Jeremy Scahill weighs in on Dick Cheney's softball interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace and why there needs to be prosecutions of everyone from top to bottom. And that means anyone who broke the law and ordered the torture of prisoners, from the top Bush administration officials to those that carried it out. Scahill also takes the media to task for their coverage of this issue and not making sure Americans are actually aware of what's been done in their name.

From The Ed Schultz Show, Jerrold Nadler says the appointment of a Special Prosecutor doesn't go far enough and that the law is that when torture occurs under American jurisdiction there must be an investigation of everyone who may have been involved and if warranted prosecutions. Nadler expressed concern that we aren't being aggressive enough and limiting the investigations too much. He also adds this:

Nadler: We are well into territory already, where because of the pardon of Nixon after Watergate and the people around him, because of in the Iran Contra, we're getting into territory where it becomes taken for granted that high officials can violate the law and get away with it.

Schultz: Yep.

Nadler: If high officials violated the law here, if Cheney did, if Rice did, etc., they've got to be prosecuted to show that no one is above the law.

I agree with his point that no one is above the law. I disagree that we're "getting into territory" where high officials take it for granted that they will never be held accountable for their law breaking. We're well past that point now.

The Henry Louis Gates situation is mainly a distraction, where the media has decided to document a sideshow instead of the hundreds of millions of people struggling every day with substandard health care coverage.

But there's also a serious policy component. Policemen should not be allowed to arrest someone for being an asshole in their own home. If that was the case, right-wing bloggers would all be doing 10-20. It appears clear, and I guess there may be audio tape to this effect, that the cop came to Gates' house, figured out that he was not a burglar, words were exchanged, and then the cop arrested him for disorderly conduct. That's really over the line of what cops should be allowed to do, regardless of the motivations, racial or otherwise.

The crime of disorderly conduct, beloved by cops who get into arguments with citizens, requires that the public be involved. Here's the relevant law from the Massachusetts Appeals Court, with citations and quotations omitted:

The statute authorizing prosecutions for disorderly conduct, G.L. c. 272, § 53, has been saved from constitutional infirmity by incorporating the definition of "disorderly" contained in § 250.2(1)(a) and (c) of the Model Penal Code. The resulting definition of "disorderly" includes only those individuals who, "with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof ... (a) engage in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior; or ... (c) create a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose of the actor.' "Public" is defined as affecting or likely to affect persons in a place to which the public or a substantial group has access.

The lesson most cops understand (apart from the importance of using the word "tumultuous," which features prominently in Crowley's report) is that a person cannot violate 272/53 by yelling in his own home.

Read Crowley's report and stop on page two when he admits seeing Gates's Harvard photo ID. I don't care what Gates had said to him up until then, Crowley was obligated to leave. He had identified Gates. Any further investigation of Gates' right to be present in the house could have been done elsewhere. His decision to call HUPD seems disproportionate, but we could give him points for thoroughness if he had made that call from his car while keeping an eye on the house. Had a citizen refused to leave Gates' home after being told to, the cops could have made an arrest for trespass.

But for the sake of education, let's watch while Crowley makes it worse. Read on. He's staying put in Gates' home, having been asked to leave, and Gates is demanding his identification. What does Crowley do? He suggests that if Gates wants his name and badge number, he'll have to come outside to get it. What? Crowley may be forgiven for the initial approach and questioning, but surely he should understand that a citizen will be miffed at being questioned about his right to be in his own home. Perhaps Crowley could commit the following sentences to memory: "I'm sorry for disturbing you," and "I'm glad you're all right."

Spoiling for a fight, Crowley refuses to repeat his name and badge number. Most of us would hand over a business card or write the information on a scrap of paper. No, Crowley is upset and he's mad at Gates. He's been accused of racism. Nobody likes that, but if a cop can't take an insult without retaliating, he's in the wrong job. When a person is given a gun and a badge, we better make sure he's got a firm grasp on his temper. If Crowley had called Gates a name, I'd be disappointed in him, but Crowley did something much worse. He set Gates up for a criminal charge to punish Gates for his own embarrassment.

