Horse Shit.

I’ve decided not to call this post “A Tree Falls in The Woods V” and instead to name it something more appropriate.

I’ll just open by stating there’s a lot going on these days, if I can be allowed the “easy out” of a criminally dull understatement. Washington Mutual, a savings and loan bank, possibly the biggest, has collapsed. The only surprise of the last 24 hours is that Wachovia was not sold to JPMorgan Chase, but to rival CitiGroup. The end of the investment banking economy on Wall Street seems to dwarf everything else on my horizon, and some of these mergers and acquisitions smell like flagrant antitrust violations disguised as rescues… But I think the founder and my co collaborator on this blog had always intended this to be a forum where the overlooked, the fictionalized, the distorted elements of our social and political lives could be set straight, brought back into focus and afforded their deserved centrality. I’ll put off writing about the latest developments in what’s left of the financial markets and the bail out agreement that nears completion to focus on something being swept under the rug while we’re all distracted by the legitimate panic over our economy.

So here goes: Henry Waxman, Congressman from California and the Democratic chairman of the he House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, subpoenaed Attorney General Mukasey in June 2008 for the transcripts of interviews with Vice President Dick Cheney as well as the transcripts of President George W. Bush’s interview with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald -and most importantly the Grand Jury testimony of Karl Rove. This as you already know, is all because key Bush administration officials leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to journalists between June and July of 2003. This leak was the White House’s attempt to retaliate against her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. Ambassador, for aggressively criticizing President Bush’s knowing misuse of flimsy intelligence to justify the March to war in an Op Ed piece in the New York Times.

Valerie Plame’s name was revealed on July 14, 2003, by journalist Robert Novak, which effectively marked her and everyone she ever worked with still operating in the field for violent reprisals by enemies of the United States. It took a formal CIA complaint to the Justice Department to start a criminal probe into exactly who in the Bush Administration was/were responsible for the leaks.

-Yes, let that sink in: the CIA had to file a complaint against the White House.

AG Mukasey had advised President Bush to invoke Executive Privilege powers to stop release of the transcripts after the investigation began but Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald maintained all of these documents could be turned over to Congress, i.e. the representatives of the people of the United States under an authorization by the Department of Justice.
The week before last, the contents of Dick Cheney’s interview transcripts and the others related to this investigation were cited as “classified” for the first time. The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel maintains that the documents are withheld because they contain information “protected from disclosure” by the National Security Act of 1947.

That is a bunch of Horse Shit.

In my life, there has not been a more criminal administration than the White House of George W. Bush. That’s no small statement considering I was alive (albeit a small child) during Richard Nixon’s presidency. These smug, impossibly rich elitists laugh at our laws and imperil human beings to suit their own ends. I’m talking about things like: Going after a guys’ wife because they can’t silence his criticism of them even though she’s a CIA Operative and her identity is supposed to be protected under our treason laws; I’m talking about sending young and not so young men and women to invade and police a country so that friends and associates of the Bush administration can come in on no-bid contracts that make the deficit skyrocket; I’m talking about going after people in our own government, in our own taxpayer funded intelligence apparatus; I’m talking about trying to rig the justice department so that it’s an instrument of their will and not an institution that safeguards the rule of law and the constitution for you, me and everyone you know and don’t know.

A federal judge ordered Vice President Cheney to preserve all documents during his terms as Vice President on September 20, 2008. Someday, the country will be allowed the privilege of knowing the truth about what these crooks did while they were in office to people like Valerie Plame and possibly others.

“So?”

-SJ