All Blog Posts from Courtwatch

Ninety years ago, in the shadow of the Great War, long before the invention of cable news and bloggers, the great American writer and journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in Liberty And The News that:

The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows of events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the aspirations of peoples, the struggles of classes, he knows at second, third or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself.

Americans could not go see for themselves the effects of the Bush Administration's torture policies. There are no commuter flights to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the train doesn't run on time to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. The digital cameras that recorded the degradation of Iraqi prisoners at the prison were never supposed to see the light of day. And the video recordings of the Gitmo interrogations were improperly destroyed by the CIA so that they never would.

We were blind but now we begin to see. Slowly, a clearer picture is emerging of the legal and political path from the "torture memos" authorized by the Office of Legal Counsel (by men like John Yoo and Steven Bradbury and Alberto Gonzales) to the reported water-boarding (simulated death by drowning) of Khalid Sheik Mohammed not once or twice but 183 times. What began in 2002 as faux legal ambiguity (about the legality of torture) turned into official military policy and then into a moral and diplomatic disaster and now has become, as almost all facts always do, a part of history.

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I have been covering the U.S. Attorney scandal since its inception and have written hundreds of thousands of words about it. And yet today, in the wake of the newest revelations about White House involvement in the prosecutor purge, I confess I am no closer to understanding precisely what happened than I was a few years ago.

As the New York Times put it Wednesday morning: "it is unclear who made the final decision" to fire David Iglesias, the Republican U.S. Attorney in New Mexico who was canned because he refused to act more aggressively in pursuing voting fraud cases against Democrats in that state. If it were Karl Rove who pulled the trigger, he's not saying. If it were Alberto Gonzales, he's not saying. If it were Dick Cheney, he's not saying.

Nearly four years later, after hundreds of hours of testimony and negotiations, we still don't know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Part of this is the result of a business-as-usual approach to politics inside the Beltway. Part of this is the result of a cynical and unrepentant approach to the matter by the Bush White House. Part of this is the result of timid and passive Democratic reluctance to spend time and energy on an "inside baseball" conflict when voters are looking for answers and solutions on health care, the economy and other real-life matters.

Yes, all federal prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the president, which means they may be fired or dismissed for no reason at all. And, yes, White House officials field (and sometimes act upon) political complaints from their supporters. This is the gravamen of the defense that Karl Rove and other former Bush officials offer to explain why they did what they did to those Republican U.S. Attorneys.

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This column is actually an open letter to the students of Texas Tech, who now will have the dubious privilege of taking courses from former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. The disgraced former official finally landed a job outside of government—he resigned in 2007 — and now (for one year anyway) will teach political science - “contemporary issues in the executive branch” - at a school most recently known for hosting basketball coach Bobby Knight.

Hey, young people! What an opportunity you have. It’s not every day that you get to take a class with a man who has played such a significant role in recent American legal and political history. After all, your new professor is at the heart of: 1) the U.S. Attorney scandal, 2) the terror-memo scandal, 3) the Texas clemency memo scandal, 4) the Valerie Plame scandal, and the 5) domestic surveillance scandal. There are probably a few other scandals he’s involved in that we don’t even yet know about!

Your new professor is so wanted as a witness and deponent in Washington that when he lectures to you in Lubbock you’ll probably have federal investigators sitting in on the class hoping he says something material and relevant. So the first thing you ought to do is buy yourself a really good cell-phone with recording capabilities. You never know when you are going to be able to sell sound-bytes of his remarks to your local television station. And YouTube? Forget about it.

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