Decrepit

It's shameful that the technology for our nation's highest office is so pathetic. The White House needs to keep up with the times as surely as any other large company. It's appalling that they can't meet what I imagine to be the increased demand from the new Administration. Congress should remove whatever barriers are in place to a more robust technology in the White House (the Presidential Records Act ought to be rewritten) and properly budget for the changing times.

No More Commodore 64s In The West Wing

Stories like this, about the primitive nature of the White House's communication apparatus, make me mental. Maybe the incompetence of the past eight years is attributable to idiotic Bush appointees, but maybe just as much to the fact that they were charged with running the most powerful nation on Earth with WordPerfect and a TRS-80.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

The White House website has been very late to update. The PCs in the White House have 6 year-old software on them. Laptops are generally not allowed. I remember being amazed that the Bush Administration would "accidentally" leak documents to reporters, but with the garbage tools they have to work with, I get why.

There are two problems here - inertia and compliance with the Presidental Records Act. On the latter, Congress needs to get involved - our government should have the best and most state-of-the-art equipment to do their job. On the former, the Obama Administration is the best in history to push the executive office into the 21st century.

Free The Blackberry

John Podesta argues for liberation.

I've been working with Barack Obama since before the election, and I know that without his virtual connection to old friends and trusted confidants beyond the bubble that seals off every president from the people who elected him, he'd be like a caged lion padding restlessly around the West Wing, wondering what's happening on the other side of the iron bars that surround the People's House.

An off-line Obama isn't just bad for Barack. It's bad for all of us.

The president's ability to reach outside his inner circle gives him access to fresh ideas and constructive critics; it underscores the difference between political "victories" and actual solutions; and it brings the American people into a battle we can only win by working together.

The reason Obama will probably lose Blackberry privileges is the 1978 Presidential Reocrds Act, which was signed into law 24 years before the invention of the Blackberry. But surely there's a compromise here that can be reached through Congress that will enable Obama to get unfiltered information from friends and opinion makers. The laws need to keep pace with modern life, and we should want to welcome our President into it.

UPDATE: WIN! Obama will keep his Blackberry. But the legislation angle ought to be addressed.

Step Into Marcusland

I finally got around to seeing Taxi To the Dark Side, the Oscar-winning, Peabody-winning documentary that looks at the death of an Afghani cab driver in US custody at Bagram Air Base and expands out to study American detainee policy during the war on terror. There's nothing in there that you didn't know if you've read the articles, the magazine profiles, the books and the official reports about our torture policy. But it's laid out in an almost lawyerlike fashion, a brief for the crimes committed in our name since 9/11, crimes that do make Americans and (especially) American troops less safe, extract misleading and frequently wrong intelligence, and debase us all by acting contrary to American values and principles and lowering our moral authority throughout the world.

These are the crimes that Ruth Marcus wants us all to ignore, by acknowledging that people like Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were doing their level best to keep us safe, and whether they ignored federal law and international conventions in the process should be overlooked. Despite the fact that, just this week, a Senate Armed Services Committee report emphatically charged top officials inside the White House with creating the conditions for and authorizing the practice of torture in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons abroad, according to Marcus (and I would imagine the bulk of the political establishment) these crimes should be ignored, not because they weren't illegal but because of who the people were that conducted them. This is what Marcus brushes aside:

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

That order set the stage for the infamous redefinition of torture at the Justice Department, and then Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization of “aggressive” interrogation methods. Some of those methods were torture by any rational definition and many of them violate laws and treaties against abusive and degrading treatment.

These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive.

Marcus somehow rationalizes her leniency by claiming that the important thing now is to "make sure this never happens again," not to prosecute the crimes of the past. And yet, as Glenn Greenwald lays out in only the way he can, only through prosecution can we deter top officials from this behavior. The laws are already in place. The determinations about liberty and security have already been made. If Bush officials are allowed to go free, like the many White House officials before them in Administrations past, what becomes learned behavior is that high crimes at the executive level will forever go unpunished. Here's Glenn:

...one of the two principal reasons we impose penalties for violations of the criminal law is deterrence -- to provide an incentive for potential lawbreakers to refrain from breaking our laws, rather than deciding that it is beneficial to do so. Though there is debate about how best to accomplish it and how effective it ultimately is, deterrence of future crimes has been, and remains, a core purpose of the criminal law. That is about as basic as it gets [...]

Punishment for lawbreaking is precisely how we try to ensure that crimes "never happen again." If instead -- as Marcus and so many other urge -- we hold political leaders harmless when they break the law, if we exempt them from punishment under the criminal law, then what possible reason would they have from refraining from breaking the law in the future? A principal reason for imposing punishment on lawbreakers is exactly what Marcus says she wants to achieve: "ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated." By telling political leaders that they will not be punished when they break the law, the exact opposite outcome is achieved: ensuring that this conduct will be repeated [...]