By telling Gates to come outside, Crowley establishes that he has lost all semblance of professionalism. It has now become personal and he wants to create a violation of 272/53. He gets Gates out onto the porch because a crowd has gathered providing onlookers who could experience alarm. Note his careful recitation (tumultuous behavior outside the residence in view of the public). And please do not overlook Crowley's final act of provocation. He tells an angry citizen to calm down while producing handcuffs. The only plausible question for the chief to ask about that little detail is: "Are you stupid, or do you think I'm stupid?" Crowley produced those handcuffs to provoke Gates and then arrested him. The decision to arrest is telling. If Crowley believed the charge was valid, he could have issued a summons. An arrest under these circumstances shows his true intent: to humiliate Gates.

The cop baited the guy into leaving the house so he could arrest him for making a cop feel bad.

I appreciate the work of law enforcement. But regardless of race, too many cops have the belief that if they get insulted, they have the right to turn that into an arresting offense. That's not the law whatsoever, nor should it be. It creates a chilling effect among the public not to call out bad behavior in law enforcement or raise your voice in any way. I know we're all supposed to believe that cops are saintly, but I live in LA. Police misconduct happens all the time, and we should be vigilant when it does.

Instead, the media takes the soccer ball and chases it into the corner, without any semblance of factual records or perspective. It becomes an emotional argument instead of a factual record of misconduct. We pay cops with tax money. We should not risk arrest when arguing with them.

Oopsie, I guess we really can't count this as a mark for "out of the mouth of babes", but Liz Cheney, perhaps inadvertently, admitted that part of the reason we've seen Dick Cheney more in the last two months than we did in the eight years of the Bush administration is that he is very nervous that there will be investigations and prosecutions in his future:

(M)any in the media have asked why Cheney — someone who had avoided the media at all costs during his eight years as vice president — would be airing his opinions in such a forceful and public way. Indeed, Cheney himself has answered this question, claiming he is speaking out because he believes that torture and other Bush administration anti-terror policies — many of which Obama is abandoning — were “exactly the right thing to do” and that “there isn’t anybody there on the other side to tell the truth.”

In turn, media figures have answered the question in much the same way. “I think he genuinely believes we are threatened now more because of what Obama is doing,” MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan has said. CNN’s David Gergen said, “I think Dick Cheney almost has a Churchillian view of this, and that is somebody has got to stand up and be the voice in the wilderness.” But while the narrative of Cheney’s motives focuses mainly on the righteous, it has all but ignored the selfish — that Cheney is trying to muddle the public debate with the goal of reducing public support for a criminal inquiry into the torture regime that he authorized.

Last night on CNN, however, Cheney’s daughter Liz revealed that fear of prosecution is indeed a motivating factor in the former vice president’s current media campaign:

L. CHENEY: I don’t think he planned to be doing this, you know, when they left office in January. But I think, as it became clear that President Obama was not only going to be stopping some of these policies, that he was going to be doing things like releasing the — the techniques themselves, so that the terrorists could now train to them, that he was suggesting that perhaps we would even be prosecuting former members of the Bush administration.

Sad that this "Get Daddy Out Of Jail Free" ploy seems to have all the news outlets lapping it up with nary a word on what the motives might be for a former Vice President to break with protocol and criticize a sitting President (and by doing so, implicitly admitting that Cheney--not Bush--was in charge). Can you imagine how the right wing noise machine would have gone into overdrive if Clinton had started criticizing Bush for not taking the al Qaeda threat seriously at the beginning of his presidency? By all reports, that's what happened. Richard Clarke was demoted, his reports ignored, and then 9/11 happened on their watch. And now terrorism has increased worldwide four-fold. However, even with this miserable track record (kept from the public by these media outlets eager for a Cheney appearance), Cheney thinks his opinion has any value to the discussion?

Heather has put up the larger Anderson Cooper interview at VideoCafe.

Steve Benen wonders if there isn't a more pecuniary motive to Cheney's sudden appearances (twelve in nine and a half days over four networks). Of course, Liz Cheney may also be trying to establish herself as a credible candidate in 2012 too:

The hottest Republican property out there isn't former Vice President Dick Cheney but his daughter Liz, who has taken to the airwaves to defend her dad and the whole Bush administration on national security and Guantánamo Bay issues. Liz Cheney, who followed the former veep's hard-hitting speech criticizing President Obama's policies with a CNN appearance, is becoming so popular in conservative circles that some want her to run for office. "She's awesome. Everyone wants her to run," said a close friend.

