Glenn Greenwald wrote an amazing piece this morning and, since he doesn't crosspost here, this diary is to make sure everyone gets a chance to see it. It's worth a full read.
Titled, "The DOJ pursues the 'real criminal' in the NSA spying scandal," Greenwald recounts how mid-level Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm risked his reputation and career, even his freedom, to expose the illegality of the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping and how DOJ has relentlessly gone after him since. Meanwhile Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez and their many Congressional enablers (so many alleged Democrats among them), the very people charged with oversight, have stymied all efforts to investigate and gotten away with burying their misdeeds and complicity behind the FISA wall of retroactive immunity.
Greenwald discusses how conventional Washington is outraged by the notion that any of the guilty parties should be prosecuted (since justice is apparently only for commoners).
There are few viewpoints, if there are any, which trigger more fervent agreement across the political and media establishment than the view that George Bush, Dick Cheney and other top officials should not be criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted, for the various laws they have broken over the last eight years. Conversely, in the Beltway world, few things will render you "Unserious" as quickly and irrevocably as arguing that Bush officials should be held accountable under the rule of law for their multiple violations of criminal statutes. Everyone from Cass Sunstein and Ruth Marcus to David Broder and Stuart Taylor valiantly stands up and defends the President and his top aides against the terribly uncouth and disruptive suggestion that their crimes merit investigation and prosecution.
He then introduces us to Tamm, who "watched his life be virtually destroyed by the FBI's ensuing -- and still ongoing -- criminal investigation into this disclosure."
Greenwald points out that, with Bush on his way out the door, DOJ continues to harass Tamm as though he were Public Enemy #1. In fact, they seem desperate to cut him down before the clock runs out. This, the very same DOJ that sanctioned so much high-level criminality under Bush (and continues to do so).
He then contrasts "Tamm's heroic behavior with the complicity and cowardice of people like Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman."
It is not in dispute that those Democratic Congressional leaders were told -- repeatedly, over the course of years -- that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by FISA. They had the obligation to use their considerable power to put a stop to illegal intelligence activities when they learned of them; that is, after all, the whole point of why the law requires that Congressional leaders be briefed on intelligence activities.
Yet these Democratic Congressional leaders did absolutely nothing to impede Bush's illegal surveillance. They did the opposite. Pelosi's "concern" was that the CIA ensure it had obtained "specific presidential authorization" for the illegal program -- i.e. she merely wanted to be assured that the President had personally ordered this illegal spying. Jay Rockefeller meekly sent a pitiful handwritten letter to Dick Cheney (.pdf) that Rockefeller then impotently and harmlessly placed in his little drawer, and never did anything else to object. And Jane Harman, upon learning in 2004 that the NYT knew about the NSA program, replicated Bush's efforts to bully Lichtblau out of writing the story. Then -- once the NYT finally wrote about it -- she went on Fox News and vigorously defended "the program" as "both legal and necessary," and then went on Meet the Press and disgustingly suggested she'd even be open to the idea that the New York Times -- but not the Bush administration -- should be prosecuted ("I think it is tragic that a lot of our capability is now across the pages of the newspapers").
Greenwald details how none of these Congressional enablers have called for any investigation (for what he terms "obvious reasons") but rather worked to bury all evidence behind FISA telecom immunity.
He concludes as follows:
That's America's justice system in a nutshell: the President who deliberately and knowingly violated our 30-year-old law making it a felony offense to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants has the entire political and media class eagerly defend him against prosecution. Those who enabled him -- in both parties -- block investigations into what was done. Ruth Marcus and Cass Sunstein and friends offer one excuse after the next to justify this immunity. But the powerless and defenseless -- though definitively courageous -- public servant who blew the whistle on this lawbreaking is harassed, investigated, and pursued by the DOJ's Criminal Division to the point of bankruptcy and depression, while the lawbreakers and their enablers stand by mute and satisfied.
Let's hope that Pelosi, Rockefeller, Bond, Lieberman and others are wetting their beds at night over the prospect of Panetta at CIA, knowing things will change under Obama. Let's hope the new administration does the right thing, standing up for real justice rather than Washington conventional wisdom that says any effort to sanction criminal activity among the elite would be pure political partisanship, that law enforcement is only for drug users and "little people."
If We the People means anything, then as the elder George Bush sanctimoniously said about Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, "This shall not stand!" We can only hope -- and make our best efforts, together with men like Greenwald, to keep a spotlight on this issue, keep pressure on the Obama Administration, and not allow Constitutional abrogration to be swept under the rug.