The Wheel's Still In Spin - And There's No Tellin' Who That It's Namin'...

The following excerpt, from an AP article posted on MSNBC’s web site on Friday, contains a surprise. The article concerns an audit of the Justice Department conducted by Glenn Fine, the Inspector General of the Justice Department, which reveals that the FBI “improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States.” The excerpt is italicized.

"In an earlier statement, Mueller called Fine's audit ‘a fair and objective review of the FBI's use of a proven and useful investigative tool.’ The finding ‘of deficiencies in our processes is unacceptable,’ Mueller said. ‘We strive to exercise our authorities consistent with the privacy protections and civil liberties that we are sworn to uphold,’ Mueller said. ‘Anything less will not be tolerated. While we've already taken some steps to address these shortcomings, I am ordering additional corrective measures to be taken immediately.’”

So what’s the surprise? Not that the FBI abused its privilege and power under the guise of protecting Americans from terrorists. No...the surprise is that FBI director Robert Muelller admits that the findings of the audit are viable. This is an absolutely astonishing mea culpa to come out of a cabinet-level agency in the Bush White House.

Even Attorney General Alberto Gonzales got in on the crow-eating bandwagon, at least in part. Again, the excerpt is italicized. To wit:

“There were two main problems: First, partly due to insufficient guidance and training there was some confusion in the field about the rules, and that led to numerous instances of these letters being used in ways contrary to our policies and procedures. For example: in some cases the paperwork was filled out wrong; in some cases necessary approvals were not obtained or documented; and, in some cases the third-party recipient provided the wrong information or information on the wrong individual. In addition, one FBI unit used a form letter to obtain information that should have been obtained by an NSL.

And second, the FBI did not have proper internal mechanisms to track the use of NSLs or to provide adequate oversight. Consequently, the FBI is unable to give an accurate number of NSLs issued…and thus our reporting to Congress has been inaccurate.”

The full text of the Attorney General’s remarks can be found here. He does go on to make a bit of a week-kneed assertion that he doesn’t think the “kinds of errors” that took place were of the intentional sort, but mostly he seems contrite. A second astonishing mea culpa from a Bushie. None of what has happened seems to portend a shakeup in either the office of the Attorney General or the office the Director of the FBI - at least not yet.

But it does bring instantly to mind the objections to the Patriot Act that were voiced by its opponents when it was first passed - that while the Patriot Act, on its face, seemed to be a useful tool for rooting out terror suspects within our borders, at bottom it was also a piece of legislation that could very easily be abused to spy on just about any American the government saw fit to bug. And while there might not have been malice aforethought in the irregularities uncovered by this audit - surely it would not come as a surprise to anyone that people in Bush’s administration might be poorly trained or unsupervised - the audit shows that those kinds of abuses not only could take place, but that they did take place.

(The audit, along with other reports issued by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, can be found here, but be warned - if you aren’t outfitted with that fancy broadband stuff, those reports could take a while to access. They range in girth from nine to thirty-four megabytes.)

Not that we can impeach Bush or anything. In the first place, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ruled it out shortly after she was installed as Speaker. In the second place, convicting Bush and removing him from office would leave us with Darth Cheney as the President. I can’t think of many things that could be worse than having George Bush as President, but putting Cheney in charge would be one of those things.