Update [2007-5-17 13:36:14 by Tod Westlake]: I've changed the title, in the spirt of keeping within DailyKos guidelines. Again, thanks for the feedback.
Update [2007-5-17 13:20:17 by Tod Westlake]: Wow, first time on the rec list. Thanks for all the mojo. And let me just say, I hope to god I'm wrong about this.
Please forgive me if this diary is merely pointing out the obvious. If others have made this connection, I'll be happy to delete.
The excellent diary written by CanYouBeAngryAndStillDream reminded me of a post I read yesterday from Digby over at Hullabaloo.
We all know what a hard-core Christian nationalist John Ashcroft is. He was, perhaps, the most controversial USAG of all time, eclipsing even Mitchell and Meese -- until Abu G. came along.
So what could possibly cause this partisan Christian warrior to say "You do that, and I'm resigning."
Well, Digby has made the connection for us:
How over-the-top must this have been for staunch Republican John Ashcroft to have risen from his ICU bed to argue against it and the entire top echelon of the DOJ were preparing to resign? These are not ordinary times and the law enforcement community has not been particularly squeamish about stretching the Bill of Rights. None of those people are bleeding heart liberals or candidates for the presidency of the ACLU. For them to be this adamant, it must have been something completely beyond the pale.
My suspicion has always been that there was some part of this program --- or an entirely different program --- that included spying on political opponents. Even spying on peace marchers and Greenpeace types wouldn't seem to me to be of such a substantial departure from the agreed upon post 9/11 framework that it would cause such a reaction from the top brass, nor would it be so important to the president that he would send Gonzales and Card into the ICU to get Ashcroft to sign off on it while he was high on drugs.
What Digby is suggesting, as I'm sure you have figured out, is that the program in question must have been pretty far out in left field in a legal sense if Ashcroft was willing to walk the plank a la Richardson and Ruckelshaus.
Digby then highlights this quote from a TPM Muckraker commenter:
When the warrantless wiretap surveillance program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form the program took in that period, although some details have been leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off on it. In fact, Comey reveals, the entire top echelon of the Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required. They just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running such a program.
This wasn't an emergency program; more than two years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies. It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been saying, for weeks, that they would withhold approval. But at the eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of the program, unaltered.
The anonymous commenter continues by saying:
I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over, it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the process, he’s not doing it for kicks. Similarly, when the President sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man, and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being stubborn.
Damn straight.
So what kind of surveillance program could have been so egregiously illegal that it turned the stomach of John Ashcroft? How about spying on the Democrats?
Some may think this idea paranoid. And I'm certainly willing to concede that I have a tendency to go off half-cocked at times, but when has the Bush Junta ever disappointed us when it comes to shocking moral depravity? Hasn't the reality of what the administration has been doing always eclipsed our most paranoid, tin-foil-hat fantasies?
Obviously, I have no proof of this. I don't work in government; I'm a simple grad student in English. But I do know how to interpret a text, and the implications here remind me a great deal of what we went through with the Watergate scandal. Whatever crimes the Nixon henchmen were convicted of, the Watergate break-in that started the whole thing was about surveillance of GOP political opponents, especially the DNC. How far this surveillance program actually went, we will likely never know.
The Bush Junta has dusted off nearly every old playbook left behind by the Nixon Mafia. Why shouldn't we think the worst in this situation?
The same anonymous commenter closes by saying this:
It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the rules under which the government can obtain physical search warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story, but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional investigation that we ought to be having.
Yes, this is what should be happening. You will forgive me, however, if I don't hold my breath.