A central observation in Marcus' column is that the controversies that have now arisen over Bush lawbreaking in the areas of interrogation and surveillance are not new. As she points out, these are the very same controversies that we've been confronting for decades.

That's exactly right. The same controversies over government lawbreaking arise over and over. And why is that? Because our political leaders keep breaking the law -- chronically and deliberately. And why do they keep doing that? Because there is no deterrent against it. Every time they get caught breaking the law, the Ronald Reagans and Ruth Marcuses of the world step in to insist that they should not be punished, that the criminal law is not for elite leaders in political office, that those involved in the noble function of ruling America are too intrinsically well-intentioned to warrant punishment even when they commit crimes, that it's more important to look forward than back.

And those who committed these crimes clearly know this. That's why we're seeing Dick Cheney practically boasting about torturing terrorists, having the audacity to call it the moral thing to do. In doing so he makes the same argument as Marcus; that he was doing whatever he could to protect the country from attack, and in those situations, the law does not apply in the same way, and nobody should suffer opprobrium for doing what he thought was right, as if the law is now subject to personal conceptions of right and wrong rather than the federal statutes and written code available to everyone. The lies that torture yields valuable information and saves lives
notwithstanding, what Cheney is saying goes as far as Richard Nixon's famous statement "If the President does it, then it's not illegal." Essentially, his plea is that "if I think it's necessary, then it's not illegal."

This is how we get to the point that the Vice President decides that he has the sole determination for what records he must release to the National Archives, which to some may seem like a smaller point, but is symptomatic of the same pathology - that the laws don't apply to him unless he decides they do.

"The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law," according to a court filing by Cheney's office with the U.S. District Court on Dec. 8.

Cheney is being sued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group that is trying to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public.

The 1978 Presidential Records Act requires all presidential and vice presidential records to be transferred to the National Archives immediately upon the end of the president's last term of office and gives the archivist responsibility to preserve and control access to presidential records. The law ended the tradition of private ownership of presidential papers, opening White House records to the public and historians.

So here we have a Vice President who has no problem torturing, wiretapping on American citizens, detaining suspects without charges for years, rendering others to countries we know torture, outing CIA agents for political retribution, eliminating habeas corpus and nullifying the Geneva Conventions, and he gets to shred every document he ever wrote and paper over this shameful history. Meanwhile, those brave enough to speak out about these offenses upon the Constitution and the dignity of the office are harassed without end, with their lives nearly destroyed, for intending to uphold American law. This is the topsy-turvy dynamic we have in a country where accountability is removed at the highest levels. This is Marcusland.

As Digby notes, this is a self-perpetuating cycle that insures those Republicans who get back in the White House are more radicalized and more contemptuous of US law because there is no consequence to the radicalism.

In fact, I have long argued that most of the past 35 years have been one long, horrific orgy of undemocratic political thuggery and conservative usurpation of the constitution. They get caught, they suffer some temporary public disapprobation, people like Feldt are caught in strange moral quandries, we define democracy down, but there is never any official sanction. It's become so common that we now this as a natural part of our politics --- the Republicans seize power, they use it in illegal and undemocratic ways, they are exposed, the Democrats win, they fail to hold them accountable and the cycle starts again. (Why, if we didn't know any better, we might think they were all in on it together! Heavens...) [...]

This all began with Nixon and the pardon, in my opinion. Many of us, myself included, believed as Marcus and Taylor still do, that forgiveness is a good thing, that the country needs to heal after a tumultuous time and there is no purpose in dragging people through the mud. But I was wrong then and they are still wrong today. How many times do we have to be hit over the head with this stuff before we realize that these people are getting more and more radical with each successive bite at the apple?

This time around, the depth of the radicalism, the breadth of the war crimes, are so astonishing, that at least some circles are arguing that war crimes prosecutions are necessary to offer resistance to this lawlessness. Unfortunately, most of these rumblings are coming from the same people that have consistently argued the need to speak up and reject war crimes, and clearly the establishment has no taste for it. What's more, the Democratic leadership has been in various ways complicit in many of the crimes and certainly willing to enable the cover-up; in the Military Commissions Act, there are explicit instructions to pardon the President and his top officials for any crimes committed in detainee treatment from 9/11 to the present and to continue the CIA detainee program that we know to be criminal. But in the absence of any attempt at prosecution, or at the very least a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this doctrine will be the lasting legacy of not only this Administration but all of those in the future, and we will have lost our democracy.

On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” “I think as a general proposition, I’d say yes,” replied Cheney.

Destroying the Evidence

This, from Henry Waxman's Oversight and Government Reform Committee, er, doesn't look good.

The number of White House officials given RNC e-mail accounts is higher than previously disclosed. In March 2007, White House spokesperson Dana Perino said that only a “handful of officials” had RNC e-mail accounts. In later statements, her estimate rose to “50 over the course of the administration.” In fact, the Committee has learned from the RNC that at least 88 White House officials had RNC e-mail accounts. The officials with RNC e-mail accounts include Karl Rove, the President’s senior advisor; Andrew Card, the former White House Chief of Staff; Ken Mehlman, the former White House Director of Political Affairs; and many other officials in the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Communications, and the Office of the Vice President.

