The first hand George W. Bush shook was Sen. Jay Rockefeller's at the signing ceremony yesterday.
For a year we cajoled, pleaded, begged and criticized Sen. Jay Rockefeller over FISA at West Virginia Blue.
Whenever a Rockefeller supporter told me how he must know what he is doing because as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee he has information I don't have access to, I scoffed.
Read any of these speeches from Sen. Robert C. Byrd from February 2003 before the Iraq war to see how one senator got so much right and another so many things wrong.
Two men. Same information. One takes the correct stance. The other fails.
I've said before I liked Senator Rockefeller when I've met him.
So my animosity is not personal. It is his history.
While he's apologized for his Iraq war vote, he continues to make terrible decisions.
He voted for the Military Commissions Act - aka the Torture Act of 2006. It was a bill so horrendous it not only endorsed torture methods used in the past, it tried to do away with habeas corpus protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
Here's what Senator Rockefeller voted yea to:
Sen. Leahy gave a superb closing speech, lamenting that the days when Congress imposes a meaningful check on the Presidency "are long past," and pointing out that the way our Government is operating contravenes all of the political values he was taught growing up. He was properly and genuinely angry as he described the simply astonishing fact that President Bush now has the power to abduct people from around the world and consign them to life in prison and torture them with no opportunity of any kind to prove one's innocence.
But Rockefeller voted to give Bush that very power.
Just as he was wrong on the Torture Act of 2006, he is wrong for telecom immunity.
In both the Torture Act and the Telecom Act, Rockefeller relied on the argument that legal "justification" from the partisan Department of Justice was enough.
That is akin to your lawyer telling you what you want to hear so there is no need for a judge to hear the case. Our system of government should not work that way.
Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald:
This incident provides yet more proof of how rancid and corrupt is the premise that as long as political appointees at the DOJ approve of certain conduct, then that conduct must be shielded from criminal prosecution. That's the premise that is being applied over and over to remove government lawbreaking from the reach of the law.
That's the central argument behind both telecom amnesty and protecting Bush officials from their surveillance felonies (it's unfair to hold them accountable for their illegal spying behavior because the DOJ said they could do it). It's the same argument that CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden just made on Meet the Press as to why CIA interrogators should be immunized from the consequences of their illegal conduct ("when I go and tell him to do something in the shadows and point out to him it is perfectly lawful, that the Department of Justice has reviewed it . . . I need him to have confidence in that DOJ opinion").
The DOJ is not the law. They are not above the law and they do not make the law. They are merely charged with enforcing it. The fact that they assert that blatantly illegal conduct is legal does not make it so. DOJ officials, like anyone else, can violate the law and have done so not infrequently. High DOJ officials -- including Attorneys General -- have been convicted of crimes in the past and have gone to prison.
How can one justify Rockefeller's judgment when he did this?
When he was defending the amendment he introduced to compel the CIA to disclose to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees information about their interrogation activities, he complained that the White House has concealed all information about the program and that the Intelligence Committee members (including him) know nothing about this interrogation program. His amendment was defeated with all Republicans (except Chafee) voting against it. He then proceeded to vote for the underlying bill anyway.
Here's what Rockefeller said of McConnell, his fellow lobbyist for the telecom industry and the White House:
...today the Senate has confirmed the nomination of VADM Mike McConnell to be the next Director of National Intelligence. It is hard for me to imagine a better choice than Admiral McConnell.
That's the same McConnell who had a history of baldly lying to the American people and to Congress.
McConnell, whose nomination early last year was applauded by lawmakers from both parties, has twice provided false information to Congress -- and in both cases, they were statements that served to distort the surveillance debate. In the heat of the surveillance bill debate, McConnell claimed that three German terrorism suspects had been arrested due to intercepts made possible by the administration's Protect America Act; it turned out the intercepts were obtained under the old FISA bill. Only a couple weeks later, McConnell told Congress that rulings by the FISA Court had prevented the NSA from surveilling Iraqi insurgents who had kidnapped U.S. soldiers for 12 hours. That turned out to be, at best, a misleading explanation for the delay.
Many West Virginia Democrats would probably prefer I did not spend so much time criticizing a Democratic senator, who on many issues has been good for the state.
But I cannot be silent when Rockefeller has aided and abetted illegal conduct that violate international law and the Constitution.
I cannot and will not shake that man's hand.