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WaPo: You Should Give the $800 Billion Away with No Oversight

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The WaPo is joining Crazy Pete Hoekstra in his opposition to having whistleblower protection in the stimulus bill. To oppose whistleblower protection, they’re reduced to poo-pooing the notion that it’s sort of important to have oversight when you give $800 billion in government funds out.

The $800 billion stimulus package making its way through Congress is supposed to include measures to jump-start the economy — extension of unemployment benefits and food stamps, infrastructure programs to create jobs. But whistleblower protections? 

[snip]

But attaching the bill to the stimulus package under the pretext that stronger whistleblower protections will enhance fiscal accountability is disingenuous.

Uh, yeah. The last eight years of widespread fraud really proves that protecting whistleblowers before you give away billions and billions is just a "pretext."

Right.

But what the WaPo is really worried about is the same thing Crazy Pete is worried about: if you give whistleblower protection to federal employees, that means you give whistleblower protection to federal intelligence employees. And, the WaPo argues, you can’t have federal intelligence employees revealing fraud and wrong-doing if the President doesn’t want them to.

The measure extends such protections to employees who work in the intelligence arena, including those at the FBI, and would give such employees the unilateral right to disclose to congressional overseers classified material. The measure also calls for federal court review of executive branch decisions to revoke an employee’s security clearance. 

[snip]

The executive branch is constitutionally charged with protecting and controlling classified information. A legislative attempt to override the executive could very well be unconstitutional. It is, in any event, irresponsible to condone and essentially immunize an employee’s unilateral breach.

The Justice Department, as long ago as the Clinton administration, has vigorously opposed expanding whistleblower protections to national security employees.

Now, set aside the question of whether, at a time when we’re privatizing intelligence functions on a massive scale, it would be a good thing to make sure intelligence professionals have some means to report wrong-doing. Put aside the question of whether or not you’d like someone to be able blow the whistle if all that data the government has collected on you were used in improper ways.

Consider the fact that this is a newspaper attacking whistleblower protections.

There are two ways to think about this phenomenon, a newspaper attacking whistleblower protections. Perhaps this is just an indication that the WaPo no longer cares about exposing wrong-doing. Read more →

Why We Can't Have Federal Whistleblowers, Per Congress

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I’m watching the debate over amendment adding federal whistleblower protection to the stimulus package, on CSPAN.

And thus far, I’ve seen the following explanations for why we can’t have our billions of dollars in stimulus and TARP funds protected by Federal whistleblower protections.

Crazy Pete Hoekstra says we can’t have federal whistleblower protection because it would expose sources and methods.

Think about that. We can’t allow federal employees to come forward to report waste and fraud (and subsequently have their jobs protected) because doing so would expose sources and methods. 

Apparently, we’re stimulating the economy by employing a bunch of new spooks.

Then, another Congressman (sorry, didn’t get who it was) who argued that federal whistleblower protection would make it hard for TSA to ramp up screeners quickly.

Don’t worry, though, because the amendment just passed. So apparently those spooks who are getting hired under stimulus (!) better be careful…

Torture Tape Investigation in HPSCI

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Last week we learned that John Durham asked a computer forensics expert to contribute to a legal declaration pertaining to whether or not the CIA Inspector General had–or had ever had–evidence pertaining to the interrogations of two Gitmo detainees.

Today we learn that two of the people involved in the Torture Tape destruction are current high-raking Administration officials.

The [HPSCI] panel interviewed two “current, high-level government officials” in April, according to a congressional official, who declined to name the officials.

Both [Intelligence] panels have interviewed CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. 

It’s not clear whether this passage means that Hayden (who just resigned from the military) is one of the two "current, high-level government officials" or not–he’d certainly qualify.

But that leaves another "current, high-level government official." This is significant because several of the key players (like Jose Rodriguez, who remains under subpoena from HPSCI) are former officials. Two notable exceptions are John Rizzo, who works in CIA’s General Counsel office, and John Helgerson, CIA’s Inspector General. We also know that John Negroponte, currently at State, wrote a memo pertaining to the Torture Tapes when he was DNI. Finally, there’s always everyone’s favorite current high-level government official involved with the torture tapes, David Addington.

But I’m not holding my breath.

I’m just as intrigued by the news that Crazy Pete Hoekstra and Silvestre Reyes have gotten into a spat over this investigation.

The House investigation has been riven by partisan disputes. In January, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the panel’s ranking Republican, publicly took issue with Democrats over issuing a subpoena for Rodriguez, selecting witnesses and other aspects of the investigation. Democrats have maintained that they have been responsive to Republican input.

A spokesman for Hoekstra declined to comment Tuesday.

