Once again, we storm the cave
The day after Uncle Dick proclaimed himself exempt from rules of any kind, the Dubby asked Congress to fund Cheney’s 4+ million dollar budget — the laughter still echo’s. Now Dick has backed off that claim — he and his little buddy STILL refuse any oversight into their affairs, of course, and the Congress is still planning to boycott the Veep $$. A very interesting showdown.
Here is the last installment from the Washington Post on Angler [Dick's code name,] along with some interesting reading about Christy Todd Whitman and her resignation; then, Dick’s fishy business dealings, an article by Robert Scheer, more — last, subpoena’s have gone out to the White House and Cheney’s office over the Spygate matter, Gonzales too … for Ninegate.
America’s got gate!
Jude
Leaving No Tracks
Jo Becker and Barton Gellman, Washington Post
Wednesday, June 27, 2007; Page A01
Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.
“This is Dick Cheney,” said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. “I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House.”
Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.
In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at
stake.
Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.
First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.
Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.
Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.
The Klamath case is one of many in which the vice president took on a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business.
By combining unwavering ideological positions — such as the priority of economic interests over protected fish — with a deep practical knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, Cheney has made an indelible mark on the administration’s approach to everything from air and water quality to the preservation of national parks and forests.
It was Cheney’s insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led Christine Todd Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she said in an interview that provides the most detailed account so far of her departure.
The vice president also pushed to make Nevada’s Yucca Mountain the nation’s repository for nuclear and radioactive waste, aides said, a victory for the nuclear power industry over those with long-standing safety concerns. And his office was a powerful force behind the White House’s decision to rewrite a Clinton-era land-protection measure that put nearly a third of the
national forests off limits to logging, mining and most development, former Cheney staff members said.
Cheney’s pro-business drive to ease regulations, however, has often set the administration on a collision course with the judicial branch.
The administration, for example, is appealing the order of a federal judge who reinstated the forest protections after she ruled that officials didn’t adequately study the environmental consequences of giving states more development authority.
And in April, the Supreme Court rejected two other policies closely associated with Cheney. It rebuffed the effort, ongoing since Whitman’s resignation, to loosen some rules under the Clean Air Act. The court also rebuked the administration for not regulating greenhouse gases associated with global warming, issuing its ruling less than two months after Cheney declared that “conflicting viewpoints” remain about the extent of the human contribution to the problem.
In the latter case, Cheney made his environmental views clear in public. But with some notable exceptions, he generally has preferred to operate with stealth, aided by loyalists who owe him for their careers.
When the vice president got wind of a petition to list the cutthroat trout in Yellowstone National Park as a protected species, his office turned to one of his former congressional aides.
The aide, Paul Hoffman, landed his job as deputy assistant interior secretary for fish and wildlife after Cheney recommended him. In an interview, Hoffman said the vice president knew that listing the cutthroat trout would harm the recreational fishing industry in his home state of
Wyoming and that he “followed the issue closely.” In 2001 and again in 2006, Hoffman’s agency declined to list the trout as threatened.
Hoffman also was well positioned to help his former boss with what Cheney aides said was one of the vice president’s pet peeves: the Clinton-era ban on snowmobiling in national parks. “He impressed upon us that so many people enjoyed snowmobiling in the Tetons,” former Cheney aide Ron Christie said.
With Cheney’s encouragement, the administration lifted the ban in 2002, and Hoffman followed up in 2005 by writing a proposal to fundamentally change the way national parks are managed. That plan, which would have emphasized recreational use over conservation, attracted so much opposition from park managers and the public that the Interior Department withdrew it. Still, the Bush administration continues to press for expanded snowmobile access, despite numerous studies showing that the vehicles harm the parks’ environment and polls showing majority support for the ban.
Hoffman, now in another job at the Interior Department, said Cheney never told him what to do on either issue — he didn’t have to.
“His genius,” Hoffman said, is that “he builds networks and puts the right people in the right places, and then trusts them to make well-informed decisions that comport with his overall vision.”
‘Political Ramifications’
Robert F. Smith had grown desperate by the time he turned to the vice president for help.
The former Republican congressman from Oregon represented farmers in the Klamath basin who had relied on a government-operated complex of dams and canals built almost a century ago along the Oregon-California border to irrigate nearly a quarter-million acres of arid land.
In April 2001, with the region gripped by the worst drought in memory, the spigot was shut off.
