When I saw the NYT's headline yesterday morning about destroyed tapes, a partially vindicated CIA and a likely more culpable White House -- a headline since changed at the latter's request, so its supporters can bitch about press bias, rather than get cornered on the story itself -- my instant reaction was: Yeah, so what?
I kid you not. And that's as sad a commentary on our present course as it gets. Just another White House crime, another revelation of autocratic corruption, a few more felonies to be buried under a mound of executive-privilege claims -- felonies soon lost and forgotten amid a vast swirl of executive malefactions and to be swept away by the ticking clock. Ho-hum. Just another morning in America.
Naturally the White House declined to comment on the story, citing, as always, various Inquiries to Nowhere. But the immensely believable gist is that at the very least a quadrumvirate of executive-branch pettifoggers, and quite probably the vice president and president as well, "took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing ... secret interrogations."
Make that "illegal" interrogations, which of course was why the malefactors were conspiring to destroy the evidence and thereby obstruct any slim chance of justice. Just another day at the office.
The story noted -- and surely this line is stored in the paper's word-processing memory banks for ease and convenience -- "that the involvement of White House officials ... was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged." They included the usual suspects, Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, as well as the rather obscure John Bellinger III and the ubiquitous nonentity of the befuddled Harriet Miers.
Whenever pondering the possible (hence probable) commission of an executive crime, all one really needs to nail it down with is the sighting of the name, David Addington, former counsel and current chief of staff to Dick Cheney. While Alberto was but a paper-pusher and rubber-stamper, Mr. Addington has been the one Martin Bormann-like mover and shaker in the determined deconstruction of our nation of laws. In his view, we don't actually have any. We have, instead, merely one voice of authority -- the president -- which is otherwise known as authoritarianism.
You may recall what the former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, had to say about the redoubtable Mr. Addington, whom Goldsmith encountered in meeting after Constitutionally hair-raising meeting. He labeled Addington the "biggest presence in the room" who was "known throughout the bureaucracy as the best-informed, savviest and most conservative lawyer in the administration, someone who spoke for and acted with the full backing of the powerful vice president."
Once, after Goldsmith had argued the enduring validity of the Geneva Conventions in relation to U.S.-held prisoners, Addington snapped back: "The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections. You cannot question his decision." Never mind that the questioning of presidential decisions happened to be Mr. Goldsmith's job. He had gotten the memo, loud and clear. And Addington's ruling, siphoned through the vice president from the president himself, has stood within White House circles as the only relevant Constitutional Crypto-Article ever since.
So when the NYT story asserted that "one former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been 'vigorous sentiment' among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes" -- that is, destroy evidence -- that sentiment was merely a vigorous reaffirmation of one-man rule. There is nothing illegal if the autocrat says it isn't. Case closed. See Addington Memo.
Some will cite the line following the one above as evidence of White House innocence: "other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes." But it's the additional line that undoes that defense. "Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal." The translation has a twist, but is the same: Wink, wink. Case closed. See Addington Memo.
Both versions are equally damning. But then again, these days we as a nation don't really do condemnation. It's just the Bushies at play again with the U.S. Constitution, rough-housing as usual in their characteristic, mapcap way. Ho-hum.
Yet my parental instincts tell me that someone is going to get hurt -- and recent history suggests it won't be the Bushies. Yeah? So what? It's just another day of malefaction, just another White House crime to be dismissed and therefore resolved by the ticking clock.
Problem is, then another executive clock starts; and this time, with plenty of criminal but overlooked or forgiven precedents of an autocratic making.