As I have said repeatedly, one of the people spinning hard to dissociate himself from the Torture Tape destruction is Porter Goss, who was head of the CIA when the Torture Tape was destroyed, and who received Negroponte’s warning not to destroy the Torture Tape. I’ve long worried that an HPSCI investigation, handled badly, would work the same way Lee Hamilton and Dick Cheney’s HPSCI investigation into Iran-Contra did–to immunize key players from prosecution. In particular, I’ve worried about Pete Hoekstra attempting to protect his former colleague, Porter Goss, from any incrimination.

So I consider it a good sign that Crazy Pete has his knickers in a twist about the investigation. 

“It Smells Like a Cover-Up”

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So sayeth one of Pincus and Warrick’s two sources describing the content of John Rizzo’s testimony. Mind you, that source remains anonymous, because "those in attendance were pledged to secrecy about the session." Of course, that didn’t prevent Crazy Pete Hoekstra from blabbing to the NYT and others about it, but he’s never believed that laws on secrecy should apply to him as well as staffers. Though, since I beat up Pincus yesterday for helping Bennett tamper with this investigation, let me just say that he offers, by far, the most interesting tidbit about Rizzo’s testimony.

Two of those at the hearing said that Rizzo said that after the tapes were made in 2002, lawyers at the CIA discussed the possibility that the FBI and the 9/11 Commission might want to see them.

If Rizzo has testified that lawyers at the CIA knew the 9/11 Commission might want to see the terror tapes, it strongly reinforces Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton’s claim that,

There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the C.I.A. — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot. Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations.

In fact, lawyers at the CIA knew that the 9/11 Commission would want to see these specific tapes. Which I guess is why George Tenet has lawyered up.

Meanwhile, the battle between Rodriguez, Rizzo, and Goss seems to be heating up. Bob Bennett specifically named Rizzo and Goss to the NYT as those who should have told Rodriguez to retain the tapes.

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Oversight or Politics?

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Michael Mukasey has engaged in a remarkable bit of sophistry with his refusal to clue Congress in on the joint DOJ/CIA IG investigation into the destruction of the torture tapes. He explains his decision as an attempt to avoid "any perception that our law enforcement decisions are subject to political influence."

As to your remaining questions, the Department has a long-standing policy of declining to provide non-public information about pending matters. This policy is based in part on our interest in avoiding any perception that our law enforcement decisions are subject to political influence. Accordingly, I will not at this time provide further information in response to your letter, but appreciate the Committee’s interests in this matter. At my confirmation hearing, I testified that I would act independently, resist political pressure and ensure that politics plays no role in cases brought by the Department of Justice. Consistent with that testimony, the facts will be followed wherever they lead in this inquiry, and the relevant law applied.

Of course, the "political influence" Mukasey was asked to address during his nomination hearings was the kind exerted when a Senator or a Congresswoman called the Attorney General privately to demand that a USA either accelerate the prosecution of a political figure or be fired. In this matter, Mukasey has been asked to respond to what is an almost unparalleled degree of bipartisan support for an open inquiry into a matter that just stinks, already, of a cover-up. Leahy and Specter (and Reyes and Hoekstra and Durbin and Biden and more) called for a procedure that had oversight built in.

And Mukasey said no. Read more →

Congress and the Torture Tapes

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First, let me start with some congratulations. For once, Jane Harman appears to have been on the right side of an issue, in this case warning the CIA (in writing) not to destroy the torture tapes. She’s now demanding that Michael Hayden declassify that letter so we can all see it.

This matter must be promptly and fully investigated and I call for my letter of February 2003, which was never responded to and has been in the CIA’s files ever since, to be declassified.

Congratulations Jane. Glad to have you on the side of light and goodness for the moment.

Harman’s then-counterpart in the Senate (Harman is no longer in HPSCI, which is why she didn’t learn of the tapes when HPSCI did), Jello Jay Rockefeller, appears to have followed the CIA’s script they gave him–until he stopped to think or someone did so for him. On Thursday, as this news was coming out, Jello Jay released the following statement.

While we were provided with very limited information about the existence of the tapes, we were not consulted on their usage nor the decision to destroy the tapes. And, we did not learn until much later, November 2006 — 2 months after the full committee was briefed on the program — that the tapes had in fact been destroyed in 2005.

And then, yesterday he revealed that that story was what the CIA had told him, not what he knew or believed to be true or, more importantly, what the record proved.

Last night, the CIA informed me that it believes that the leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee was told of the decision to destroy the tapes in February 2003 but was not told of their actual destruction until a closed committee hearing held in November 2006.

The committee has located no record of either being informed of the 2003 CIA decision or being notified late last year of the tapes having being destroyed. A review of the November 2006 hearing transcript finds no mention of tapes being destroyed.

No wonder Jello Jay always touts the CIA party line–his first instinct is to read from the script they give him.

Meanwhile, Crazy Pete Hoekstra, current Ranking Member of HPSCI, sounds remarkably like Dick Durbin. Here’s Durbin: Read more →