[Infowarrior] - The Year in Oversight

[Richard Forno]

The Year in Oversight

News: The yeas and nays of Congress' efforts to gavel the Bush
administration into order in 2007

By Brian Beutler, Media Consortium

December 24, 2007


http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/12/year-in-oversight.htm
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As the year draws to a close, it will be tempting for pundits‹liberal and
otherwise‹to despair at the Democrats' inability to wield their new
congressional leadership to affect real and swift change in the country.
After all, the war in Iraq not only continues, but 2007 was its deadliest
year. FISA presents a greater danger to American civil liberties today than
it did when the Democrats took their gavels in January. And the radiant
vision of Karl Rove being escorted down Pennsylvania Avenue to jail never
came to pass.

But there have been successes, too. Many have emerged as part of an
aggressive oversight effort, which has dragged a number of scandals out of
the shadows and into the cleansing daylight. Democrats in both the House and
Senate have led the way in exposing corrupt leadership at the Department of
Justice, in revealing just how shadowy the president's domestic spying
program is (and how unpopular it is among members of the federal law
enforcement community), and in alerting the country to the damaging and
deadly role private military contractors play in war zones.

So as we all take the measure of 2007, here¹s the good, the bad, and the
ugly in a year's worth of congressional oversight.

Quiet as a mouse. There certainly have been gaffes, softballs, and missed
opportunities. And the most obvious are found in the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security‹the Senate's version of Rep. Henry Waxman's Oversight
Committee in the House. Unlike Waxman's enthusiastic probing, the Senate
chair conducted zero proactive investigations into Bush administration
malfeasance. It's chairman? Connecticut's Joseph Lieberman.

Fit for a Prince. Likewise, when Erik Prince, the now-infamous CEO of
private military contractor Blackwater, was called to testify before
Waxman's committee on October 2, many assumed he'd be slaughtered.
Blackwater contractors had recently massacred more than a dozen Iraqis and
had been implicated in a host of other atrocities. Waxman even came armed
with a long and damning report about the company's misdeeds. But by the end
of the hearing, Prince had found his stride. He shifted the focus from
Blackwater to structural problems with the war effort in Iraq and refused to
disclose how much of his company's billion dollars in federal contracts
constituted profit. He closed by graciously thanking the committee for its
hospitality. "Glad I could come here and correct some facts," Prince said.

Naming names‹of sources. Over the summer, the House Judiciary Committee
created an electronic tip line for whistleblowers in the Justice Department.
Do-gooders provided enough personal information to allow the committee to
investigate, but were assured the information would be kept in confidence.
And it was‹until the committee accidentally sent a list of the
whistleblowers' email addresses to every address that had been entered at
the site, including Vice President Dick Cheney's public email:
vice_president at whitehouse.gov.

Foresight is 20/20. Blunders weren't confined to investigations. Democrats
Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer helped Republican Judiciary Committee
members endorse the nomination of then-designate Attorney General Michael
Mukasey, despite his equivocal answers to questions about torture. The full
Senate confirmed him by a vote of 53-40 on November 8; just one month later,
the Department of Justice revealed that CIA videotapes of two detainees
being interrogated‹and allegedly waterboarded‹had been destroyed, despite
widespread objections among members of the government in the know. Given
Mukasey's unwillingness to describe waterboarding as torture‹and therefore a
crime‹some, including Senator Joe Biden, want an independent investigation
of the matter.

The year started on a better foot for Democrats. Mukasey's nomination was
the result of months of congressional tenacity in uncovering the
administration's lies and distortions about its firing of U.S. attorneys and
its warrantless wiretapping program. Throughout the spring and summer, the
House and Senate Judiciary committees uncovered documents and held hearings
that shook the Justice Department to its foundation.

Oops, did I say that? The U.S. attorneys scandal erupted almost immediately
after the Democrats took over Congress, and, as such, became the focal point
of their oversight. In their first weeks in power, Democrats interrogated
Justice Department officials and obtained documents at odds with their
testimonies. On May 23, under a grant of limited immunity, Justice's former
director of public affairs, Monica Goodling, told the House Judiciary
Committee that her one-time colleague, then-Deputy Attorney General Paul
McNulty, had misled the Congress about the extent of White House involvement
in politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys.

Poor bedside manner. Just days earlier, on May 15, former Deputy Attorney
General James Comey detailed for the Senate Judiciary Committee a 2004
attempt by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to make then-Attorney
General John Ashcroft sign off on the National Security Agency's so-called
Terrorist Surveillance Program. Delirious in his hospital bed, Ashcroft
refused, referring Gonzales instead to Comey. Comey thought the warrantless
domestic snooping illegal and did not approve it. When the White House
attempted to go over his head, he and several senior Justice Department
officials threatened to resign.

All in the family. Prince's graceful exit from Waxman's October hearing was
not the end of the Blackwater saga. A big part of Blackwater's job in Iraq
is to protect State Department officers, but former Inspector General Howard
"Cookie" Krongard had a peculiar allergy to watchdogging the relationship.
On November 14, we learned why. Waxman's committee asked Cookie some tough
questions‹among them, did he know that his brother, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard,
was a member of Blackwater's advisory board? Cookie first insisted that his
brother had told him otherwise in a conversation six weeks prior. During a
break, he called his brother Buzzy and, he says, learned the hard truth,
prompting him to vow before the committee to recuse himself from all
Blackwater investigations going forward. The story didn't end there. Later
that same day, reporter Spencer Ackerman of TPM Media reached Buzzy by
telephone and learned that Cookie, according to Buzzy, had known of his
brother's role at Blackwater for weeks. In the wake of this revelation,
Cookie stepped down from his position altogether. Whether he'll face a
perjury inquiry remains to be seen.

The attorney general has no clothes. Perhaps the biggest oversight victory
can be found in the dislodging of Gonzalez. On July 24, brewing Justice
Department controversies came to a head when Gonzales appeared before the
Senate Judiciary Committee and embarrassed himself badly on a number of
fronts. In his testimony, Gonzales insisted, among other things, that the
warrantless wiretapping program was a matter of little controversy within
the Department of Justice‹that all disagreements had involved another,
unidentified intelligence operation. But two days later, on July 26, FBI
director Robert Mueller, under questioning by the House Judiciary
Committee's Rep. Mel Watt, admitted to having "serious reservations about
the warrantless wiretapping program." The admission raised two
possibilities: Either the wiretapping program had once been much more
aggressive than we know, or Gonzales had directly perjured himself.

In September, following in the footsteps of a host of senior Justice
officials, Gonzales tendered his resignation‹a capstone of a series of
investigations so aggressively obstructed that three current and former
administration officials may well be held in contempt by one or both houses
of Congress in 2008.

Brian Beutler is the Washington correspondent for the Media Consortium, a
network of progressive media organizations, including Mother Jones.