Studies by the federal government’s scientists concluded unequivocally that diverting water would harm two federally protected species of fish, violating the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The Bureau of Reclamation was forced to declare that farmers must go without in order to maintain higher water levels so that two types of suckerfish in Upper Klamath Lake and the
coho salmon that spawn in the Klamath River could survive the dry spell.
Farmers and their families, furious and fearing for their livelihoods, formed a symbolic 10,000-person bucket brigade. Then they took saws and blowtorches to dam gates, clashing with U.S. marshals as water streamed into the canals that fed their withering fields, before the government stopped the flow again.
What they didn’t know was that the vice president was already on the case.
Smith had served with Cheney on the House Interior Committee in the 1980s, and the former congressman said he turned to the vice president because he knew him as a man of the West who didn’t take kindly to federal bureaucrats meddling with private use of public land. “He saw, as every other person did, what a ridiculous disaster shutting off the water was,” Smith said.
Cheney recognized, even before the shut-off and long before others at the White House, that what “at first blush didn’t seem like a big deal” had “a lot of political ramifications,” said Dylan Glenn, a former aide to President Bush.
Bush and Cheney couldn’t afford to anger thousands of solidly Republican farmers and ranchers during the midterm elections and beyond. The case also was rapidly becoming a test for conservatives nationwide of the administration’s commitment to fixing what they saw as an imbalance between conservation and economics.
“What does the law say?” Christie, the former aide, recalled the vice president asking. “Isn’t there some way around it?”
Next, Cheney called Wooldridge, who was then deputy chief of staff to Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and the woman handling the Klamath situation.
Aides praise Cheney’s habit of reaching down to officials who are best informed on a subject he is tackling. But the effect of his calls often leads those mid-level officials scrambling to do what they presume to be his bidding.
That’s what happened when a mortified Wooldridge finally returned the vice president’s call, after receiving a tart follow-up inquiry from one of his aides. Cheney, she said, “was coming from the perspective that the farmers had to be able to farm — that was his concern. The fact that the vice president was interested meant that everyone paid attention.”
Cheney made sure that attention did not wander. He had Wooldridge brief his staff weekly and, Smith said, he also called the interior secretary directly.
“For months and months, at almost every briefing it was ‘Sir, here’s where we stand on the Klamath basin,’” recalled Christie, who is now a lobbyist.
“His hands-on involvement, it’s safe to say, elevated the issue.”
‘Let the Water Flow’
There was, as it happened, an established exemption to the Endangered Species Act.
A rarely invoked panel of seven Cabinet officials, known informally as the “God Squad,” is empowered by the statute to determine that economic hardship outweighs the benefit of protecting threatened wildlife. But after discussing the option with Smith, Cheney rejected that course. He had another idea, one that would not put the administration on record as
advocating the extinction of endangered or threatened species.
The thing to do, Cheney told Smith, was to get science on the side of the farmers. And the way to do that was to ask the National Academy of Sciences to scrutinize the work of the federal biologists who wanted to protect the fish.
Smith said he told Cheney that he thought that was a roll of the dice.
Academy panels are independently appointed, receive no payment and must reach a conclusion that can withstand peer review.
“It worried me that these are individuals who are unreachable,” Smith said of the academy members. But Cheney was firm, expressing no such concerns about the result. “He felt we had to match the science.”
Smith also wasn’t sure that the Klamath case — “a small place in a small corner of the country” — would meet the science academy’s rigorous internal process for deciding what to study. Cheney took care of that. “He called them and said, ‘Please look at this, it’s important,’” Smith said. “Everyone just went flying at it.”
William Kearney, a spokesman for the National Academies, said he was unaware of any direct contact from Cheney on the matter. The official request came from the Interior Department, he said.
It was Norton who announced the review, and it was Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove who traveled to Oregon in February 2002 to assure farmers that they had the administration’s support. A month later, Cheney got what he wanted when the science academy delivered a preliminary report finding “no substantial scientific foundation” to justify withholding water from the farmers.
There was not enough clear evidence that proposed higher lake levels would benefit suckerfish, the report found. And it hypothesized that the practice of releasing warm lake water into the river during spawning season might do more harm than good to the coho, which thrive in lower temperatures.
Norton flew to Klamath Falls in March to open the head gate as farmers chanted “Let the water flow!” And seizing on the report’s draft findings, the Bureau of Reclamation immediately submitted a new decade-long plan to give the farmers their full share of water.
