MSNBC is reporting that Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) is calling for an end to the CIA interrogation probe. Hoekstra says:
This [the original investigation] was done by career attorneys within the Justice Department, who made the determination that no investigations were warranted. And, we’re really going to send a chilling effect not only through the CIA but through the entire federal bureaucracy, and maybe through the criminal justice system if we say that every time there is a change in administration the decisions that were made by the previous administration are going to be up for grabs and are going to be re-evaluated. There’s no indication at all in these cases that the decisions that were reached were politicized decisions. These were career professionals who made the determination that, no, there was not enough wrongdoing or there was no wrongdoing that warranted prosecution.
Let’s go into the three falsehoods in this attack on the Justice Department.
Hoekstra’s comments came on Andrea Mitchell Reports. This is an attack that Democrats in Congress need to immediately address. Democrats need to make it clear that if the CIA investigation is ended or short-circuited in any way that Congress will take up this investigation itself. This will squash this move immediately. Remember, Republicans use these things to pressure the government to do their bidding. Letting this go unopposed is a sign of weakness, and Republicans always exploit any show of weakness. Unless they are aggressively opposed at this point with the threat that it will get worse for them, they will continue.
Hoekstra makes several mistakes in this short comment. The first is, “we’re really going to send a chilling effect”. This is “The Wounded Intelligence Defense” (see Prosecuting Officials for Crimes in Dkosopedia). We need to respond with the following:
Clear guidelines on what is right and what is wrong did not impede our intelligence efforts prior to the Bush Administration, and they won’t in the future. If anything, knowing where the public stands on this, where the courts stand, where the law stands, and where Congress stands would be useful to helping intelligence officers know exactly what they can and cannot do in their operations.
The second mistake is, “These were career professionals who made the determination that, no, there was not enough wrongdoing or there was no wrongdoing that warranted prosecution.” The fact that there were career professionals involved means nothing in the Bush Administration. The Bush/Cheney politicians are infamous for putting pressure on the career professionals to come up with politicized decisions. Why would we trust any decision made by the Bush Administration, even if a career professional signed off on it? And, by the way, what’s to say that career professionals don’t have biases or never break the law?
And, then there’s the question of whether when there is a change in administrations the decisions of the previous administration are going to be re-evaluated. This is really the big lie, the lie that it’s a bad thing for an administration to examine decisions of the previous one. This is, in fact, one of the benefits of having elections. It allows a new set of people to come in and evaluate what the previous people did. This is absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of government. Every administration should be thinking about the fact that they will eventually leave office and another group will come in. This is one way that we make sure as a country that our officials are incentivized to be scrupulous in their conduct of office. They need to conduct themselves as if their worst critic may well be examining their actions and could, potentially, publicize them to the country. They need to understand that others with a different opinion of what’s legal may be looking at their actions. This is high motivation to think through decisions before they are made to make sure that they will withstand legal examination.
Far from being a negative, having each administration’s actions re-evaluated by the next is protection for the American people against bias and outright criminality.
The Obama Administration is anemic on these investigations. A real investigation would look at the role of Dick Cheney (who admitted in public that he was involved in promoting torture within the administration) in all this. If there’s a flaw in these investigations it’s that they don’t go nearly far enough up the chain of command. If Hoekstra is worried that career professionals are being held accountable for this, perhaps that can be fixed by conducting a more rigorous investigation of the whole question, going right up to the top.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has its own legal problems. Reports are that they are continuing warrantless wiretapping. That’s strictly illegal under the Constitution, and is a real indication of weakness on the part of the administration. They need to get their house in order because the vultures are circling and they will not be able to hold out unless they take a stronger stance on following the law.