Pelosi, Rockefeller and Harmon are Hypocrites About the NSA Spying Scandal
When it comes to hypocritical, Washington insider nominal Democrats on Capitol Hill like Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Senator Jay Rockefeller, and California representative, Jane Harmon, all muli-millionaires by the way, progressive bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, yours truly, and others have been "repetitio" for a long time and hoping that regular Americans will "mater studiorum" the facts.
Glenn Greenwald takes another crack at it in his most recent commentary at Salon.
Some excerpts:
"Thomas Tamm is the mid-level, career Justice Department lawyer who, in 2004, blew the whistle on Bush's illegal NSA spying program by alerting The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau to the fact that Bush was eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by law. He then watched his life be virtually destroyed by the FBI's ensuing -- and still ongoing -- criminal investigation into this disclosure.
"More amazing still is that even as the Bush administration is on its way out the door, the DOJ continues to pursue its criminal investigation of Tamm -- the very same Bush DOJ that has sanctioned multiple forms of high-level lawbreaking and, with Michael Mukasey at the helm, has blocked one investigation after the next into Bush criminality.
"Contrast 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.
"Yet these Democratic Congressional leaders did absolutely nothing to impede Bush's illegal surveillance. They did the opposite. Pelosi's "concern" was that the NSA 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").
"What those Democratic leaders did was, at the very best, a total abdication of their responsibilities. More accurately, they actively and culpably enabled the illegal spying. None of them -- for obvious reasons -- has called for any investigation or prosecution of Bush officials for having broken the law. All three of them -- for equally obvious reasons -- voted for the FISA bill last August which immunized lawbreaking telecoms and all but ensured a total end to any real public disclosure of what happened here...
"Meanwhile, the only person to pay any price from this rampant lawbreaking -- Tom Tamm -- is the one with infinitely less power than all of them, the one who risked his job security and even freedom to bring to the nation's attention the fact that our highest government officials were deliberately committing felonies in how they spied on us. Those who broke the law and those who actively enabled it -- the Cheneys and Haydens and Rockefellers and Pelosis and Harmans -- all protect one another, and have virtually every political and media elite righteously demand that nothing be done to them."
And it continues to be appalling. These hypocrites have no integrity and dare to disdain and defy the demands of regular Americans, the people they are supposed to be serving while ignoring the Constitution, which they took an oath to support and defend.
They are certainly not faithfully discharging the duties of their office.
They are not true Democrats but Republican lite Bushite enablers who have demeaned their office and the philosophy of the Democratic Party...government of, by, and for the all the people and the common good.
This is what eight years of the criminal Bush regime, the GOP, and some minority mind set, inside the beltway Democrats on Capitol Hill have wreaked on this country with their dishonesty and dishonor. And, unfortunately, they continue to be returned to Congress and the Senate.
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