A word from his friends...

And this from staunch Republicans, such as Bruce Fein, former associate deputy attorney under the Reagan Administration and Republican legal activist speaking about Bush's legal advisors:

"[They] have staked out powrs that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He's said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President's reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war pwoers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world's a battlefield—according to his view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It's got the sense of Louis XIV; 'I am the State.'"

From Richard A. Epstein, former high-level Administration lawyer and prominent libertarian professor of law at University of Chicago speaking on Bush, Cheney and Cheney's chief of staff and legal advisor David Addington:

"The President doesn't have the power of a king, or even that of state governors. He's subject to the laws of Congress. The Administration's lawyers are nuts on this issue ... their talk of the inherent power of the Presidency seems to be saying that the courts can't stop them, and neither can Congress." Following September 11, "Addington was more like Cheney's agent than like a lawyer. A lawyer sometimes says no. Addington never said, 'There is a line you can't cross.'"

And Colin Powell on the illegal surveillance of American citizens: "It's Addington. He doesn't care about the Constitution."

(Quotes taken from Mayer, Jane. "The Hidden Power: The Legal Mind beyind the White House's War on Terror." In The New Yorker, July 3, 2006, pp. 44-45.)

Wiretapping...

In a January N.Y. Times article, members of the FBI were quoted saying that the thousands and thousands of tips gleaned by the NSA's illegal wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens' communications after 9/11 had led to nothing but "dead ends" (see NYT, 1/17/06, p.A6). Instead, the FBI was forced to divert countless man-hours to pursuing leads that proved useless.

It is clear that in casting too wide a net -- as the NSA has done -- no discernible benefit has been reaped. But the price has been exhorbitant -- we as a nation stand poised to sacrifice the liberties that we have fought so long to maintain and that many see as the foundation of our democracy.

Too, shortly after the FBI admission, Vice-President Cheney made a speech in which he claimed that the same illegal wire-tapping had reaped immeasurable rewards ... this in the face of contradictory evidence can only point to a cynicism that knows no bounds.

Off the hook...

Karl Rove is off the hook. Even for perjury. To accept the excuses given for revealing Valerie Plame's identity, one must admit that Rove did so for the pettiest of reasons. He claims he wished to show that Vice-President Cheney never authorized husband Wilson's trip .. odd given that Wilson never claimed the Vice-President had .. and that the trip was a "boondoggle" (to use the word used by another administration spokesman) set up by his wife. In other words, Rove was trying to besmirch Wilson at a time when he knew that Wilson was only telling the truth. And while Plame did recommend Wilson for the trip, the government had already determined the need for an investigation (see FactCheck's rundown of events).

The administration was angry because Wilson claimed that his investigation unequivocally demonstrated that there was no Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection at a time when they were trying to prove the opposite. Of course it has now come to light that Vice-President Cheney knew knew as much prior to our entering the war.

While we have allowed Rove to destroy the career of a dedicated CIA covert agent, and in so doing also to compromise CIA operations, we have also decided -- that is, Attorney-General Gonzalez has decided -- to prosecute government employees who leak classified government information to the public. This kind of brings up some interesting issues. When Deep Throat revealed that the Nixon administration was behind the burgling of Democratic headquarteres, was he committing a crime? In other words, if government employees make journalists aware of flagrant instances of law-breaking by our government, should they be arrested and charged?

But not Karl Rove, whose leak was carried out for the smallest and meanest of political objectives: to cause an adversary harm by getting at him through his wife -- kind of like being angry at some guy and punching out his girlfriend.