It All Matters!

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It's not whether the president called. It's what he did.
Friday, May 18, 2007; A22

IT DOESN'T much matter whether President Bush was the one who phoned Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's hospital room before the Wednesday Night Ambush in 2004. It matters enormously, however, whether the president was willing to have his White House aides try to strong-arm the gravely ill attorney general into overruling the Justice Department's legal views.

Oh yes it does matter. It matters for a couple of very important reasons:

1) Whoever he talked to (Mrs. Ashcroft?) can testify to the fact that Bush was not only aware of what was happening, he was also assisting in it, bringing the power of the office of the presidency to bear on the Ashcroft family. It also shows involvement in a conspiracy to commit a crime, by some of the highest elected and appointed offices in the land.

2) It helps us continue to put pieces of the puzzle together, so that more of a painting is revealed; a portrait of corruption, lawlessness, political and economic thuggery, incompetence, a chilling contempt for democracy, as well as right, lawful use of government power for the well-being of the people. The story being told is as important as the legal ins and outs.

It matters enormously whether the president, once that mission failed, was willing nonetheless to proceed with a program whose legality had been called into question by the Justice Department. That is why Mr. Bush's response to questions about the program yesterday was so inadequate.

No one relly expected him to tell the truth, did they? Especially, after the aforementiond tale of thuggery had been told.

"I'm not going to talk about it," Mr. Bush told reporters at a news conference with departing British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "It's a very sensitive program. I will tell you that, one, the program is necessary to protect the American people, and it's still necessary because there's still an enemy that wants to do us harm."

Ah yes, those good old Bushie mis-direction aanswers. This is like when somone asks him if he doesn't think that maybe it was a mistake to lie his ass off and get us into this quagmiire in Iraq and he says we should support the troops. What the hell does one ting have to do with the other.

No one is asking Mr. Bush to talk about classified information, and no one is discounting the terrorist threat. But there is a serious question here about how far Mr. Bush went to pressure his lawyers to implement his view of the law. There is an even more serious question about the president's willingness, that effort having failed, to go beyond the bounds of what his own Justice Department found permissible.

His refusal to answer the question means he was willing to bump off his own grandmother to keep his spy/data-mining program. That isn't all that hard to figure out. The question remains why? Why did he simply not go to the GOP lead Congressand ask them to fix the law? Well, perhaps it was because the target of the program was not al Qaeda, but the Congress, as well as other "domestic enemies."

Yes, Mr. Bush backed down in the face of the threat of mass resignations, Mr. Ashcroft's included, and he apparently agreed to whatever more limited program the department was willing to approve. In the interim, however, the president authorized the program the Justice lawyers had refused to certify as legally permissible, and it continued for a few weeks more, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey's careful testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under the Constitution, the president has the final authority in the executive branch to say what the law is. But as a matter of presidential practice, this is breathtaking.

It certainly is. What is truly stunning is that this president would ever be left to decide the legality of anything. He isn't even a lawyer.

These are important topics for public discussion, and if anyone doubts that they can safely be discussed in public, they need look no further than Mr. Comey's testimony. Instead of doing so,
Mr. Bush wants to short-circuit that discussion by invoking the continuing danger of al-Qaeda.
"And so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people, and programs that we constantly brief to Congress," Mr. Bush assured the country yesterday, as he brushed off requests for a more detailed account.

The al qaeda thing is wearing a little thin, especially when stacked up against the portrait that is being painted by each new day of testimony

But this is exactly the point of contention.

The administration, it appears from Mr. Comey's testimony, was willing to go forward, against legal advice, with a program that the Justice Department had concluded did not "honor the civil liberties of our people." Nor is it clear that Congress was adequately informed. The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain.

That cannot be allowed to happen.

Amen


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