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Tuesday, July 15, 2008 |
Lessig: The percentage of Americans believing Congress is doing a good/excellent job is 9%.
Congress is in fact a bunch of yes-men, who have given away several of their rights to the Emperor.
"Change Congress is a movement to build support for basic reform in how our government functions."
The problem is that Congress is compromised.
Salon: "Harper's Scott Horton yesterday interviewed Jane Mayer about her new book, The Dark Side. The first question he asked was about the Bush administration's fear that they would be criminally prosecuted for implementing what the International Red Cross had categorically described as 'torture'.
Mayer responded 'that inside the White House there [had] been growing fear of criminal prosecution, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the Geneva Conventions applied to the treatment of the detainees,' and that it was this fear that led the White House to demand (and, of course, receive) immunity for past interrogation crimes as part of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. But Mayer noted one important political impediment to holding Bush officials accountable for their illegal torture program:
An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.
The ranking members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were briefed dozens of times about the CIA's interrogation and detention program over the past seven years - so any member who has held one of those posts has arguably been complicit. Some say they tried to object, internally. But either because of the threat of violating national security, or, because of the fear of the political price of dissent, these figures in both parties would find it very hard at this point to point the finger at the White House, without also implicating themselves.
That's rather definitive. Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman and Jay Rockefeller were all previous ranking members of the Intelligence Committee, all received these briefings, and were thus 'compromised' and 'complicit' in exactly the way that Mayer just described, because - as Mayer put it - they 'would find it very hard at this point to point the finger at the White House, without also implicating themselves'."
3:49:24 PM 
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© Copyright 2008.
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