Conyers, Judiciary Members Demand Answers from Attorney General on 9/11 Surveillance

The letter Conyers sent Mukasey.

It's a response to Mukasey's recent tearful statement that we need to grant telecoms retroactive immunity for the sake of the 9/11 victims. Mukasey claims the laws back then prevented eavesdropping on a call from Afghanistan about the attack. That's a lie: the law specifically permitted eavesdropping on that type of call. It is a lie that attempts to exploit--with tears, no less--the tragedy of 3,000 deaths. It is a lie that is being used in an attempt to subvert our fundamental freedoms. The current FISA law provides all the authority needed to gather intelligence.

Further, the 9/11 Commission discovered no evidence of such a phone call. Mukasey is no better than Gonzalez. He disgraces our nation. Conyers' letter also asks about the latest declassified it's-not-really-a-war-crime memo that has a footnote claiming the President in not bound by the 4th amendment when waging war inside the U.S. Mukasey, Yoo, Addington, and all the rest of them, are bad people who deserve bad endings.

In A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut calls them psychopathic personalities(PPs):

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass! (pp. 98-101)

High profile Congressional hearings will probably be on CSPAN soon. Don't expect much to come of them. These folks might not want to visit any countries interested in prosecuting war criminals though.