When the lead biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service team critiqued the science academy’s report in a draft opinion objecting to the plan, the critique was edited out by superiors and his objections were overruled, he said. The biologist, Michael Kelly, who has since quit the federal agency, said in a whistle-blower claim that it was clear to him that “someone at a higher level” had ordered his agency to endorse the proposal regardless of the consequences to the fish.
Months later, the first of an estimated 77,000 dead salmon began washing up on the banks of the warm, slow-moving river. Not only were threatened coho dying — so were chinook salmon, the staple of commercial fishing in Oregon and Northern California. State and federal biologists soon concluded that the diversion of water to farms was at least partly responsible.
Fishermen filed lawsuits and courts ruled that the new irrigation plan violated the Endangered Species Act. Echoing Kelly’s objections, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit observed that the 10-year plan wouldn’t provide enough water for the fish until year nine. By then, the 2005 opinion said, “all the water in the world” could not save the fish, “for there will be none to protect.” In March 2006, a federal judge prohibited the government from diverting water for agricultural use whenever water levels dropped beneath a certain point.
Last summer, the federal government declared a “commercial fishery failure” on the West Coast after several years of poor chinook returns virtually shut down the industry, opening the way for Congress to approve more than $60 million in disaster aid to help fishermen recover their losses. That came on top of the $15 million that the government has paid Klamath farmers since 2002 not to farm, in order to reduce demand.
The science academy panel, in its final report, acknowledged that its draft report was “controversial,” but it stood by its conclusions. Instead of focusing on the irrigation spigot, it recommended broad and expensive changes to improve fish habitat.
“The farmers were grateful for our decision, but we made the decision based on the scientific outcome,” said the panel chairman, William Lewis, a biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “It just so happened the outcome favored the farmers.”
But J.B. Ruhl, another member of the panel and a Florida State University law professor who specializes in endangered species cases, said the Bureau of Reclamation went “too far,” making judgments that were not backed up by the academy’s draft report. “The approach they took was inviting criticism,” Ruhl said, “and I didn’t think it was supported by our recommendations.”
‘More Pro-Industry’
Whitman, then head of the EPA, was on vacation with her family in Colorado when her cellphone rang. The vice president was on the line, and he was clearly irked.
Why was the agency dragging its feet on easing pollution rules for aging power and oil refinery plants?, Cheney wanted to know. An industry that had contributed heavily to the Bush-Cheney campaign was clamoring for change, and the vice president told Whitman that she “hadn’t moved it fast enough,” she recalled.
Whitman protested, warning Cheney that the administration had to proceed cautiously. It was August 2001, just seven months into the first term. We need to “document this according to the books,” she said she told him, “so we don’t look like we are ramrodding something through. Because it’s going to court.”
But the vice president’s main concern was getting it done fast, she said, and “doing it in a way that didn’t hamper industry.”
At issue was a provision of the Clean Air Act known as the New Source Review, which requires older plants that belch millions of tons of smog and soot each year to install modern pollution controls when they are refurbished in a way that increases emissions.
Industry officials complained to the White House that even when they had merely performed routine maintenance and repairs, the Clinton administration hit them with violations and multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Cheney’s energy task force ordered the EPA to reconsider the rule.
Whitman had already gone several rounds with the vice president over the issue.
She and Cheney first got to know each other in one of the Nixon administration’s anti-poverty agencies, working under Donald H. Rumsfeld. When Cheney offered her the job in the Bush administration, the former New Jersey governor marveled at how far both had come. But as with Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill, another longtime friend who owed his Cabinet post
to Cheney, Whitman’s differences with the vice president would lead to her departure.
Sitting through Cheney’s task force meetings, Whitman had been stunned by what she viewed as an unquestioned belief that EPA’s regulations were primarily to blame for keeping companies from building new power plants. “I was upset, mad, offended that there seemed to be so much head-nodding around the table,” she said.
Whitman said she had to fight “tooth and nail” to prevent Cheney’s task force from handing over the job of reforming the New Source Review to the Energy Department, a battle she said she won only after appealing to White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. This was an environmental issue with major implications for air quality and health, she believed, and it
shouldn’t be driven by a task force primarily concerned with increasing production.
Whitman agreed that the exception for routine maintenance and repair needed to be clarified, but not in a way that undercut the ongoing Clinton-era lawsuits — many of which had merit, she said.
Cheney listened to her arguments, and as usual didn’t say much. Whitman said she also met with the president to “explain my concerns” and to offer an alternative.