White House officials made extensive use of their RNC e-mail accounts. The RNC has preserved 140,216 e-mails sent or received by Karl Rove. Over half of these e-mails (75,374) were sent to or received from individuals using official “.gov” e-mail accounts. Other heavy users of RNC e-mail accounts include former White House Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor (66,018 e-mails) and Deputy Director of Political Affairs Scott Jennings (35,198 e-mails). These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.

There has been extensive destruction of the e-mails of White House officials by the RNC. Of the 88 White House officials who received RNC e-mail accounts, the RNC has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials. In a deposition, Susan Ralston, Mr. Rove’s former executive assistant, testified that many of the White House officials for whom the RNC has no e-mail records were regular users of their RNC e-mail accounts. Although the RNC has preserved no e-mail records for Ken Mehlman, the former Director of Political Affairs, Ms. Ralston testified that Mr. Mehlman used his account “frequently, daily.” In addition, there are major gaps in the e-mail records of the 37 White House officials for whom the RNC did preserve e-mails. The RNC has preserved only 130 e-mails sent to Mr. Rove during President Bush’s first term and no e-mails sent by Mr. Rove prior to November 2003. For many other White House officials, the RNC has no e-mails from before the fall of 2006.

There is evidence that the Office of White House Counsel under Alberto Gonzales may have known that White House officials were using RNC e-mail accounts for official business, but took no action to preserve these presidential records. In her deposition, Ms. Ralston testified that she searched Mr. Rove’s RNC e-mail account in response to an Enron-related investigation in 2001 and the investigation of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald later in the Administration. According to Ms. Ralston, the White House Counsel’s office knew about these e-mails because “all of the documents we collected were then turned over to the White House Counsel’s office.” There is no evidence, however, that White House Counsel Gonzales initiated any action to ensure the preservation of the e-mail records that were destroyed by the RNC.

People may not have time to understand the intracacies of policy or the various interlocking elements of a scandal. But they get destruction of documents. There needs to be some explaining to the public about why government officials can't use off-the-grid email accounts, but I think that one's pretty obvious too; it means they're trying to hide something (it also violates the Presidential Records Act). If the Democrats can manage to make this as simple as possible, they can gain an understanding in the public about the seriousness of these charges. Rove and company have been fucking with the executive bureaucracy, employing it to elect Republicans and punish Democrats, and then hiding the evidence after the fact. Game, set, meet match.

You've Got RNC Mail

I've been following but not writing about this related scandal to the US Attorney purge, which concerns the fact that many White House communications are coming from RNC email servers instead of those from the White House, which is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

Apparently this has become standard practice, and while it sounds like an inside baseball thing, it's just an extension of the secrecy under which this White House operates.

White House staff are using non-governmental e-mail addresses to avoid leaving a paper trail of their communications, a senior congressman charged Monday.

In a pair of letters Monday, House Oversight and Investigations Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, D.-Calif., asked the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney '04 Campaign to preserve e-mails sent and received by White House officials using domains controlled by the two groups [...]

"Such e-mails written in the conduct of White House business would appear to be governmental records subject to preservation and eventual public disclosure," Waxman wrote.

The use of e-mail addresses from domains like "gwb43.com" by White House aides surfaced in the news earlier this month when the Justice Department released hundreds of e-mails between political appointees discussing the firing of several U.S. attorneys. E-mails from Scott Jennings, a deputy to White House political adviser Karl Rove, came from an address featuring the gwb43.com domain.

But Waxman also pointed to e-mails his committee received last year in connection to convicted superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, which show White House aides sending and receiving work-related e-mails from domains like "georgewbush.com" and "rnchq.org".

It appears that the White House deliberately went off the grid because they knew internal emails could be subpoenaed. Rep. Waxman has made public emails that circumvent the White House communications system that he uncovered during the US Attorney probe, but also the Jack Abramoff investigation, and emails sent to the General Services Administration, which is a target for holding meetings on helping Republican candidates in 2008 with taxpayer dollars.

Apparently Karl Rove sends 95% of his email on RNC servers, yet the White House is paying him to do that. Rove's top aide, Susan Ralston, was walking around with an RNC Blackberry. This is a security issue as well, since the RNC servers are not as locked up as the ones in the White House, and could be subject to spying from foreign intelligence agencies. And in the end, this won't help White House staffers avoid scrutiny as easily as they thought:

But as we noted earlier with Karl Rove, this may have been too clever by half. If the president's aides were using RNC emails or emails from other Republican political committees, they can't have even the vaguest claim to shielding those communications behind executive privilege.

Now Rep. Waxman is asking for all RNC emails regarding the General Services Administration probe, and he'll get them. This was a stupid idea from an executive branch obsessed with secrecy, and it won't even achieve the stated purpose. And it's against the law, but that's almost expected at this point.