p.m. carpenter's Commentary - "A Comedy of Arrows"

(Here's a wonderful column by p.m. carpenter, just to get us started this week. And just for our transit union friends at LTD, notice his reference in the last paragraph. Now that we're not allowed to strike, I'm wondering just how good this "binding arbitration" thing is going to work out. But, that's another post altogether... JP)


Having misjudged the illegal law of the land for at least the past couple of years, Congressional Democrats are now the ones suffering from the "combined effects" of a "secret regime" and its torturous application of authoritarian rule.

How embarrassing. Or, as John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, put it, "I find it unfathomable that the committee tasked with oversight of the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program would be provided more information by The New York Times than by the Department of Justice."

Just as unfathomable is that any Democratic member of Congress would still find unfathomable any administration secrecy, brazen illegality, or bombastic snubbing of the people's representatives.

But, the gloves are off, or, to mix metaphors, the Dems have drawn some menacing projectiles from their quivers and are now aiming straight at the administration's swinish heart.

The chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees are, understandably, particularly upset, because the New York Times did indeed do their work for them -- the product of which John Conyers finds "extremely troubling," and Patrick Leahy speculates is proof of a "secret regime." This would be extremely troubling proof number -- what? -- 168?

Nevertheless, they mean business this time. So Conyers has sent flying a scathing letter to Justice, and Leahy, along with fellow judiciary committee members, has vowed to "closely question" the administration's attorney-general nominee "about his views on interrogation." Well, that should clear things up.

Furthermore, Democrats are "demand[ing] to see the classified memorandums" regarding the administration's happily deployed "harsh interrogation techniques."

But White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said yesterday -- rather, she actually said yesterday -- that those techniques are secret because they're classified. Had I been present I would have asked why they're classified, just for the amusement of hearing her say, because they're secret.

At any rate, Ms. Perino assured us, the world and potential terrorists that the interrogation techniques are "safe," thereby disclosing practical information that she also said should never be disclosed, lest terrorists train against the techniques. Why bother?

Just as entertaining was a statement released late yesterday from old reliable Kit Bond -- a man I once personally witnessed primping his hair endlessly before a radio interview -- saying that the intelligence committee on which he sits, with thumbs twirling and fingers in the ears, had already "been briefed on the administration’s 'legal justifications' for interrogation," which, of course, happen to be illegal.

Thus, in the name of God, marches the Rump Parliament against its increasingly monarchical foe, whose secrecy and impunity are sure to triumph once again -- because, having adorned itself with the similar powerlessness of a strike-disowning union, impeachment is "off the table."