From Countdown, Keith's Special Comment after watching Dick Cheney's speech today. Keith takes former Vice President Cheney to task for defending the use of torture while refusing to accept any responsibility for his actions.

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment about Mr. Cheney's speech.

Neurotic...

Paranoid...

False to fact and false to reason...

Forever self-rationalizing...

His inner rage at his own impotence and failure dripping from every word...

And as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane, as any terrorist...

The former Vice President has today humiliated himself beyond redemption.

The delusional claims he has made this day could be proved by documentation and first-hand testimony to be the literal truth, and still he himself would be wrong, because the America he sought to impose upon the world and upon its own citizens, the dark hateful place of Dick Cheney's own soul, the place he to this hour defends and to this day prefers, is a repudiation of all that our ancestors, all that for which our brave troops of 200 years ago and two minutes ago, have sacrificed and fought.

I do have to congratulate you, Sir. No man living or dead could have passed the buck more often than you did in 35 minutes this morning.

Continue reading »

One of the main features of the running debate over the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act -- which, should it pass, would become the nation's first real federal bias-crimes law -- has been conservatives' insistence on digging up new rationales to oppose it, and then clinging to them intransigently, regardless of how thoroughly their arguments get knocked down.

Thus we get spectacles like Sean Hannity with Steve King, flatly dissembling to a national audience about what the legislation does, how it works legally speaking, and repeating the usual Zombie Lies: "this bill creates thought crimes," "it creates special rights," "it protects sexual perverts," and "all crimes are hate crimes." Or Virginia Foxx informing Congress that Matt Shepard's murder was a "hoax."

That's the brazenly dishonest component of the right-wing opposition. Then there's the only somewhat less dishonest approach of the right's more intellectual corners, which does not stoop to naked falsehoods in the fashion of Hannity et. al., but instead relies on a more legalistic, largely libertarian construct that is opposed to the law on the basis of their general opposition to expanding the reach of federal law -- but clings just as mightily to disproven claims and its own preconceived mythology about bias crimes.

Their reasoning runs roughly thus: The law raises the danger of double jeopardy, while the depth of the hate-crimes problem is wildly overstated by liberal civil-rights groups. There is no problem with enforcement or investigation of these crimes. There is no problem, like we had in the South during the Civil Rights era, with juries refusing, largely on the basis of race, to convict people for bias crimes.

Apparently, these people don't bother to read the news. Because fresh in the national headlines this week is the case of the Shenandoah, Pa., jury that apparently indulged in some very current nullification in the case of the hate-crime beating death of a Latino man named Luis Ramirez.

Indeed, it seems the Justice Department is currently reviewing the case to see if federal charges might be warranted:

Two Pennsylvania teens acquitted of the most serious state charges in the beating death of a Mexican immigrant could still face federal charges.

Justice Department spokesman Alejandro Miyar says the civil rights division is reviewing evidence surrounding last summer's fatal fight between high school football players in Schuylkill County and 25-year-old Luis Ramirez.

This is a tricky issue with the law as currently written, because federal prosecutors would have to find that the killers committed a federal violation in order to act on this case. That would not be nearly the issue if LLEHCPA were already law.

One of the major components of the LLEHCPA, as we recently explored in some detail, is the ability of federal prosecutors to step in and file federal charges in cases like these where the state or local prosecutions fail for whatever reasons.

Now, this is where the conservative intellectuals weigh in, claiming the law raises the specter of double jeopardy. You'll call that this was David Freddoso's objection over at NRO -- to which we responded by citing Frederick Lawrence, dean of the GWU Law School, who explains that this falls easily under the rubric of the doctrine of dual jurisdictions:

Continue reading »

The right-wing pundits love to hurl insults and ridiculous talking points about the Obama administration. The newest one to date is that what we've really got here is a "Banana Republic." The media won't tell you this, so the blogs have to. Right-wingers were quite happy to try to prosecute Bill Clinton after he left office and weren't shy about their feelings.

