If I was Karl Rove and had full run of the machinations of the U.S. government, I'd do what my Nixon administration mentors did, get dirt on my potential political opponents. My feeling is that Cheney and Rove's team listened in and recorded incriminating or embarrassing conversations on every member of Congress, the media, and others by listening in and taping their calls.

Congress created the FISA law after Watergate to prevent just this from happening again, but here we are. So a few Dems were read-in to the NSA program as insurance. I do remember reading right from the start (The Times exposé) that key members of Congress were briefed on the NSA's surveillance program including Rockefeller.

We know the White House illegally eavesdropped already in the run-up to the Iraq war, spying on U.N. delegates to hear how the Security Council was going to vote. This was illegal, they were outed, never denied it and were never prosecuted for it.

This is Washington at it's worst - conspiring to cover up Constitutional violations by the White House and a few key Dems. This is We The People getting screwed and you need look no further then the FISA roll call to see who is in on the horse trading.

Obama especially needed to show some intellectual rationale for his FISA vote. My hope is that he was just delaying the eventual showdown between the current White House and the slew of investigations to be ordered by him as President. His vote hurts, but his "signing statement" on retroactive immunity offers a glimmer of hope. I'm off to join Obama's anti-FISA Facebook network. Later.

Am I right or am I off base?

I, a non-lawyer, believe you are off base.

The President has the power to issue pardons in all cases except those concerning impeachment. Impeachment is the procedure which is used by the legislature to remove an official from office. Thus, the President may pardon anyone at anytime except if that official is currently under impeachment proceedings, apparently including himself. Pardons are used for criminal charges and impeachment is not a criminal matter. The only result from a successful impeachment would be to remove the person from office. It's possible that the removed official would then be charged criminally and I suppose that a pardon could then be issued since no impeachment proceedings would be ongoing.

Don't trust me on this though. Find a constitutional lawyer and ask him/her.

That's it.

Coopted representatives failed to demand that the scary men act under existing law specifically designed to handle the clandestine intelligence gathering activity they embarked on.

9/11 spooked them all and they went stupid and ignorant beyond the scope of legal authority.

And kidnapping, torture interrogation, secrecy, savagery, and denial of due process were easier to condone without any attachment to a FISA court warrant judge.

So they abandoned the law. Which made everything easier and worse.

Those who knew became criminally infected.

They remain elected and ruined.

They compounded the evil acts by expanding uncheckable power and burying the record and constitutional wreckage.

The greed, destruction, corruption and genocide never got confronted because those who could best have reined it in were too compromised to act against it.

What a pitiful story.

Now i've been watching the mortgage dialogues.

And, eyeing sens and reps interact with Treasury, Reserve, and whatever Christopher Cox is (i forget,) i see a replay.

The GSE's aren't government.

And there's no enacted provision to handle Freddy-Fanny beyond regular rescue.

And the Treas wants unlimited backing to confidence the shaky debted enterprises.

And it's more of our money.

But it's not official.

Not secured.

At least the backstage whispers are out in the open.

So another crisis is argued to be addressed extralegally.

Under the control of nothing.

That it warns of trading copper for straw seems eerily redundant.

The bank guys don't seem to have much aptitude for innovation.

Paulson flailed the worse.

Half the mortgages in the country ran through a credit sieve and Phil Gramm steps in to advise the candidate who knows little about economics; except that he's married to a multimillionheiress who has her own plane.

(Which he most likely will not crash to see what conditions on the ground dictate.)

I know an ex- Wall Street Journalist (ex-Price-Waterhouse, too). I'm gonna see him tomorrow and find out what all of this means.

The bankers don't look like crooks. But they don't look like solutions either.

Jim Bunning was so mad, he forgot to say why.

This Administration has the bar set so low; Obama could take an 8 year Reagan nap and do better.

Now that we have some closure on the cloture (FISA,) i have a rhetorical Republican request:

If any of you remain on a ballot by the time we get to the election, be real fuckin quiet about it.

Luckily, except for Darlen, (i've known him too long to talk about it anymore,) we don't have any Republicans in Philadelphia.

America, take note.