She wanted to work a political trade with industry — eliminating the New Source Review in return for support of Bush’s 2002 “Clear Skies” initiative, which outlined a market-based approach to reducing emissions over time. But Clear Skies went nowhere. “There was never any follow-up,” Whitman said, and moreover, there was no reason for industry to embrace even a modest pollution control initiative when the vice president was pushing to change the rules for nothing.
She decided to go back to Bush one last time. It was a crapshoot — the EPA administrator had already been rolled by Cheney when the president reversed himself on a campaign promise to limit carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming — so she came armed with a political argument.
Whitman said she plunked down two sets of folders filled with news clips. This one, she said, pointing to a stack about 2-1/2 inches thick, contained articles, mostly negative, about the administration’s controversial proposal to suspend tough new standards governing arsenic in drinking water. And this one, she said as she pointed to a pile four or five times as thick, are the articles about the rules on aging power plants and refineries — and the administration hadn’t even done anything yet.
“If you think arsenic was bad,” she recalled telling Bush, “look at what has already been written about this.”
But Whitman left the meeting with the feeling that “the decision had already been made.” Cheney had a clear mandate from the president on all things energy-related, she said, and while she could take her case directly to Bush, “you leave and the vice president’s still there. So together, they would then shape policy.”
What happened next was “a perfect example” of that, she said.
The EPA sent rule revisions to White House officials. The read-back was that they weren’t happy and “wanted something that would be more pro-industry,” she said.
The end result, which she said was written at the direction of the White House and announced in August 2003, vastly broadened the definition of routine maintenance. It allowed some of the nation’s dirtiest plants to make major modifications without installing costly new pollution controls.
By that time, Whitman had already announced her resignation, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family. But the real reason, she said, was the new rule.
“I just couldn’t sign it,” she said. “The president has a right to have an administrator who could defend it, and I just couldn’t.”
A federal appeals court has since found that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act. In their ruling, the judges said that the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid “only in a Humpty-Dumpty world.” ++
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Report: Cheney backs off on claim that he is ‘fourth branch of government’
Michael Roston, Raw Story
Wednesday June 27, 2007
With a vote looming in Congress on Thursday to defund the Office of the Vice President in the White House’s annual appropriation, a report at The Politico claims that the White House will no longer advance the argument that the Vice President’s office is not a part of the executive branch.
“The White House has no plans to reassert the argument there is any vice presidential distinction from the executive branch,” according to Bush administration officials who spoke with reporter Mike Allen. “Two senior Republican officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the rationale had been the view of the vice president’s lawyers, not Cheney himself.”
However, Cheney’s change of tack does not mean that Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), Chairman of the Democratic Caucus, will end his drive to defund the Vice President’s $4 million-plus appropriation for the next fiscal year.
“Emanuel said the vote is still planned, and said the new position means the vice president needs to comply with National Archives requirements,” Allen added.
The veteran reporter suggested that a letter written by the Vice President’s chief of staff, David Addington, to Senator John Kerry (D-MA) amounted to a capitulation as it no longer held that Cheney’s office was outside of the executive branch. RAW STORY reported Tuesday on the letter.
However, Addington made clear that he still did not believe that the Vice President’s office, or the President’s for that matter, was bound by the rules for the security of certain classified information laid out in Executive Order 12958. He wrote that the order “makes clear that the Vice President is treated like the President and distinguishes the two of them from ‘agencies.’”
In a response at The Gavel, the blog of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, staff member Jesse Lee noted the original complaint to the Attorney General filed by the National Archives and Records Administration rebutted Addington’s claim.
“OVP staff, when they are supporting the Vice President in the performance of executive duties, are an entity within the executive branch that comes into possession of classified information and are thus, for the purposes of the Order, an agency,” NARA wrote to Alberto Gonzales.
One legal scholar, Marty Lederman, offered a substantive critique of Addington’s claim to Kerry.
“Such an interpretation would be belied by the fact that until 2003, the OVP did comply with the ISOO directive, and, even more so, by the fact that entities within the Executive Office of the President, such as the National Security Council, are reported to continue to comply to this very day,” he observed in a lengthy post at Balkinization. ++
Cheney BAE Scandal Ignored By American Media
Mathaba News Network
2007/06/26
The public continues to turn to “main stream” news for information although as evidenced time and again it is the independent news agencies that are where uncensored news is to be found.
Explosive revelations that Vice-President Dick Cheney was behind the failed effort to cover up an $80 to $100 billion dollar slush fund run through the British defense firm BAE Systems, as reported several days ago by the Executive Intellegence Review and Mathaba News Agency, have been totally ignored by the mainstream media.
