Small-Time Break-In
Honest injun: I don’t want to keep harping on politics. I’ve got a small text file of reminders of blog subjects that strike me during the day, and very few of them are political. But politics is topical, and issues must be handled either as they arise, or not at all, and the damn things keep popping up.
The story du jour is the report that three “independent contractors”—funny how those guys who were supposed to make government efficient and accountable keep cropping up, isn’t it?—illegally searched Barack Obama’s private passport records. The incident looks disturbingly similar to a similarly illegal examination of Bill Clinton’s records back when he was running against Bush senior in ’92, an attempt to dig up dirt suggesting Clinton may have tried to travel overseas to dodge the Vietnam draft. It’s not merely dirty politics, it’s downright illegal politics, and what really bugs me is that the powers that be don’t seem concerned.
CNN reports that, of the three contractors, who breached the personal records on at least three separate occasions (Jan 9, Feb 21, Mar 14), two were fired and one was “disciplined by the contractor’s company,” whatever that means, according to State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. And that’s as far as McCormack and the state department feel the discipline need go. Certainly no investigation is necessary. They’re writing off the intrusion as “impudent curiosity” on the part of the workers themselves.
Those scamps! Boys will be boys; sometimes a contractor just can’t help himself but spy upon politically prominent citizens. No sense in cracking down on an innocent prank. And they didn’t find anything anyway, so what’s the big deal? (Of course, if the crooks had found something, the same voices would insist we have more important things to worry about than a couple Watergate-style burglars. They might even consider the crime positively heroic.)
The Justice Department agrees. Remember the Justice Department? The one that’s been packed with Republican party loyalists while prosecutors with the audacity to pursue Republicans when the evidence warranted it were fired? The one that wants us to trust them to run their own blanket investigations of American citizens without warrants? The one that argues that catching the bad guys by any means is more important than preserving fundamental civil liberties? Yes, that Department of Justice has declined to investigate. No prosecution is pending.
To date, the White House has declined comment.
I didn’t intend to bring this article up; it seemed a little too far into conspiracy territory for me, in that it connects dots on no more evidence than the “cui bono.” The idea that Spitzer was targeted purely to remove a political obstacle isn’t grounded in much evidence, but it’s entirely plausible for an administration that continues to twist our law enforcement agencies into party-run political weapons.
Stuff like this needs to come to light, and it won’t happen unless the little fish are hit with the biggest hammers in the book. Bloody, vicious prosecution and sentencing is the only threat sufficient to get them to squeal on whoever hired them, and the only consideration these creeps would consider a deterrent. Certainly ethics aren’t. In the legal environment we now inhabit, the innocent do have something to fear, because the authorities won’t play by their own security rules, and make no distinction between indiscretions and felonies. They pursue political enemies’ embarrassments as though they were felonies, and dismiss their own felonies as minor embarrassments, better forgotten if they can’t be ignored altogether. The party of law and order.
The Watergate break-in in ’72 eventually toppled a corrupt president. Nixon could not stand on his executive privilege because Archibald Cox, appointed by the president to investigate his own misdeeds, proved to have principles. So did two attorney generals Nixon compelled to resign for refusing to fire Cox. The staff and aides surrounding Nixon, including Dick Cheney, learned from his experience, and have consistently, for a generation or more, worked to replace justice with personal and party loyalty. They have largely succeeded. No matter how ugly this gets, I can’t expect that anyone will get his just desserts for it.