Jamison Foser has the lowdown on the bottom feeders:

Gaps in the Right's "banana republic" rhetoric

... In fact, Sean Hannity argues in favor of investigations and prosecutions of past administrations -- as long as the past administrations are Democratic administrations.

In April of 2000, for example, when independent counsel Robert Ray (Ken Starr's successor) suggested that he might indict Bill Clinton when Clinton left office, Hannity said he thought that should happen. On January 21, 2001 -- the day after George W. Bush replaced Clinton in office -- Hannity reiterated that position. In March of 2001, Hannity argued that there should be a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton pardons, and that Clinton attorney general Janet Reno should be indicted...read on
--
What really lends this a through-the-looking-glass quality, however, is that the conservative media who now denounce potential investigations of torture by portraying it as a mere policy disagreement previously sought investigations of a pardon. Whether or not you think all of Clinton's pardon decisions were correct, there is pretty much nobody who denies that he had the authority to make those decisions -- so investigating the pardons essentially was investigating a policy disagreement. Torture, on the other hand, is not a policy disagreement; it is a crime. Thus, the Journal's case against investigating the Bush administration better applies to investigations of the Clinton administration -- investigations the Journal supported.

That's what the conservative media consists of: partisans offering inconsistent, insincere, and nonsensical arguments on behalf of torture and the depraved thugs who authorized it.

They are hypocrites, crooks and liars -- the whole lot of them.

On CNN's "State of the Union" program today, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress took a seemingly middle-of-the-road position on the torture memos: He indicated that he thought pursuing potential prosecutions of the torture-regime architects was a bad idea -- but at the same time, called for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee for his role in authoring them:

Podesta: The one thing I disagree with you and David [Gergen] about is I do think there's a distinction between going back and prosecuting in criminal courts the actors who were involved in these memos and letting Judge Bybee continue to sit on a court one step removed from the Supreme Court. He's acting and listening to cases, making judgments of others, and we know he authorized things that were illegal under U.S. law and violated the U.S. obligations under international treaties.

If he would do the right thing, he should just simply resign. If he doesn't, I think this is one matter where he continues to sit -- he doesn't have the moral or legal authority to continue to do that. And I think a simple matter would be to remove him from office.

King: We need to move on, but do your friends at the White House agree with you on this?

Podesta: You'd have to ask them. But I suspect they don't.

The Village may shake its collective finger at Podesta, but this is just the beginning of the effort to remove Bybee. As DDay reports, the California Democratic Party is preparing a resolution calling for his impeachment as well.

Still, it's amazing how the Beltway Villagers -- particularly the political-media pundit class -- seem to have wholly absorbed the Rovean idea that the fight over the torture memos and the calls for investigation are about "revenge" and partisan recrimination, that this is about "criminalizing politics."

That was the entire context of the discussion of the memos in this show, not to mention most of the discussions I've seen on Fox and MSNBC too. It's the context of David Broder's recent blatherings on the subject.

You have to wonder when these people will wake up to the reality that judging these kinds of political endeavors by the ostensibly dark motives of the people behind it is simply blithering nonsense. It's also worth noting that, within the confines of the Village, this kind of judgment is only ever to be raised against liberals and the Left generally. It's "partisan" to do that with the Right, you know (see, e.g., the Clinton impeachment brouhaha).

These are, of course, the same people who dismissed those same Dirty Freaking Hippies when they warned that invading Iraq would turn into a disaster -- because, of course, they only opposed the war out of Bad Motives (i.e., they reflexively hated Bush).

Of course, this narrative -- liberals proceed from knee-jerk, visceral motives -- constantly repeated is also a very comforting and self-serving one for the established classes of the Village. It's also been repeatedly proven wrong -- to very little notice inside the Village.

This isn't about Right and Left. This is about Right and Wrong. Not that the Village would ever get such alien concepts.

Newsday columnist Ellis Henican took on Bill O'Reilly last night to talk about President Obama's decision to leave the door open for prosecutions of Bush administration officials for creating its now-defunct torture regime.