Instead, the American media establishment has been agog over a series of articles in the Washington Post claiming that Cheney has overstepped the boundaries of his office of Vice-President and behaves in an importunate manner to the President, George W Bush.
This type of deflection has become common during the Bush Presidency. A story detailing how the British Government set up a long-term agreement with the Saudi Arabian monarchy where defense systems and fighter jets were bartered for vast quantities of oil, which most of the profits from were turned into a slush fund used for gun-running and covert operations, aided
and abetted by the U.S. government and Cheney, is more important to the public than four-year-old allegations about how Cheney supposedly manipulates Bush. ++
Will BAE Scandal of Century Bring Down Cheney?
Dissident News
June 24th, 2007
[open link for article]
The Banality of Greed
Robert Scheer, TruthDig
Jun 27 2007
As the Iraq war that Vice President Dick Cheney created continues to shred American–and many more Iraqi–lives, further documentation has emerged proving that, even during failed wars, the merchants of death profit. No company has profited more from the carnage in Iraq than Halliburton, which Cheney headed before choosing himself as Bush’s running mate. One shudders at the blissful arrogance of this modern Daddy Warbucks, who sees no conflict of interest over the blood-soaked profits garnered by the once-bankrupt division of the company that left him rich.
This week’s evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton’s recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad’s super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations.
Those operations have already produced a litany of condemnation by congressional and administration oversight bodies, and the June 25 report hardly details the company’s most egregious activities. However, the Green Zone, the site of this latest instance of taxpayer fleecing, is instructive because, safely removed from the risks of battle, it deprives these war profiteers of their favorite excuse: that construction in a battle zone is inherently more costly. While KBR’s Green Zone shenanigans covered by this report may seem small in comparison with the enormous waste attendant to the U.S. reconstruction program in Iraq, they are illustrative of the feeding frenzy that has fueled the American effort.
The corrupt reconstruction project has left a wasteland of failed energy, water, educational and political reform plans. As report after report details, garbage is not collected, hospitals are not staffed, schools close soon after they are opened and factories sit idle in shocking refutation of the vaunted efficiency of the United States’ political economic model.
KBR’s role in this fiasco is easily exposed by a basic Google search, beginning with a stop at the website of Henry Waxman, the California congressman who heads up the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Waxman deserves a Medal of Freedom for trying to figure out what happened to those $22 billion that KBR received but are now lost to U.S. taxpayers, as well as to the once hopeful but now bitterly disillusioned Iraqi people. Indeed, six months ago, the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., termed the high level of official corruption in Iraq the “second insurgency,” stating that the siphoning-off of U.S. dollars is a major source of funds for the anti-American fighters in the country. It was estimated that last year upward of $100 million in stolen oil funds went directly to the insurgents. In the context of that horrid record of waste and corruption amid the destruction of Iraqi society in which “democratic nation building” transmogrified into fascist mayhem, KBR’s antics in the Green Zone seem petty.
But the fact that KBR played loose with our tax dollars even in the safety of the Green Zone is evidence of the company’s contempt for the sacrifice of U.S. taxpayers. For example, concerning KBR’s mismanagement of the fuel distribution program, the inspector general wrote: “We found weaknesses in KBR’s fuel receiving, distributing and accountability processes of such magnitude that we were unable to determine an accurate measure of the fuel services provided.” Yet, it was paid for by American taxpayers.
Or, take the extra $4.5 million spent on the company’s food service and the cost of billeting 90 percent of KBR personnel in single quarters, as opposed to the doubling-up practiced by regular Army folks.
That was chicken feed compared with other examples of taxpayer rip-offs, as revealed in one case by the Army reducing payments to KBR by $19.5 million following Waxman’s first “fraud, waste, and abuse hearings.” It is hoped that there will be other efforts at forcing accountability for the billions of dollars that have been spent to advertise the efficiency of the United States’ free-enterprise model to a skeptical Mideast public.
It is claimed by American officials that KBR’s accountability issues are being addressed. In one instance cited, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad–a spiraling enterprise well on its way to becoming a nation-within-a-nation akin to the Vatican in Italy–announced that, as a means of avoiding food theft, its personnel would no longer be allowed to bring large bags into the eating halls. Such sacrifice for the mission of securing Iraqi freedom. ++
White House, Cheney’s office subpoenaed
LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press
23 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - The Senate subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office Wednesday, demanding documents and elevating the confrontation with President Bush over the administration’s warrant-free eavesdropping on Americans.
