Shoulda been my 4 – Were you shocked when you discovered that the “authorizations” to the programs were military orders?

Could this be the backdrop to Card’s catty remark to Comey after the hospital visit whether Comey was “refusing” to come to the White House? Comey clearly states his is not refusing an order, just delaying his arrival until he secured a witness. Military Commission Act trials and such maybe were dancing in everyone’s heads…Card’s and Comey’s alike.

Learned that Angler in the title is/was the Secret Service’s code name for Cheney.
But does Cheney fish? And with a fishing rod or a quail shot gun?

The name is fitting enough with its double meaning: Cheney angling to get his way and all.
I first was thinking about CIA’s Angleton, who was criticized for his paranoia and his tearing apart the intelligence community searching in vain for a mole. “Angler” sounds like a dedicated follower of Angleton’s methods.

Lindsay, one quote has always stuck with me, from Joan Didion’s essay for the New York Review of Books, Cheney: The Fatal Touch.

Cheney’d said, during his 1989 confirmation hearing as SecDef:

I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service. I don’t regret the decisions I made. I complied fully with all the requirements of the statutes, registered with the draft when I turned 18. Had I been drafted, I would have been happy to serve. I think those who did in fact serve deserve to be honored for their service…. Was it a noble cause? Yes, indeed, I think it was.

Didion’s work resonates. Cheney’s always had “other priorities”, opaque to most of us; his entire life was dedicated to these nebulous, unspecified priorities, going about his own way to fulfill the objectives those priorities defined, most of the time at our expense but without explanation to us. He’s committed — good choice of words, thank you — to those priorities.

But he is a selfish, heartless, cold-blooded bastard because he ultimately lives off us like a leech and feels no compunction to ask what our priorities are, feels no obligation to be transparent in any way, feels no need to be a servant to the needs of the nation rather than his own, closed-off, firewalled priorities.

Gellman does a fine job of picking through Cheney, continuing the work first started with the WaPo Angler pieces (that drove me crazy for weeks, digging through maps of the northwest to try and figure out what priority it was that drove Cheney to ultimately kill off so many salmon). But ultimately there is no answer to the question: who is it that inhabits the skin we call Dick Cheney?

Perhaps we continue to expect to find humanity there and we do not recognize what we find instead — an entity with priorities that do not look like those we recognize as caring, civil humans.

Maybe Cheney should be doing road-work laying pavement on the proverbial road to the warmest climes …?

Otherwise, a most interesting book salon.

I note that eCAHN was clearly having a good deal of fun.

;~D

I’m prepared to believe that he champions crony capitalism and authoritarianism because he believes that’s what’s best for the country. One could argue that these princples are just a smokescreen to justify his personal lust for power. Maybe the ideology gelled around the ambition. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. He is entirely committed to those principles in thought, word, and deed.

Powerful people, being questioned by people who they believe have no right to question them are interesting to watch. I’ve had an opportunity to work with some smart, powerful and arrogant people. When you challenge them the anger is right below the surface and most people with emotional intelligence can see it. It is an explosive anger that they want people to see at times, because they can use it to control and manipulate.

It is like the power of the bully who would have physically harmed someone in the past but has now switched to be an intellectual who uses financial or legal power to harm someone. If they had less self control they would have exploded which might have revealed more than they wanted.

I’ll toss this out – it’s a part of my theory on why there was an almost panicked ripple out on the problems with the program. It’s been reported that the FISCt Chief Judges (Lamberth, then Kollar-Kotelly) both ordered firewalls to keep what they considered to be the Unconstitutional program from infecting and tainting FISA applications. We also know that the FISCt had some experience with shennanigans involving applications and Fran Townsend, as an example, discovered how tough the court could be.

It’s also been reported that Thompson began to refuse to sign FISA applications (and you have to wonder if that’s not because he realized that the court ordered firewalls could not really be maintained the way the program was operating in fact). THere have also been references here and there implying that it was partly the review of the manner in which the program was operating, as well as the legal underpinnings, that caused the problems.

Leonnig reported that, at a seeming contemporaneous time as the showdown, Kollar-Kottelly was told about breaches of the firewalls and was furious – those would have been signed by Ashcroft, as Thompson had begun to refuse.

It seems to me that in part, the problem was that there was no way – under the mechanics for how the program was operationg at the time – to actually comply with the Court’s firewall orders. And so every application being made to FISCt, was being made with a substantial likelihood of non-compliance with the order. And what the lawyers wanted was to have the program modified only so much as necessary so that they could at least comply with the court orders. ANd they were perhaps being told “screw the FISCt, you do what the President says, not what the court orders”

And about this time, the Chief Judge was ready, per Leonnig’s story, to take action against Ashcroft and possibly Mueller.

So it seems to me likely that a part of the impetus was not just the problems with the program’s authorizations, but also that the effect of continuing the program under the existing authorizations would be to cause all the future applications to the FISCt to be KNOWINGLY in breach of the court’s orders – putting the AG in a position where he would be likely to be misrepresenting, or lying, to the court with every application. Putting DOJ in that same position with respect to the courts. Basically, telling the lawyers there, not just that Bush was the highest intradepartmental source of law, but that in a conflict between Bush and the courts, lawyers for the DOJ should disregard the courts.

One possiblity fwiw.