Apparently, after the Democrats convinced the president to create the Department of Homeland Security, he got so into it that he ended up creating two of them.
First, there’s the get-along-go-along operation that gets dragged into Keystone Cops political shenanigans and then lets bygones be bygones when it finds out it’s been had. Then there’s the highly-compartmented, top-secret, black-marker-wielding intelligence operation that releases its public reports.
The report the DHS released yesterday looks a bit like one of those old cornball FBI surveillance reports you might find in the back of some Malcolm X Reader you read in college or the same from some old lefty PBS documentary about Allen Ginsberg. In many places the thing is so marked up — or, as the phrase goes, ‘redacted’ — with that oversized, black magic-marker that you can hardly see what’s going on.
Actually, I shouldn’t have gone with the two DHS metaphor. It’s really more like three. Because there’s also the comically passive DHS which conducted the investigation of itself. The report issued Monday lacks, shall we say, Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutic of suspicion.’ (The general thrust of the report is ‘no harm no foul.’ We’ll be saying more about the specifics in subsequent posts.) In all seriousness, the report’s methods and conclusions are good examples of the difference between the hyper-aggressive investigations of the 1990s and the see-no-evil-hear-no-evil operations of today.
Here are some noteworthy examples from Wednesday’s article from the Austin American-Statesman. Keep in mind that the real question most people were trying to get an answer to was just who tried to misuse the DHS’s resources …
During questioning [of the DPS], the investigator “was consistently interrupted and challenged by DPS participants that questions were not within the scope of the DHS-OIG investigation,” one document said.
When asked who instructed the officer to call the interdiction center, “(redacted) said several individuals,” the document said. When asked for specifics, the investigator was told that “this question was outside the scope” of the investigation, and the question was not answered.
[ed.: if and when DHS investigates TPM, I’d like to put in my request for this ‘investigator’.]
…
Homeland security investigators refused to investigate a DPS order to destroy all documents relating to the agency’s search for the Democrats, referring the matter to the FBI. The FBI was not interested in investigating.
[ed.: with Leung and Hanssen out of circulation the Bureau is stretched thin lining up a new crop of double-agents.]
Not exactly the Ken Starr treatment …
