In covering Barton Gellman's shocking and brilliant book about the Cheney presidency, Angler, we looked at the palpable-- and very rational-- fear many of Cheney's law-breaking minions had about going to prison in a post-Bush/Cheney future.
I would wager that history will treat Nancy Pelosi well. She is not just the first woman Speaker of the House, she is also one of the Speakers with the most accomplished records. Tarring her legacy however, is one 3-word phrase, "off the table." One of her daughters once blamed me for popularizing the unfortunate Pelosi response to a question about holding Bush and Cheney accountable for the most criminally-oriented American government in all history. I suspect a Speaker Alan Grayson would have handled it very differently. He may be a huge Pelosi backer but he has some very different priorities and is a lot more serious about the U.S. Constitution than most mere politicians.
Gellman makes it clear in his book how Cheney moved with lightning speed to take over the U.S. government from an incurious and ill-equipped-- both intellectually and morally-- George W. Bush and how Cheney and his team of war criminals used the NSA to grab more and more power within the administration and freeze out any and all rational debate. An out-and-out fascist shit-bag like David Addington, Cheney's completely unscrupulous chief lawyer, didn't seem to care… but he was pretty much the only one not obsessed with President Kerry throwing the whole lot of them in jail for subverting the Constitution. If Cheney was the E.F. Hutton on the Bush Regime, Addington was the alpha lawyer of the snarling, snapping pack of ruthlessly bred attack dogs. Gellman:
It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. Back in 2001, it had been Cheney who brought Bush a radically new concept of electronic surveillance at home. Through his lawyer, the vice president now guided the program's expansion and development. Words, once assigned by the commander in chief, became orders for the nation's espionage machinery. And it was Addington who wrote those words, defining the reach of warantless intrusion into the lives of Americans. On national security matters, the president's own lawyer, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, did little more than review documents that Addington prepared.Before he resigned in 2004-- and wrote a book about his experiences inside the Bush Regime (The Terror Presidency)-- Jack Goldsmith headed the Office of Legal Counsel, the final arbiter on what was and what wasn't legal inside the administration. He quickly fell out with Cheney and Addington-- he wrote in his book, "Nobody had said no to them before"-- over torture and domestic spying. The carefully placed network of Cheney apparatchiks throughout government demanded ex ante pardons for the activities they knew were illegal. Goldsmith pulled that rug out from under them and there was a general freakout at the CIA and among others who were carrying out Cheney's criminally insane agenda. Gellman writes that "Cheney and Addington, Goldsmith came to believe, manipulated the legal advice they sought. 'They were geniuses at this,' Goldsmith said. 'They could divide up all the problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answer together to get the result they want.'"
There were all kinds of excuses floated for clearly criminal activities like insisting customers-- so forget citizens-- waived their privacy rights in the fine print of their telephone and Internet service contracts.
If only they knew how accommodating Nancy Pelosi would be, lots of sleepless, fearful nights could have been avoided!