And frankly, he did as well I've ever seen anyone do in the canned, no-win setup that is The O'Reilly Factor. He went toe-to-toe with O'Reilly on the factual points -- and in fact started scoring so well that O'Reilly was reduced to blurting out increasingly outrageous pronouncements.

First, it's clear that O'Reilly was only familiar with the GOP Talking Points[tm] version of the letter written by National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair in which he talks about "high value information" obtained through these techniques. But here's the actual letter.

As you can see from reading it, unlike the edited-down version O'Reilly and the GOPTP offer, Blair makes clear that he probably would have opposed the use of torture and clearly disapproves of it now:

Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing. As the President has made clear, and as both CIA Director Panetta and I have stated, we will not use those techniques in the future. I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.

Moreover, Blair further clarified himself the next day in the New York Times, explaining exactly why he would not have approved it:

"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means," Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. "The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

O'Reilly clearly was unaware of this, so when Henican tosses it in his lap, he's at first confused, continuing to think that Blair and Henican have opposing views when they don't. It's kind of an amusing instance of O'Reilly so enrapt with his own narrative he doesn't recognize when it's been knocked out from under him.

Indeed, Henican essentially repeats Blair's words, and O'Reilly resorts to claiming that's "not exactly" what he said.

From then on, O'Reilly is reduced to barking increasingly strident charges at Henican:

O'Reilly: This was done to protect your life, you live in New York City. You -- this was done to protect your life, and it worked! That's No. 1.

Henican: We don't know whether it worked.

O'Reilly: Yeah, we know it worked, you're still alive! And the attack on Los Angeles was aborted.

[Crosstalk]

O'Reilly: Wait, wait, wait. We can establish facts. And the facts are, this worked.

Henican: Well, you say that.

O'Reilly: They did it to protect us.

Henican: You assert that. Well, let me assert a couple of things.

O'Reilly: That's the overwhelming evidence.

Henican: Well, that's what you're focused on. Let me focus on some other facts. One is that these kinds of things cause huge problems for us afterward.

O'Reilly: Oh, now we're in Theory World. Here we go!

Continue reading »

It wasn't just Karl Rove and the Bush White House crew that was freaking yesterday over President Obama's statement yesterday leaving the door open for prosecutions of the architects of Bush's torture regime -- indicating he'd leave the decision up to the Attorney General. (There was also growing speculation that AG Eric Holder might appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter.)

No, it seemed the entire Village was in an uproar. Especially over at Fox, where the dismay was universal. Especially funny on Fox's All Star Panel yesterday afternoon was Morton Kondracke, the Faux Designated Liberal, who blamed it all on MoveOn.org and the liberal bloggers.

Oh, and NBC and the New York Times, too.

Wait. Can we blame it on the French somehow too, while we're at it?

Karl was positively freaking out yesterday afternoon over the prospect that some of his ex-colleagues at the White House might wind up being prosecuted -- or held responsible publicly -- for helping George W. Bush install a torture regime during his tenure, after President Obama's statement earlier in the day indicating he'd leave the decision up to the Attorney General.

Rove, appearing on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, was particularly frantic -- and when Rove gets frantic, he gets nasty:

Rove: Sure, as long as they've released the limits to which America will go to extract this information, let's share the information that was extracted, and saved America from further attacks. We know, for example -- it's already a part of the public record -- that the interrogation of these high-value targets kept them from being able to attack Los Angeles by flying airplanes into the Liberty tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles, which was one of their plans.

But look, let's step back for a minute. What the Obama administration has done in the last several days is very dangerous. What they've essentially said is, If we have policy disagreements with our predecessors, what we're going to do is we're going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run colonels in mirrored sunglasses. And what we're going to do is prosecute, systematically, the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences.

Is that what we've come to in this country? That if we have a change in administration from one party to another, that we then use the tools of the government to go systematically after the policy disagreements that we have with the previous administration? Now that may be fine in some little Latin American country that's run by, you know, the latest junta. It may be the way that they do things in Chicago. But that's not the way we do things here in America.

Hmmmm. Last I looked, Chicago was here in America.

But more to the point: Karl's sounding like someone who's already looking over his shoulder at congressional subpoenas.

