intelligence since 2002 is much higher than the total of $33 billion the Bush administration paid to Bechtel, Halliburton and other large corporations for reconstruction projects in Iraq.”
To sum up: McConnell left a career in government to go profit from the private telecom industry. Then he returned to government, where he devoted himself to protecting and shielding that industry from any accountability. Once the Bush administration ended, McConnell went back directly to his lucrative position at Booz Allen, where he advocates for massive expansions of surveillance policies—such as increased, joint government/corporate control over the Internet in the name of fighting “cyber wars”—from which his firm and its clients would profit greatly.
This is the toxic pattern that leads government officials to try to shield not only themselves but their most favored private corporations from any consequences for what they do, no matter how legally dubious.
Lawbreaking Studiously Ignored
When McConnell first publicly demanded full immunity for the telecom industry he served, it seemed implausible in the extreme that it would actually happen. Even highly cynical observers (such as myself) who had been working extensively on these issues for several years did not expect his brazen efforts to succeed. For a Democratic-controlled Congress, which claimed to be offended by Bush’s illegal spying, to grant retroactive immunity to the entire telecom industry after it had spent years breaking the law and invading the privacy of Americans—it just seemed a bridge too far, even for the culture of impunity that reigns in Washington.
After all, leading Democrats in Congress were expressing righteous outrage not only about the illegal spying but also about how little they were being told regarding what the program entailed and about how contemptuously Bush officials were stonewalling their investigations. In September 2006—two months before Democrats won control of Congress—the then–ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, made clear in a letter to the White House how little even he knew about the most basic elements of the NSA spying program.
For the past six months, I have been requesting without success specific details about the program, including: how many terrorists have been identified; how many arrested; how many convicted; and how many terrorists have been deported or killed as a direct result of information obtained through the warrantless wiretapping program.
I can assure you, not one person in Congress has the answers to these and many other fundamental questions.
The problem for McConnell wasn’t merely that Congress was in the dark about what the eavesdropping program entailed. A potentially even greater obstacle was that it had become indisputably clear that, even using the right-wing DOJ’s view of the law, the Bush administration’s spying on Americans had been blatantly illegal. Indeed, Congress and the nation would soon learn that at one point, the wiretapping had been so shockingly lawless that even Bush’s own top DOJ officials had revolted when they learned of it.
In May 2007, James Comey—Bush’s deputy attorney general in 2003 and 2004—testified about the NSA program before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, had spent two years working to block Comey from testifying, but once Democrats gained control of the Senate they were finally able to compel his appearance.) Comey reported that shortly after he became deputy attorney general, he reviewed the warrantless NSA spying program Bush had ordered back in 2001 and concluded that it was patently illegal. As a result, Comey refused to sign a DOJ certification attesting to the program’s legality, a certification which was required every forty-five days under Bush’s original executive order that implemented the program.
When the new DOJ certification was due, Attorney
To sum up: McConnell left a career in government to go profit from the private telecom industry. Then he returned to government, where he devoted himself to protecting and shielding that industry from any accountability. Once the Bush administration ended, McConnell went back directly to his lucrative position at Booz Allen, where he advocates for massive expansions of surveillance policies—such as increased, joint government/corporate control over the Internet in the name of fighting “cyber wars”—from which his firm and its clients would profit greatly.
This is the toxic pattern that leads government officials to try to shield not only themselves but their most favored private corporations from any consequences for what they do, no matter how legally dubious.
Lawbreaking Studiously Ignored
When McConnell first publicly demanded full immunity for the telecom industry he served, it seemed implausible in the extreme that it would actually happen. Even highly cynical observers (such as myself) who had been working extensively on these issues for several years did not expect his brazen efforts to succeed. For a Democratic-controlled Congress, which claimed to be offended by Bush’s illegal spying, to grant retroactive immunity to the entire telecom industry after it had spent years breaking the law and invading the privacy of Americans—it just seemed a bridge too far, even for the culture of impunity that reigns in Washington.
After all, leading Democrats in Congress were expressing righteous outrage not only about the illegal spying but also about how little they were being told regarding what the program entailed and about how contemptuously Bush officials were stonewalling their investigations. In September 2006—two months before Democrats won control of Congress—the then–ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, made clear in a letter to the White House how little even he knew about the most basic elements of the NSA spying program.
For the past six months, I have been requesting without success specific details about the program, including: how many terrorists have been identified; how many arrested; how many convicted; and how many terrorists have been deported or killed as a direct result of information obtained through the warrantless wiretapping program.
I can assure you, not one person in Congress has the answers to these and many other fundamental questions.
The problem for McConnell wasn’t merely that Congress was in the dark about what the eavesdropping program entailed. A potentially even greater obstacle was that it had become indisputably clear that, even using the right-wing DOJ’s view of the law, the Bush administration’s spying on Americans had been blatantly illegal. Indeed, Congress and the nation would soon learn that at one point, the wiretapping had been so shockingly lawless that even Bush’s own top DOJ officials had revolted when they learned of it.
In May 2007, James Comey—Bush’s deputy attorney general in 2003 and 2004—testified about the NSA program before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, had spent two years working to block Comey from testifying, but once Democrats gained control of the Senate they were finally able to compel his appearance.) Comey reported that shortly after he became deputy attorney general, he reviewed the warrantless NSA spying program Bush had ordered back in 2001 and concluded that it was patently illegal. As a result, Comey refused to sign a DOJ certification attesting to the program’s legality, a certification which was required every forty-five days under Bush’s original executive order that implemented the program.
When the new DOJ certification was due, Attorney
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