Secrecy, Lies, and the Covert War on the Constitution (Rockefeller interview)

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/04/horton-20070425lwyh

Secrecy, Lies, and the Covert War on the Constitution
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED April 25, 2007

In an interview yesterday Senator Jay Rockefeller discussed one of the great untold truths of the last six years. The Bush Administration has blocked Congressional oversight of its intelligence operations through a series of lies, tricks and misrepresentations. But its principal tool has been simple: it withholds information. As Rockefeller said:

Don't you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I'm chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All of it. All of the time. I only get and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.

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But the aspect that probably requires the most immediate action is the conscious subversion of Congressional oversight. For the last four years, the administration has illegally evaded oversight of its intelligence programs, and particularly of its extensive palette of extra-legal activities, by Congressional committees. It has done so openly, and its actions went shamefully unchallenged by the last Congress—probably the most corrupt in the nation's history.

Vice President Cheney was the ringmaster of this project, and he has attempted a public justification of it on several occasions—usually citing leaks which seem suspiciously close to his office or to congressional figures close to him. In the current administration, Cheney has been the leaker-in-chief, regularly disclosing classified information of even the highest sensitivity when he felt it would meet his political interests to do so. The most striking example of this came with the outing of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, as an act of political retaliation. The Libby trial afforded a deep insight into how Cheney's mind works in this regard. He spent a period of at least three weeks completely obsessed with the project of leaking, scheming with staffers and aides as to how to carry it out, and ultimately even involving President Bush. His intent was criminal and reflected actual malice. As several jurors noted when they emerged following the Libby conviction, they could not understand why they were deprived of the opportunity of passing on Cheney's criminality. Indeed, there's not much question what the verdict would have been.

There is no more urgent agenda before Congress today than reasserting its oversight function, and using all the tools at its disposal—including subpoenas, hearings and the power of the purse—to regain a check on a regime of secrecy which is reeling dangerously in the direction of a police state. It could yet make a difference.