And even more to the point: Sorry, Karl, but working for the White House is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. If you broke the law -- and particularly if you and your pals are war criminals according to American law for having not merely permitted but avidly constructed a torture regime -- the appropriate justice needs meting out.

Of course, we keep hearing about how Torture Saved Us From Terrorists -- notably the overhyped and debunked "Los Angeles Tower plot."

Funny thing about that -- back in 2006, it was Wiretapping Saved Us From Terrorists.

Yes, the same overhyped "plot."

Rove will have to do better than that if he wants to stay ahead of those rapidly gaining footsteps.

There's a new poll out from Gallup and USA Today which one is headlining as showing there's "no mandate for criminal prosecutions" and the other is headlining as showing that "most want an enquiry" into whether Bush's anti-terror policies broke the law.

Those headlines aren't mutually incompatible. There's a hard core of around 30% of Americans who still cleave to Bush as a hero, an unsung genius who can do no wrong and think that a president can just declare actions legal and be done with it. There's a slightly larger core of those who want America to return to the fold of the rule of law, presidential accountability and humanity. They've done some homework and realise that anti-terror tactics during the Bush Years were built upon the kind of deliberately twisted legal reasoning that got Nazi lawyers hanged at Nuremberg. And there's a group - the undecideds - who want to know more before they make their minds up, and would understandably prefer the evidence to come from official governmental sources rather than liberal blogs and human rights groups. They want to trust their government and want that government to bring the facts out in the open. That's just human nature and trying to spin the two different headlines about results of this poll as some liberal conspiracy is just being dishonest.

So give the people a Truth Commission. Let the evidence be made public in official hearings rather than tucked away in little-read reports from human rights groups about the Defense Department's co-operation in running CIA secret prisons or in obscure blog posts citing studies showing the military have "disappeared over 24,000 video tapes of detainee interrogations. Let's not rely on whether foreign officials and judges bow to blackmail in hoping to get details of why someone had his penis repeatedly sliced because he once read a satirical article online. Let's get those Bush officials who have admitted their administration engaged in torture up on the witness stand, under oath.

We need to send an overwhelming and clear message to Obama and those among his cabinet who don't want to see justice served. Two thirds of America want this. Give it to them if that's the people's will - that's called "moving forward". Then as the evidence unfolds we'll see how America feels about prosecutions, and about making sure such inhuman acts can never again by perpetrated wholesale by a White House under cover of blanket secrecy and legal lies. I'm betting that America will overwhelmingly want to see those guilty have their day in court.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

John McCain on Fox News Sunday is asked about the closing of Gitmo, and apparently John is for it but yet he's against it. He thinks we should close Gitmo, but only after finding another kangaroo court to replace the one we have now.

He also feels we have to find somewhere to put all of those prisoners who aren't from the United States, which Joe Biden pretty well debunked today, noting that there was only ONE of them which would fit that category. McCain also apparently thinks that Obama closing Gitmo equates to just freeing prisoners without any trials. I don't think anyone is asking for that, John.

Chris Wallace frames the following question on torture as to whether anyone at a lower level should be prosecuted as opposed to anyone in the Bush administration who ordered the torture. McCain follows right along with Wallace in his answer and only talks about those at the lower level in the CIA who followed the orders and not those they were taking orders from, and says we need to "move on". As someone who was himself tortured, this is pretty pathetic. I've got to wonder if he'd be as charitable if he ever met the person who ordered his torture.

Maddow: One of the things I think has been so I guess challenging to the American debate about this is that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have essentially argued that they have legalized waterboarding. That they have legalized torture. They think that the actions of their Justice Department made things like waterboarding not war crimes any more. Are they right?

Levin: You can't just suddenly change something that's illegal into something that is legal by having a lawyer write an opinion saying that it's legal. Things can't work that way or else someone could get a lawyer to say a crime is not a crime and then that would be a defense. That is not a defense and I just, I was astounded frankly when I heard the Vice President of the United States sort of just blandly, blithely saying that oh he thought that was an appropriate thing and yes he was involved in the discussions about it.

Senator Levin, why are you shocked about this when no one who has been paying any attention to what this administration has done is shocked? And can we get a straight answer that there should be prosecutions and not hedging?