Patriots in the DOJ

Richard Comey is a saint. He values the duties of his office over party loyalty. It's a sad statement on America that such a mundane act (doing your job) can propel you to sainthood. But Comey wasn't going along with the White House's illegal spying racket:

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.

With Mr. Comey unwilling to sign off on the program, the White House went to Mr. Ashcroft - who had been in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital with pancreatitis and was housed under unusually tight security - because "they needed him for certification," according to an official briefed on the episode. The official, like others who discussed the issue, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.

This image of Abu Gonzales and Keystone Kard spiriting into a hospital in the dead of night to force a bedridden patient just out of surgery to let them continue their nefarious deeds is right out of a 50s film noir. And apprently, even Ashcroft wouldn't go along with it:

On one day in the spring of 2004, White House chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made a bedside visit to John Ashcroft, attorney general at the time, who was stricken with a rare and painful pancreatic disease, to try--without success--to get him to reverse his deputy, Acting Attorney General James Comey, who was balking at the warrantless eavesdropping.

Let the Eagle Soar could even see through this game. Of course, having the Chief of Staff and top counsel burst into your hospital room while you're on your potential deathbed probably didn't make him too happy either. This led the White House to have to suspend and reform parts of the program, which must have burned the Brush-Clearer-in-Chief's hide.

At what point are Risen and Lichtblau going to take their place alongside Woodward and Bernstein? Their reporting has been dogged, with revelation after revelation advancing the story with almost every article. These guys deserve a lot of credit, despite the cowardice of their betters, who won't even answer to their own ombudsman about why they held this story out for over a year. As pontificator correctly notes, the release of this information did not compromise national security in any way. It was a matter of public record that the government could obtain secret warrants to spy on terrorists in the United States.

The disclosure of the NSA's secret wiretapping program therefore changes nothing in terms of a terrorist's knowledge, and simply could not under any circumstances "tip off" a terrorist that he was under surveillance.  Accordingly, there are simply no circumstances under which disclosure of the program could harm national security.  (Of course, if the disclosure were to then go on and identify actual persons under surveillance, then of course that could harm national security -- but clearly that is not what happened here).

What we're talking about here is the rule of law, a principle about which Republicans only have a passing knowledge. It wasn't so long ago that Republicans would fulminate away about how, in the absence of the rule of law, we would be susceptible to "the arbitrary exercise of power by the state." Of course, then they were talking about a blow job, and the dangers to the republic contained therein. Now, when we have the executive branch ACTUALLY exercising that arbitrary power, too many of them remain silent. Arlen Specter and now Richard Lugar support hearings, and we'll have them. But this is clearly an episode that shows how 9/11 really changed everything: it turned a party that was once intimately concerned with small government and civil libertarianism into a bunch of fear-addled bedwetters who don't mind giving up on everything they once believed and held dear, so long as they can run into Daddy Dear Leader's waiting arms and be kept safe and soothed from the big bad monsters just outside the window.

This is a variation on a progressive blogosphere theme, but it's so damn true that we need to keep saying it over and over again. Stop being so afraid of everything, America. We can't dismiss the founding tenets of the country because a bad thing happened four years ago and trickles of pee started running down everybody's legs.