You'd Think This Would Merit A Mention

I don't know if you've been following this Michael Mukasey story, and if you haven't been reading Glenn Greenwald, I don't know how you would be able to follow it. At a speaking engagement in San Francisco, Mukasey asserted without proof that the Bush Administration knew about a phone call from a "safe house" in Afghanistan into the United States prior to 9/11, but couldn't eavesdrop on the call because of FISA's requirement for a warrant. On its face, this is completely untrue - under FISA you could get the warrant after the fact. However, what's more crucial is that nobody in the government or the agencies in a position to know about this phone call have any idea what Mukasey is talking about. And so once again, we see a Bush Administration official lying about a terrorist threat in order to gather massive unchecked powers for the executive.

Members of the 9/11 Commission doesn't know about this story. The House Judiciary Committee doesn't know about this story and wants some answers from Mukasey. And now, 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton is denying that any such call took place.

In light of Hamilton's amazing comment, could journalists possibly now report on this story? One of two things is true about Mukasey's extraordinary claim about how and why the 9/11 attacks occurred. Either:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

This is very serious. From the Justice Department's response to Greenwald it's clear that this call was not hypothetical, at least according to Mukasey. So we're left with either a lie or a cover-up. And at the minimum we're left with a use of fearmongering and the threat of terror to frighten Americans into loosening their grip on their civil liberties. And we know that these new executive powers have been abused and mishandled to expand the national surveillance state.

It's shocking to me that these abuses of executive authority haven't become a main argument in the Presidential race thus far. They have the bully pulpit to force attention on these egregious illegalities, from rendition to torture to illegal surveillance to legal theories abrogating multiple Constitutional amendments and international law. Look at the consequences from such actions, for example in the case of John Yoo's memo asserting the right of interrogators to torture.

The exact circumstances surrounding the dealings between Haynes and Yoo that led to the development of this memorandum are unclear. However, it is clear that Haynes had previously authorized the use of the torture techniques, and had secured an order from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorizing them.

Following the implementation of these techniques, more than 108 detainees died in detention. In a large number of these cases, the deaths have been ruled a homicide and connected to torture. These homicides were a forseeable consequence of the advice that Haynes and Yoo gave.

The introduction of torture techniques destroyed America’s reputation around the world, dramatically eroded a system of alliances that generations of Americans fought and labored to sustain and build, and provided the basis for a dramatic recruitment campaign for terrorist groups who are the nation’s principal adversaries in the war on terror. Yoo’s and Haynes’s conduct dramatically undercut the security and safety of every American. And equally, Yoo and Haynes demonstrated by their conduct contempt for the rule of law and the principles for which hundreds of thousands of Americans shed their blood in prior conflicts.

This Mukasey lie is a symptom. It's not an isolated incident. It's been the goal of this Administration to do whatever it takes, break whatever law necessary, to aggrandize power to themselves. They will clearly kill for it. They will clearly terrorize for it. And one would think the media would catch up to this reality.