Security is an issue only when it suits us

WallDon has already spoken to the Prez's personal intervention to block a DOJ investigation into warrantless NSA eavesdropping. And if you are like me, you will have also learned the irony of the fact that DOJ investigators had no problem with security clearances for looking into the leaks that led to the story of NSA actions coming out in the press. As such, I was not particularly surprised, and hardly even offended-- what else was there to expect? Concern for, ugh, facts?

But Glenn Greenwald has put his finger on the real asininity of the matter:

. . . Bush followers will argue . . . that the Commander-in-Chief was simply trying to limit knowledge of this critical, illegal program to as few people as possible, but this paragraph from the Associated Press, by itself, dispenses with that excuse:

Yet, according to OPR chief Marshall Jarrett, "a large team" of prosecutors and FBI agents were granted security clearances to pursue an investigation into leaks of information that resulted in the program's disclosure in December. . . .

When it comes to criminally prosecuting those who alerted Americans to the existence of this illegal eavesdropping, these alleged security concerns disappear, and all sorts of investigators are given full access to the details of the program to enable them to conduct an aggressive investigation. But when it comes to investigating whether the President and his legal advisors acted properly with regard to the same program, the President blocks any such investigation from occurring on the grounds that not even DoJ lawyers can be trusted to investigate.

Got that? Security requires no investigation of NSA wiretapping: not too many should know too much. Security is not a problem when investigating who leaked information about that wiretapping: the more the better!

Remember all the bravado after 9/11-- "these colors don't run", and so forth? Wrong. We have already surrendered. If the "terrorists hate our freedoms", it looks to me like they have succeeded in taking them away after all. The Regime is still running as fast as it can from democracy.

Oh well, Lincoln's brave words at Gettysburg,

we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,

were well intended. But that government is no more: it perished shortly after 9/11/2001. The soldiers at Gettysburg only put off the reckoning.