Separately, the Senate Judiciary Committee also is summoning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to discuss the program and an array of other matters that have cost a half-dozen top Justice Department officials their jobs, committee chairman Patrick Leahy announced.
Leahy, D-Vt., raised questions about previous testimony by one of Bush’s appeals court nominees and said he wouldn’t let such matters pass.
“If there have been lies told to us, we’ll refer it to the Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney for whatever legal action they think is appropriate,” Leahy told reporters. He did just that Wednesday, referring questions about testimony by former White House aide Brett Kavanaugh, who now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The escalation is part of the Democrats’ effort to hold the administration to account for the way it has conducted the war on terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The subpoenas extend the probe into the private sector, demanding among other things documents on any agreements that telecommunications companies made to cooperate with the surveillance program.
The White House contends that its search for would-be terrorists is legal, necessary and effective — pointing out frequently that there have been no further attacks on American soil. Administration officials say they have given classified information — such as details about the eavesdropping program, which is now under court supervision — to the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress.
Echoing its response to previous congressional subpoenas to former administration officials Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor, the White House gave no indication that it would comply with the new ones.
“We’re aware of the committee’s action and will respond appropriately,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. “It’s unfortunate that congressional Democrats continue to choose the route of confrontation.”
In fact, the Judiciary Committee’s three most senior Republicans — Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, former chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa — sided with Democrats on the 13-3 vote last week to give Leahy the power to issue the subpoenas.
The showdown between the White House and Congress could land in federal court.
Also named in subpoenas signed by Leahy were the Justice Department and the National Security Council. The four parties have until July 18 to comply, Leahy said. He added that, like House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., he would consider pursuing contempt citations against those who refuse.
The Judiciary committees have issued the subpoenas as part of a look at how much influence the White House exerts over the Justice Department and its chief, Gonzales.
The probe, in its sixth month, began with an investigation into whether administration officials ordered the firings of eight federal prosecutors for political reasons. The Judiciary committees subpoenaed Miers, one-time White House legal counsel, and Taylor, a former political director, though they have yet to testify.
Now, with senators of both parties concerned about the constitutionality of the administration’s efforts to root out terrorism suspects in the United States, the committee has shifted to the broader question of Gonzales’ stewardship of Justice.
The issue concerning Kavanaugh, a former White House staff secretary, is whether he misled the Senate panel during his confirmation hearing last year about how much he was involved in crafting the administration’s policy on enemy combatants.
The Bush administration secretly launched the eavesdropping program, run by the National Security Agency, in 2001 to monitor international phone calls and e-mails to or from the United States involving people the government suspected of having terrorist links. The program, which the administration said did not require investigators to seek warrants before conducting surveillance, was revealed in December 2005.
After the program was challenged in court, Bush put it under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established in 1978. The president still claims the power to order warrantless spying.
The subpoenas seek a wide array of documents from the Sept. 11 attacks to the present. Among them are any that include analysis or opinions from Justice, NSA, the Defense Department, the White House, or “any entity within the executive branch” on the legality of the electronic surveillance program.
Debate continues over whether the program violates people’s civil liberties. The administration has gone to great lengths to keep it running.
Interest was raised by vivid testimony last month by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey about the extent of the White House’s effort to override the Justice Department’s objections to the program in 2004.
Comey told the Judiciary Committee that Gonzales, then-White House counsel, tried to persuade Attorney General John Ashcroft to reverse course and recertify the program. At the time, Ashcroft lay in intensive care, recovering form gall bladder surgery.
Ashcroft refused, as did Comey, who temporarily held the power of the attorney general’s office during his boss’ illness.
The White House recertified the program unilaterally. Ashcroft, Comey, FBI Director Robert Mueller and their staffs prepared to resign. Bush ultimately relented and made changes the Justice officials had demanded, and the agency eventually recertified it.
Fratto defended the surveillance program as “lawful” and “limited.”
“It’s specifically designed to be effective without infringing Americans’ civil liberties,” Fratto said. “The program is classified for a reason — its purpose is to track down and stop terrorist planning. We remain steadfast in our commitment to keeping Americans safe from an enemy determined to use any means possible — including the latest in technology — to attack us.”
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the subpoena to Gonzales is under review and that the department recognizes Congress’ oversight role.
“We must also give appropriate weight to the confidentiality of internal executive branch deliberations,” he said. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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