On the fringe looking in: Would-be NSA whistleblower Russell Tice is still having a hard time getting anyone on Capitol Hill to listen to his allegations of wrongdoings at the National Security Agency when it was run by Gen. Michael Hayden, now head of the CIA. Tice has not been able to meet with anything higher than the Senate committee aide level, and he can’t just tell anybody anything because what he has to tell is classified and few on the Hill have the requisite security clearance to hear it. Catch-22!
But Russ should take heart. His plight has caught the attention of a couple of the House’s least powerful knob-jobs who want to hear his story as a way of raisning their own paltry profiles. House Government Reform National Security Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and ranking member Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, have told the NSA they want to hear from Tice, who worked on special access programs at the agency until he was fired in May 2005.
These are the same guys who held hearings on cruise ship safety after absinthe-besotten George Smith went overboard on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship last summer. They are desperate for any attention they can get, which is why they are butting into the NSA case.
Shays is in a tough re-election campaign against Dianne Ferrell and his constituents are not pleased that he supports and continues to support the war in Iraq. Even Shay’s mother thinks he’s blowing the campaign by talking about Iraq.
Kucinich, who made an embarrassing bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 (remember? he wouldn’t quit campaigning) and was formerly known as the “Boy Mayor” when he was the youngest-ever mayor of Cleveland, just can’t seem to be taken seriously. Just the other day, in response to a press release issued by Kucinich following the assassination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, MSNBC’s Don Imus suggested that Kucinich might make a good replacement for Zarqawi as head of al Qaeda in Iraq. Zing!
The NSA, surprise, has been dragging its feet on responding to Shays and Kucinich, claiming A) Tice has not contacted the NSA to tell it what ilegal stuff he wants to talk about, and B) it’s not clear that the House Government Reform National Security Subcommittee has one iota of jurisdiction over the NSA. According to CongressDaily:
Tice originally wrote letters last December asking to meet with the Senate and House Intelligence committees. He got a meeting earlier this year with staff from the House Intelligence Committee, but they told him they were not cleared to hear what he had to say. Instead, Tice met last month in a closed session with senior staff from the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Tice said he told the staffers everything he knew. But he said the aides did not say how, or if, they would follow up on his allegations. Shays and Kucinich believe that the House Government Reform Committee has jurisdiction to hear from Tice. In a May 17 letter to the NSA, the lawmakers argue that they can hear from Tice because the House Intelligence Committee does not have exclusive jurisdiction over special access programs that Tice worked.
Shays and Kucinich must have stayed up all night to find this questionable microscopic loophole:
“If the SAP [special access programs] does not fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of [the House Intelligence Committee], but rather under the jurisdiction of the Armed Services Committee, the House rules provide that the Government Reform Committee may exercise oversight jurisdiction to investigate allegations of illegal activity under that government program,” the letter said.
There’s no doubt the NSA’s domestic spying initiatives should be investigated thoroughly and some committee with some clout should hear what Tice has to say. But allowing these two irrelevant grandstanders to become involved in what could be one of the most important government investigations since Watergate would be to doom any chances that we’ll ever know the truth about the Bush administration’s domestic spying activities.
But hey, maybe that’s the point.
