Jane Harman

We’re in the midst of a slow-moving, long-running Constitutional crisis, where the authoritarians in the White House and the Republican party have, in large part, freed themselves from the restraints of Constitutional authority, and are governing as despots, in an extra-legal fashion.

What Digby said:

The simple fact is that Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and Nancy Pelosi have known since 2002 that the US Government was engaging in torture. They have done next to nothing to stop it and have not used the power of their offices to reveal it or guide the congress to investigate it.

Pelosi knew and lied, she knew and mocked voters for caring that civilized countries don't torture innocent people. She joked about it to reporters when she foolishly thought that Lindsay Graham would get Dick Cheney to be more humane!

Read that again. It's true. She thought that the GOP would splinter on its own over the use of torture - no need for Democrats to weigh in on this little issue! This is a miscalculation so grievous that Nancy Pelosi is officially a braindead shitbag.

What could Dems who were briefed do? Civil Disobedience was suggested by some, including me - the reason being that these lawmakers were not allowed to go public with the classified information - so leaking the news is a crime. However, they could have gone to the floor and included the question into privileged speech and debate - - thereby vastly increasing the possibility of leakage.

Because Jane Harman, Jay Rockefeller and Nancy Pelosi could not be bothered to do the right thing they could have at least increased the likelihood that SOMEONE in the caucus would.

After it was revealed that the CIA obstructed justice by destroying evidence - video of Americans torturing people - Senate Intelligence Chair / General Idiot, Jay Rockefeller stumbled around yesterday dropping things and mumbling that he knew about the tapes... oh, wait. No he didn’t. Sorta, kinda.  {seriously - can him...}  Then Russ called and told him the plan, eventually.

Across town, area retard Michelle Malkin chirped that the Democrats are as much to blame for the destruction of this evidence as those who actually destroyed the evidence because "they knew and they did nothing." She's got a fucking point, Harry!

First, if the Democrats in Congress knew about the CIA’s destruction of torture tapes and did nothing about it, why do conservatives like Malkin hate the Democrats so much?

Rep. Harman clears things up for the retard Malkin:

In early 2003, in my capacity at Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, I received a highly classified briefing on CIA interrogation practices from the agency’s General Counsel. The briefing raised a number of serious concerns and led me to send a letter to the General Counsel. Both the briefing and my letter are classified so I cannot reveal specifics, but I did caution against destruction of any videotapes.

Given the nature of the classification, I was not free to mention this subject publicly until Director Hayden disclosed it yesterday. To my knowledge, the Intelligence Committee was never informed that any videotapes had been destroyed. Surely I was not.

This matter must be promptly and fully investigated and I call for my letter of February 2003, which was never responded to and has been in the CIA’s files ever since, to be declassified.

To side with Harman the public needs to sympathize with a member of congress who's being stymied by abuse of the classification procedure.

That might work if there wasn't a long history of Democrats in key positions where they could do some good sitting on their hands instead.  Jay Rockefeller is the worst offender.

Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at which point he expresses outrage and incredulity -- but reveals nothing (other than how he wrote a letter and sealed it in his safe). Really, isn't it about time the Democrats select an effective Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one who will treat this criminal administration with the seriousness it deserves? I nominate Whitehouse.

Members who find themselves in the position Harman is in -- and the position that Dick Durbin, Carl Levin, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller and others like them need to realize is that on some level acquiescence in these kind of abuses winds up legitimizing them.

A member who believes he or she is in possession of evidence of crimes being committed by a dangerously unhinged Executive and covered-up through illegitimate classification ought to seriously consider civil disobedience.

As Matthew Yglesias put it: "Our political leaders have responsibilities to the country and to the constitution" and bragging to disgusted voters that they abdicated responsibility to red tape, that they declined to make the tough calls, and that the main thing they did was make sure their asses were covered.

Because it's always the cover-up and not the crime that gets you in Washington, White House-shiny-lying-robot Dana Perino positively crapped her pants today.  The count for her most commonly used phrases today was: “I don’t know” — seven times; “decline to comment/not commenting” — 10 times; and “still gathering facts/gather the facts” — 11 times.

If compromised accomplices like Rockefeller don't keep slipping the press good questions to ask, they'll stop asking the questions.