentary. And now we have The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration by Jack Goldsmith, former head of the White House Office of Legal Counsel. He clashed with David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s Constitution-shredding chief legal adviser, and eventually resigned.

“Why don’t we just go to Congress and get it to sign off on the whole detention program?” I asked, explaining that the Supreme Court would have a much harder time striking down a wartime detention program that had Congress’ explicit support. Clement concurred, as did John Bellinger, Condoleezza Rice’s legal adviser, and Department of Defense general counsel Jim Haynes. Those men had made this argument before. They had always been shot down, just as I was about to be.

“Why are you trying to give away the president’s power?” Addington responded. He believed that the very act of asking for Congress’ help would imply, contrary to the White House line, that the president needed legislative approval and could not act on his own. The president’s power would diminish, Addington thought, if Congress declined its support once asked, especially if it tried to restrict presidential power in some way. Congress had balked, during the month after 9/11, at giving the president everything he had asked for in the congressional authorization to use force and the Patriot Act. Things would only be worse in 2004 and beyond, Addington believed.

Slate has an excerpt.

Lost in translation?

Does anyone have video of this? I’ve tried viewing it via the CNN Web site and I can’t get it to actually PLAY. Multiple Youtube searches turned up nada.

On a visceral level

Hmm. What digby said. Passed on without comment.