The Harman Letter

Jane Harman's letter warning the Bush administration not to destroy evidence has now been declassified. Good for her for writing it, though obviously one wishes some more effective means of halting this business had been devised.

Comments

Unfortunately you can't see the "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" that accompanied the letter.

Posted by steve duncan | January 4, 2008 9:06 AM

So where's her letter telling them to stop torturing people? For fuck's sake, any of these people could have leaked this to the New York Times well before those tapes were destroyed. But that, of course, would have involved some minuscule amount of risk to their status and career, so dainty, classified letters of protest it is!

Posted by Christmas | January 4, 2008 9:24 AM

Marty Lederman's post on this is well worth reading.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | January 4, 2008 9:48 AM

further to tyrone slotrop's point and post: congressional oversight has become somewhat chummy with the agency/program they are overseeing. The incentives to rock the boat are few (you lose willing access to information, "favors", and quite frankly, with respect to intelligence oversight, significant status within Congress).

Term limits on committee assignments would help reduce risk-aversion at the risk of increasing lack of specific knowledge -- I'm still trying to figure out if that is a good trade off but something has to change.

Congress, as an institution, could have done a lot better with this.

Posted by mike c | January 4, 2008 10:09 AM

The incentives to rock the boat are few - mike c

Bingo!

But what you point out are the disincentives to rock the boat which, while you can alleviate them, will always be there.

The key problem is providing incentives to rock the boat. As I always do in these cases, I pretend like I'm Scalia and go to the "original intent" of the Founders. Which is pretty clear. The incentive is supposed to be that by rocking the boat, you score major political points (c.f. how Truman became VP and then President). The problem is that if you rock the boat nowadays, the media will go on and on about you just doing it to score political points, as if that were a bad thing.

So now, people feel that, to score political points, they should avoid rocking the boat.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but IMHO, it's a construction of neo-manoralists in the media (and no doubt the GOP) to undermine our democratic system of checks and balances by denigrating the very notion of ambition. And it has deep roots in pre-millenialism and the attitudes of the Southern class system.

What to do about it? I dunno. Maybe instead of trying to force students to pray in school or reciting the pledge, they should be forced to read Federalist #10 (I think that's the one) every day?

Posted by DAS | January 4, 2008 12:18 PM

Best I can tell, she asked a direct and important question in the letter, the CIA told her to go fuck herself, and that was the end of it.

Leaving aside the fact that the whole idea of oversight is, if you see something illegal, you do something about it....this still shows how little she gave a shit. She couldn't even be bothered to get a secret answer to her secret question.

Pelosi, it seems, did even less

Posted by Alan in SF | January 4, 2008 3:30 PM

"Good for her for writing it"

Really ? On the topic of the destruction of evidence relating the the interrogation of al Qaeda members before the 9/11 commission had begun, he advice was that this "might make the CIA look bad".
As opposed to constituring destruction of evidence, being illegal, etc.

I'd suggest good on the CIA, WH, GOP officials who also didn't protest this and would undoubtedly made the same point.

Posted by Kilo | January 4, 2008 11:36 PM