(With apologies for indelicate uncivility-)

Yes, in true District of Corruption Beltway fashion, the Beltway looks out for its own. By covering for the Liar-in-Chief's criminalilty, look-the-other-way assholes like Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman, Nancy Pelosi et al. are covering for their own depredations.

Professor Jonathan Turley is a pleasure to listen to. He's unrelenting in his defense of civil liberties and the "rule of law." Greenwald is right to feature him.

I knew the United States was torturing people and spying on its citizens. Does that make me complicit?

The day every American citizen answers that question with an unequivocal YES is the day the killing stops.

Better say yes while you still possess the right to.

The people who are on the Intelligence Committees have as their central duty ensuring that intelligence activities comply with the law.

I disagree. Their central duty is intelligence subject matter expertise as it pertains to lawmaking. Congress is not well-endowed for the purpose of ensuring legal compliance and never has been.

That isn't to say that compliance or enforcement is entirely outside their purview. But central duty?

In any case, okay: we're talking about a select group of people, not just anyone.

(and -- unlike them -- you didn't know in 2002 and 2003 that the Bush administration was using torture techniques and spying on Americans without warrants; they did).

Well, there was the Bush regime's open announcement that that's what it was going to do, and Paul Wolfowitz' (ultimately ironic) use of Battle for Algiers as a training film for how he wanted to treat Iraqi captives.

And federal funding for data aggregation and filtering R&D whose evident purpose was dragnet telecom scanning was the net's worst-kept secret going back to the end of the 1990s.

All that's missing there are names and dates.

But okay, again, leaving that aside: we're talking about certain knowledge of specific programs going back to 2002 or 2003. We're not talking about a lot of people.

...what about those who supported subsequent legislation to legalize all war crimes or provide immunity for the war criminals? Or those, like Harman, who worked hard to keep it secret, prevented reporters from exposing it?

... the administration only briefed the so-called "Gang of 4" (the Chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees).

So.. those Democrats in committee leadership positions, who knew as far back as 2002 or 2003, and who specifically enabled the Bush regime's program.

Which is what you say:

Only the ranking members and the Chairs of the Intelligence Committee were briefed. If you look at the Fox interview I linked to with Jane Harman, she herself makes that point (as did Mayer in the update).

I think we've established a pretty clear scenario here. The problem is, it totally fails to explain how the widespread support for the Bush regime is based in fear of personal implication. We can barely find 2 Democrats who meet the above criteria, and even then that's stretching things.

I think the point is that if you're a key Democratic on the Intelligence Committee and knew about and approved of these crimes, how can you possibly sit there and argue -- as a political matter if nothing else - that Bush officials should be held accountable for those same policies?

I shouldn't have to point out that political matters have little to do with logic or consistency. The Republicans have taken full responsibility, in the public mind, for everything having to do with the "war on terror." Trying to portray the Democrats as haven been even partially in charge is one of the few things that is a stretch even for the right-wing propaganda mill.

Beyond all that, I find your attempt to defend these Democrats not just legally (which is reasonable) but "morally" as well to be completely confounding.

Where do I defend anyone? I'm calling into question the assertion that they're particularly subject to indictment, or that we can reasonably assume that that's what motivates them. I see no real evidence of that.

If it were entirely up to me I'd go after every single one of them — every colonel who covered up torture sessions, every judge who permitted evidence to be concealed, every legislator who voted for unconstitutional surveillance or even the wretched Patriot Act, every Air Force pilot who flew a terrorist-transporting aircraft, nearly everyone in the White House period. Drag them all into court and then decide who's guilty enough to lock up. It would gut Congress, bring the military to a screeching halt, cause a complete collapse of the executive branch, and tie up the highest courts in the country, and the world, for years. And it would not be forgotten for a long, long time.

But that's not going to happen. Realistically speaking, the Democrats would have a hard time persuading either a judge or the American public (call it "public opinion" instead of "moral liability") that they were responsible — even if they tried.

So I still don't see all the dots. At what point does Nancy Pelosi, say, or Diane Feinstein wake up in the morning and think, "My god, they're going to drag me to The Hague for this unless I keep quiet"?

I just don't see it.