Once you begin to out people who do wrong, you are inevitably going to reveal privacies of those who have done nothing wrong at all. I am not opining here on who does or does not deserve protection, because deserved or not there cannot be the same privacy during an investigation as there is ordinarily. That is the reason the administration wants to wiretap everyone, they are “conducting an investigation.” The problem is, of course, they will find people who had nothing to do with what they were originally investigating, and then they will discover facts which incriminate those people.
The problem now is that the rest of us have too little information. The administration is holding people hostage by knowing their deepest, darkest secrets, and can say to members of congress that they had better do what the administration wants, or they will not only be embarrassed from office, many of them will go to jail.
Yes, Mark Foley.
And it is a continuing threat, laying over the whole government, that he can do it again. And again. He can be as judicious or liberal with his disclosures as he wants to be.
Who is “he”? Good question. Could be Cheney. Could be Rove. We’ll find out by the time our public investigation is through. Or it could be that my accusation is completely off base and they will all be acquitted. That is for the public jury to decide, when the information has been gathered and the relative probity of the evidence weighed.
David Corn reports that a site by the name of Blogactive has published a list of names. I do not intend to bias you in any way, if you choose to view that list weigh it carefully for relevance and do not condemn anyone on the basis of a single accusation. There is nothing wrong with people having secrets, and having lifestyles that you might not approve of. There is something wrong when people are concealing secrets so powerful they will consent to authorize torture.
Update: I think this explanation by Michael is worth reading; you can pay whatever attention to the left column you like.
October 8, 2006 at 12:41 am
[...] Glenn Greenwald wants to avoid discussion of anything at all “speculative” — that is entirely his free choice. The speculations of the “wingnuts” are different but in some ways similar to my own, and I have explained my own history as a conservative libertarian. We do not find the truth unless we first speculate where it may be found, and search there. If we do not find what we expected, then we change our theories. That is how science works, that is how investigations work, and that is also how religion works. Glenn is a careful lawyer and a good one. He is doing a different job. [...]