Will no one stand up for the torturers?

Well, this is it, I suppose -- the final if unneeded proof that the variously assorted yokels, incompetents, racketeers and blackguards of the Bush administration are, hands down, the most brazenly buffoonish ever.

Couldn't, just once, we get one scandal out of the way before proceeding to the inexorable next?

I guess not. For now comes word that the administration's top superspook, the CIA's Gen. Michael Hayden, has been investigating his investigator, Inspector General John Helgerson, which the New York Times delicately terms as "unusual."

And the delicate understatements didn't stop there. It seems the CIA's inspector general's probes into the CIA's detention, interrogation and rendition programs have caused "resentment" at the agency. The inspector is deemed by stouter superspooks as a namby-pamby buttinsky, who concluded in 2004, for instance, that "some C.I.A.-approved interrogation procedures" -- such as slapping the bejesus out of a suspect in a freezing cell amidst numerous drowning sessions -- "appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."

Pshaw. So the chief spook is snooping into the nefarious and immeasurably unpatriotic doings of this candy-assed slacker. And that brings us back to more understatements.

Experts -- but only qualified experts, mind you -- say a counterinvestigation of the investigator by the investigated -- all are now interchangeable, so don't fret if confusion arises -- would be sure to cause "anxiety" by the investigated and has "aroused concern on Capitol Hill that it posed a conflict of interest." Yes, even as a clueless non-expert, I can see how it might pose that.

Furthermore, these experts say such a counterinvestigation "would threaten to undermine the independence" of the first, legitimate investigator. Frederick Hitz, for example, who whiled away his days as a CIA inspector general way back in the legally uptight 1990s, went so far as to declare the counterinvestigation "a terrible idea," not to mention that it might "not be proper." Observed Mr. Hitz: "Under the statute, the inspector general has the right to investigate the director. How can you do that and have the director turn around and investigate the I.G.?"

Ah, but these are Bush appointees, Mr. Hitz -- you know, those brazenly buffoonish yokels, incompetents, racketeers and blackguards who accomplish daily new managerial heights in new lows.

Besides, Gen. Hayden's spokesman has cleared up the kerfuffle. His boss' "only goal," said he, "is to help [the inspector general's] office, like any office at the agency, do its vital work even better." And next, perhaps the IRS will try to help the inspector general do his vital work even better.

But let's do cut Gen. Hayden a little slack. Rather than launching illicit counterinvestigations, it seems the heretofore normal route for "agency heads who are unhappy with the conduct of their inspectors general" was to go the "Integrity Committee of the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency." My guess: If that route was ever proposed to the good director, he laughed every bit as hard as you just did.

Nevertheless the director does have his defenders, other than his hired spokesman. Said one former spook of his fellow spooks investigated in the original investigations: "These are good people who thought they were doing the right thing. And now they are getting beat up pretty bad and they have to go out and hire a lawyer."

Yes, give me the beatings amid drownings any day. Anything but the horror of retaining counsel, merely because I whisked a few folks off to secret prisons housing industrious torture chambers.

What's this country coming to, when a spook can't do his patriotic best in the bravest and newest of American ways?

Comments

[Zee]

Well put.

[Mooser]

Only a matter of time until "Dead men give no depositions" becomes the operative rule for all interactions with detainees. And after that, citizens.

[t quigly]

"and now ...they have to go out and hire a lawyer."

Too bad the illegally-detained detainees can't do the same.

[UK]

See, guys, this is just like CSI and Ecklie! Or Lethal Weapon's Lorna Cole versus Riggs, or Dirty Harry and DA Rothko!

Here's another interesting assertion regarding Helgerson:

http://tinyurl.com/3xq2a8

Mighty Mike Hayden is heroically trying to frustrate the traitor Helgerson in time to save the cheer . . . er, save the world. That's how it will play.