(1) Rocky Balboa, Move Over
The only investigation ever launched of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program – the program that hit the fan in December – was an investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the role of Justice Department lawyers in putting together the program.

The outcome of the investigation was reported last Wednesday (May 10):

The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
[…]
“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey.

The entire timeline of the investigation:

January: investigation is launched at the initiative of Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y.

January: Jarrett requests necessary clearances for OPR lawyer.

May: NSA finishes thinking it over, and turns down the requests.

May: so investigation is dropped by OPR.

Just to be perfectly clear about it, the OPR investigators were not denied security clearances for poking into NSA files and questioning NSA personnel. They were denied security clearances for questioning other Justice Department lawyers who played a role in the construction and design of the program.

And there you have it, folks: the Bush regime version of our hallowed system of checks and balances. Wherein the entity under investigation gets to exercise veto power over whether the investigation can go forward. Wherein everyone is shocked when the investigation suddenly fails to get off the ground.

Hinchey, apparently doesn’t know when he’s beaten. The investigation he originally pushed for was an “attempt to determine which administration officials authorized, approved and audited NSA surveillance activities”. His reaction to the investigation being dropped is to propose a second investigation into the dropping:

Hinchey, who along with Representatives John Lewis of Georgia and Henry Waxman and Lynn Woolsey of California requested the Justice Department inquiry in January, following initial reports regarding the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, is furious.

“It is outrageous that people within the Bush administration have blocked an investigation into the role that members of the Justice Department played in establishing and executing this secret domestic spy program,” says the New York Democrat. “We must get to the bottom of this and reveal who has stifled this investigation. The Bush administration cannot simply create a Big Brother program and then refuse to answer any questions on how it came about and what it entails. We are not asking for top secret information. We simply want to know how the domestic spy initiative evolved and who is behind what many legal scholars believe is an unconstitutional surveillance program. If the administration believes the program is legal then it should have no problem being forthright with Justice Department investigators as to how it was initiated and is being carried out.”
[…]
Hinchey is not prepared to let the matter rest.

The congressman is seeking to determine who in the administration prevented the OPR investigators from obtaining the security clearances needed to conduct an investigation. When he has that information, Hinchey says, he will press for a reversal of the denial of the clearances and the reopening of the investigation.

You gotta love this guy! Rocky Balboa lost in the first movie too, didn’t he?

(2) Set A Thief To Catch A Thief?

“Set a thief to catch a thief” makes sense as a saying, but only if you understand what it’s saying. The Bush government – which is surely like no other government in recorded history, and I’m not thinking just of the U.S. – is either so dumb that it doesn’t understand, or so smart that it pretends to be too dumb to understand.

So by the time Karl Rove and Dick Cheney had processed that truism through their pea-or-pumpkin sized brains, it had turned into “Set the thief to catch himself”. And they managed to give even that a few unexpected twists and turns.

How surreal was the script they wrote? One tentacle of the government conducts a super-secret program of questionable legality. When it comes out, after fighting off all attempts by Congress to conduct investigations of the program, an investigation of sorts is handed over to another tentacle of the government. What is not revealed to anyone at the time is the fact that the tentacle of the first part retains veto power over the investigation proposed to be conducted by the tentacle of the second part.

In super-secret matters, when you don’t have highly placed sources, it’s best to fall back on frankly-admitted logical reconstructions of what must have happened offstage. For four months, the tentacles of both parts pretended not to be on talking terms with each other. At the end of four months (i.e., last week) either a nudge or a wink changed hands, so to speak, and the tentacle of the second part went through a half-heartedly hand-wringing announcement of its abject failure.

All this is basically bad news, and here’s why. Once you’ve perfected this kind of act, you can do whatever you want. It’s the Alice’s Restaurant school of government. All you need is:

A president good at lying with a straight face

A Congress good at asking no questions other than “What’s my line again?”

A brazen administration that cares not a fig for the judgment of history or any meet-your-maker day-of-reckoning fairy-tales

The game plan:

Do whatever you want

When it comes out, keep declaring it to be perfectly legal (that’s where the president gets to earn his keep), and a matter of national security

If there’s a demand for investigation, pull the stunt above

If there’s a lawsuit, invoke the State Secrets Privilege

Get away with doing whatever you want

Don’t laugh all the way to the bank. Don’t laugh, period. Don’t go to the bank; just stuff it under your mattress. (That way, it’ll be handy when you need to pay the hookers. Where do hookers come into it, you might ask? With this administration, hookers always come into it. Some of them may be masquerading as print media journalists. Some of them may be masquerading as ex-Watergate-uncoverers. Some of them may be masquerading as White House or Justice Department lawyers. Some of them may be masquerading as Congressmen or Dukes. Some may actually be hiding in plain sight by masquerading as hookers. But you can be sure hookers always come into it somewhere.)