The power-elite don't care about the Constitution or upholding the Rule of Law. The law is only useful to them as a tool, in this case to bludgeon some little guy who had the nerve to try to get in their way.

Tamm's crime was not "breaking the law." His crime was not playing along with the team.

Better success if you google "Colleen Rowley" I thought it was Crowley too, but stumbled across the real name entirely by accident.

at least it shows we're not in full-blown anarchy mode..

GG, aren't the oaths of office that any public servant take to uphold the rule of law..and aren't there specific laws on the books to give whistleblowers safety by upholding law for "country first" in teh govt. sector as well?

On another note..For some reason this is stuck in my mind:the blowup that Cheney and Rice had very early on as the administration came into office about the NSC..

Rice claimed the territory was hers/Cheney said it was under his jurisdiction EO/CIC/military..

I can recall going online to say that it was a separate entity form the military complex-yet Cheney hijacked them to come under the military complex ie the Executive office with CIC jurisdiction..

Going online to find out directly-the NSC website-you can no longer find under who's jurisdiction it was under..

I believe Cheney pulled a fast one here-bullying Rice to get his neoconian "perpetual war" wetdreams passed..

the crime is the direct power grab by Cheney and the EO--which he subsequently waffled on later about his own VP responsibilites by saying "it was a separate branch on it's own"..

Did he make up this shit..to cover his own ass for his power grab of agencies to be under the "military" umbrella to support his own ideologies/war agendas-to stovepipe the intel?

I'm betting "yes".

Oooops! Senior moment. Thanks.

Since many people who support and respect Mr. Tamm's efforts read liberal blogs, I might suggest that someone who knows how help Mr. Tamm create a PayPal contribution button.

Your post with pointed and deceptively simple questions to Shooter (p.4) would be powerful if you ended it before the ad hominem attacks. I read with approval until I got to your attack points and realized this will probably degenerate into a "back atcha" set of counterinsults--instead of a real response from Shooter.

Hope I'm wrong.

Sorry, I see the questions are on p. 5.

Now:

"As you know, the Department of Justice, with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI"), presently is investigating the unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding the Presidentially-authorized National Security Agency ("NSA") program involving the interception of international communications into and out of the United States of persons linked to al Qaeda or related terrorist organizations (referred to herein as the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program')." - Steven Tyrrell, Chief, DOJ Criminal Division Fraud Section, 12/31/2008 to Thomas Tamm

And then:

QUESTION: ... You said that Valerie Plame's identity was classified but you're making no statements as to whether she was covert. Was the leaking [of] her identity, of and in itself, a crime?

MR. FITZGERALD: Okay, I think you have three questions there. I'm trying to remember them in order. I'll go backwards.

And all I'll say is that if national defense information which is involved because her affiliation with the CIA, whether or not she was covert, was classified, if that was intentionally transmitted, that would violate the statute known as Section 793, which is the Espionage Act. That is a difficult statute to interpret. It's a statute you want to carefully apply. There are lots of -- I think there are people out there who would argue that you would never use that to prosecute the transmission of classified information because they think that would convert that statute into what is in England, the Official Secrets Act.

Let me back up. The average American may not appreciate that there's no law that specifically just says if you give classified information to somebody else it is a crime. There may be an Official Secrets Act in England but there are some narrow statutes and there's this one statute that has some flexibility in it.

So there are people who should argue that you should never use that statute because it would become like the Official Secrets Act. I don't buy that theory, but I do know you should be very careful in applying that law because there are a lot of interests that could be implicated in making sure that you pick the right case to charge that statute.

- Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, 10/28/2005

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/documents/2005_10_28_fitzgerald_press_conference.pdf

In the end, Fitzgerald determined that the unquestionably damaging, personal-revenge-motivated Valerie Plame covert spy outing nevertheless was not the "right case" to charge Libby, Rove, Armitage, et al, with violations of the (narrow, somewhat flexible as to simple classified information exposure) WWI-era Espionage Act statute, with regard to their conversations with the media about a CIA employee and the CIA's Niger uranium mission. And yet Steven Tyrrell, of the same DOJ, apparently believes that the undetailed, whistleblowing tip to the media by Thomas Tamm about unapparently unlawful government spying does represent such a "right case" and merits such a charge.

From the Isikoff Newsweek cover story cited by Tyrrell:

"The [NSA] program was in fact a wide range of covert surveillance activities authorized by President Bush..."

But note how misleadingly and deceptively Steven Tyrrell's official DOJ letter to Tamm strictly adheres to the purposeful misdirection of the administration's cover story that the limited (and Goldsmith OLC-blessed*) "TSP" activities are the only domestic spying activities at issue or whose existence was exposed by the New York Times in 2005.

[*This fact and its source, as admitted on the record by the administration, with further context, is detailed here: http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/22/cheney/permalink/77875e0234fbad265c6f56e361a755de.html]

One of the key players in the DOJ - until 2007, and as mentioned in the Newsweek article - with regard to FISA applications and interactions with the FISA Court was James Baker, of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, where Tamm also worked for a time. Baker effectively blew the whistle to the FISCourt on 'bleed over' of information from the unwarranted aspects of the NSA's domestic spying into regular FISA applications at least twice, but because Baker had the trust of the court he was useful to the administration and was retained in that role. Baker's concerns probably helped alert Thomas Tamm to the contortions in the normal FISA application process that the unwarranted spying had caused (the details of which Tamm, unlike Baker, apparently did not learn).

James Baker made clear at a public forum last March (2008) that the then-proposed FISA Amendments Act (replacing the temporary Protect America Act) encompassed "much broader" domestic surveillance authority than whatever the limited-hangout "Terrorist Surveillance Program" operation entailed.

Again, the only "publicly acknowledged" (by the administration) unwarranted domestic spying program is the so-called (post-exposure) "Terrorist Surveillance Program." The limited "TSP" program apparently primarily involves collection of stored emails from U.S.-located ISPs, and, significantly, was not the reason for the March, 2004 hospital showdown between Ashcroft/Comey and Bush/Cheney. An August, 2007 letter from AG Gonzales to the Senate states flatly that Goldsmith's 2003/2004 OLC review had okayed, as-was, whatever activities the "TSP" encompassed (source linked above, in my most recent preceding comment).

And yet, as forewarned by the expert James Baker, the United States Congress acted in July, 2008 to broaden beyond the publicly-acknowledged "TSP" the domestic spying activities of the NSA - apparently authorizing activity beyond that submitted to the FISA Court pre-ProtectAmericaAct, including reinstating domestic spying activities that Comey's 2004 principled stand had successfully ended - by passing the FISA Amendments Act.

P.S. (From the same 2005 press conference)

MR. FITZGERALD: Okay. I don't know, you know, sort of when you stop beating your wife. I have read -- one day I read that I was a Republican hack, another day I read I was a Democratic hack, and the only thing I did between those two nights was sleep. I'm not partisan; I'm not registered as part of a party and I'll leave it there.