Good sum-up from the Senate Majority Project. The RNC and the NH GOP have spent almost $6 million on lawyers in the phone-jamming case. I guess just out of the goodness of their hearts.
Yeah, I think David and Kevin have it just right. The Post buried the lede in its piece today on the continuing fall out from the firing of CIA officer Mary McCarthy.
Says the Post in the second to last graf …
The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials.
CIA officers don’t work under the same civil service rules as most government employees. But I still don’t think this sort of political purge activity is permitted.
Not that we should be surprised about this. When Porter Goss took over as DCI he brought over with him a number of GOP political operatives. Take the CIA head of Public Affairs Goss installed: Jennifer Millerwise Dyck. She was a flack from the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign. Before that she worked for Goss on the Hill. And before that she worked for Ari Fleischer at the House Ways and Means Committee.
The administration’s response to the ills of the intelligence agencies has been to further politicize them, to put them under more reliable political control. And that’s not surprising either since, from the White House perspective, the failures of the intelligence agencies weren’t not getting it right on WMD and other issues. It was getting it more right and then wrong and then talking about what had happened to the press.
Now as the consequences of their policies grow more severe and catastrophic and the news gets worse and worse, it’s batten down the hatches time. We should be surprised that a deeper purge is underway.
Just because the White House was trying to root out all but loyalists that doesn’t mean they didn’t catch McCarthy in a fireable offense. I don’t know. But this latest abuse of power from the White House deserves much more than a passing reference.
Dionne: “Here’s the real meaning of the White House shake-up and the redefinition of Karl Rove’s role in the Bush presidency: The administration’s one and only domestic priority in 2006 is hanging on to control of Congress.”
Another choice graf from E.J.’s Friday column …
As one outside adviser to the administration said, the danger of a Democratic takeover of at least one house of Congress looms large and would carry huge penalties for Bush. The administration fears “investigations of everything” by congressional committees, this adviser said, and the “possibility of a forced withdrawal from Iraq” through legislative action.
This is the issue. Talk of impeachment, real or play-acted, is beside the point. Even having their hand pushed on Iraq is to them, I believe, a matter of far secondary importance. The key is subpoena power.
Little of what’s happened in the last five years would have been possible were it not for the fact that there was no political institution with subpoena power in Washington not under the control of the White House. Obviously, that doesn’t apply to pure policy objectives as much as what used to be known as congressional oversight and, particularly, investigations of wrongdoing. Yes, the Democrats briefly controlled the Senate. But that was always a marginal control, and as far as tough oversight it was almost immediately engulfed by 9/11.
The White House and the entire DC GOP for that matter is just sitting on too many secrets and bad acts. The bogus investigations of the pre-war intel is just one example, if one of the most resonant and glaring. Keeping control of the House and the Senate is less a matter of conventional ideological and partisan politics as it is a simple matter of survival.
They have too much to cover up. They could not survive sunlight.
By now you’ve probably seen or heard about the 60 Minutes segment with the interview with Tyler Drumheller, the now-retired CIA officer who was head of covert operations in Europe during the lead up to the Iraq War.
I just got off the phone with 
Drumheller. But before we get to that, let’s run down the key points in the story.
First, Drumheller says that most folks in the intelligence community didn’t think there was anything to the Niger-uranium story. We knew that in general terms; but we hadn’t heard it yet from someone so closely involved in the case itself. Remember, the CIA Station Chief in Rome, the guy who first saw the documents when they were dropped off at the US Embassy in October 2002, worked for Drumheller.
Second, Drumheller told us a lot more about the case of Naji Sabri, Iraq’s Foreign Minister, who the CIA managed to turn not long before the war broke out. Drumheller was in charge of that operation. The White House, as Drumheller relates it, was really excited to hear what Sabri would reveal about the inner-workings of Saddam’s regime, and particularly about any WMD programs. That is, before Sabri admitted that Saddam didn’t have any active programs. Then they lost interest.
Now, if you didn’t see the episode you can catch most of the key facts in this story at the 60 Minutes website.
But here’s an angle I’m not sure we’re going to hear much about.
Drumheller’s account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iraq intelligence.
So why didn’t we hear about any of this in the reports of those Iraq intel commissions that have given the White House a clean bill of health on distorting the intel and misleading the country about what we knew about Iraq’s alleged WMD programs?
Think about it. It’s devastating evidence against their credibility on a slew of levels.
Did you read in any of those reports — even in a way that would protect sources and methods — that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren’t any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn’t help the case for war? What about what he said about the Niger story?
Did the Robb-Silbermann Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee?
I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission. Three times apparently.
Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight’s 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely.
Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report.
