My Interview with Rep. John Conyers (re: his omnibus Iraq report)

WilliamPitt

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Thu Aug-17-06 01:09 PM
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My Interview with Rep. John Conyers (re: his omnibus Iraq report)

The Conyers Report: An Interview
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Thursday 17 August 2006

When Ned Lamont defeated Joseph Lieberman in the Connecticut primary last week, the prattling mass of GOP talking heads cried with one voice: the vote was evidence that the "Loony Left" had taken over the Democratic Party. It was a good talking point, and empty vessels like MSNBC's Chris Matthews happily ran with it for a while. Sadly for the Republicans, reality decided to intrude. Poll numbers came out which established that opposition to the Iraq occupation is now the majority position of the American people. The so-called Loony Left hadn't taken over the party. Instead, they had managed to convince the moderate middle that the war was just plain wrong.

Before the ink was dry on the Lamont stories, along came the bombshell: a roomful of terrorists were arrested in Britain for conspiring to blow nine commercial airliners out of the sky. Once again, the right-wing echo chamber ramped up. This is why we need to stay the course in Iraq, they said. This is why we are there. Again, however, these talking points jumped the tracks. The American occupation of Iraq is not curbing terrorism, but is instead inspiring it.

Just after noon on Thursday, August 17th, a report was broadcast stating that a Federal District Court in Detroit had ruled that the Bush administration's use of the NSA to spy on American citizens was unconstitutional. Judge Anna Diggs opinion on the ruling read, "In this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids. FISA is the expressed statutory policy of our Congress. The presidential power, therefore, was exercised at its lowest ebb and cannot be sustained."

A lot of different threads to tie together here, to be sure. Thankfully, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has managed to do so in historic fashion. He has released a 350-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance."

Within the pages of this report lies the hard, ugly truth of our sorry situation. The lies that led us into Iraq, the horrors of torture at Abu Ghraib, the unrelenting attacks against critics, and the frightening desiccation of Constitutional protections are described in scathing detail.

"The single overriding characteristic running through all of the allegations of misconduct identified in our Report," reads the conclusion, "has been the unwillingness of the Bush Administration to allow its actions to be subject to any form of meaningful outside review. Not only were 122 Members of Congress unable to obtain any response to their questions posed regarding the Downing Street Minutes, but neither the House nor the Senate has ever engaged in any serious review of the facts surrounding the NSA domestic spying programs. The institutional damage resulting from such constitutional neglect will likely be felt for many years, if not generations. The lesson of this Report is that if we allow intelligence, military and law enforcement to do their work free of political interference, if we give them requisite resources and modern technologies, if we allow them to 'connect the dots' in a straight forward and non-partisan manner, we can protect our citizens. We all want to fight terrorism, but we need to fight it the right way, consistent with our Constitution, and in a manner that serves as a model for the rest of the world."

Rep. Conyers was kind enough to grant an interview regarding his report, the substance of which is as follows.

More: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081706A.shtml