Now, quite a few of us have been arguing for almost two years now that those reports were fundamentally dishonest in the story they told about why we were so badly misled in the lead up to war. The fact that none of Drumheller’s story managed to find its way into those reports, I think, speaks volumes about the agenda that the writers of those reports were pursuing.
“I was stunned,” Drumheller told me, when so little of the stuff he had told the commission’s and the committee’s investigators ended up in their reports. His colleagues, he said, were equally “in shock” that so little of what they related ended up in the reports either.
What Drumheller has to say adds quite a lot to our knowledge of what happened in the lead up to war. But what it shows even more clearly is that none of this stuff has yet been investigated by anyone whose principal goal is not covering for the White House.
On Friday, Jon Landay 
had a piece on the latest Iran bamboozlement out of the Bush administration. The State Department’s top arms control guy, Robert Joseph, says “We are very close to that point of no return” on Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Remember though, in last gig at the NSC, Bob Joseph was the guy charged with browbeating the CIA into letting the president use the Niger-uranium story in his 2003 state of the union address, even though Agency officials told him and other White House officials repeatedly that there was nothing to it.
Just no reason to take anything Bob Joseph says even remotely seriously on this question. His credibility is shot.
In order to “make lobbying reform legislation a better candidate for passage,” House Republicans further dilute that nasty “reform” part of the bill. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Josh noted earlier that CIA Official Tyler Drumheller spoke with the Bush-appointed WMD Commission. They don’t seem to have paid attention.
Yesterday evening I noted the Tyler Drumheller inteview on 60 Minutes and asked why little or none of what he had to say had made it into the reports of either the Robb-Silbermann Commission or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports on Iraqi WMD intelligence. As I reported in that post, Drumheller was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission three times prior to the issuance of its report and twice by the Senate Committee, though in the latter case only after its summer 2004 report came out.
Now, a number of readers have written in to ask whether it might not be the case that only staffers or investigators on the Robb-Silbermann Commission interviewed in Drumheller. In that case, perhaps his information never made its way up to the Commissioners themselves.
Not so.
I called Drumheller back today and asked him who from the Robb-Silbermann Commission interviewed him.
He told me that at his main interview — where he discussed everything he discussed on 60 Minutes — he was interviewed by the entire commission. That means Sen. Robb was there, Sen. McCain, Judge Silbermann, everybody. (You can see the complete commission roster here.)
On two other occasions, said Drumheller, he was interviewed by commission staffers. But he estimated that his interview before the full commission went on for between two and three hours. And he assured me that they heard everything that 60 Minutes viewers heard yesterday evening and more.
Why his account didn’t get into their report is something they can answer. But they can’t say they didn’t hear it.
Last week I mentioned that there’s a very bad bill moving through Congress. It’s supported overwhelmingly by Republicans but also by a lot of Democrats too. Basically the bill would turn over the control of the Internet to the phone companies — though ‘phone companies’ is probably now an antiquated phrase for Verizon and AT&T and other such outfits. There’s a lot more underlying complexity to it of course. But the change could make it much harder to access TPM or any source of news or entertainment that isn’t owned by some big corporation or, more likely, have the inside track with one of the phone companies. If you’re cool with AT&T deciding the sources of use you can access then you probably won’t mind. But if you like making those decisions yourself, you may want to speak up.
Here’s one group mobilizing against the bill: savetheinternet.com. Another group that is on the case is publicknowledge.org.
This isn’t some obscure issue of interest only to policy wonks. It may seem like it, but it’s not. It’s a very big deal and I strongly encourage you to find out what’s going on.
We tend to take for granted how the Internet evolved. For all its shortcomings, it is a remarkably level playing field where all sorts of voices — the strong and the weak, the popular and the despised — can all make their voices heard. Yes, Viacom’s voice is louder than TPM’s or Atrios’s or Newsmax’s. But if you want to read TPM, we’re right here, just as easy to visit as the media giants.
But it won’t necessarily stay that way.
The Internet could have evolved very, very differently. It could have turned in to one or two big proprietary networks — maybe AOL and Compuserve, or AOL and MSN, each closed, each controlled by one company, without the dynamism, freedom and entrepreneurial magic we associate with the web. The big media offerings would be easy to get to and easy to download while the blogs and other moderately funded alternatives, right and left, had to make do with second or third tier access. Or maybe Verizon decides that anti-Verizon content just won’t run on their network.
Think of it like Cable TV. Anybody can start a cable channel. But if you can’t get on TimeWarner Cable here in Manhattan, for me you might as well not even exist. The Internet could work like that.
It could have been that way. And it could still become that way. That’s what this new debate is about. Find out more about it. And see what you can do to make your voice heard.