Does it Matter if the Attorney General is a Liar?

Because you probably heard more about Obama’s bowling or Chelsea Clinton getting accosted with Monica questions last week, you may not have picked up on this quote from Attorney General Michael Mukasey:

Officials “shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody picks up the phone in Iraq and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that’s the call that we didn’t know about,” Mr. Mukasey said[.] “We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. “We got three thousand. … We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said[.]

So, here we have the Attorney General of the United States telling us that – for want of permission from the FISA court – the US was unable to listen on a call regarding the planning of 9/11 attacks. You know, I don’t remember hearing anything about that (in fact, most of what I remember hearing about involved the US ignoring the information it had already gathered). But honestly, I might just have missed that fact. You know who’s job it was to know that about that call? Lee Hamilton. Co-chair of the 9/11 Commission. What does Hamilton have to say about that?

I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

Repeat: the chair of the commission charged with examining all of the 9/11-related intelligence known to the United States has never heard of the call Mukasey just laid out as bringing about 9/11.  Nor had the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission. Nor had the Congressional representatives charged with overseeing US surveillance programs. I think the word we’re creeping toward here is “liar.” Maybe someone with a newspaper or cable station might be interested in checking it out? Anyone?

Anyone?

Probably not, for the reasons Glenn Greenwald captures so well:

[P]eople like McArdle and Drezner think it’s fine that we spend so much time talking about Obama’s bowling scores and Edwards’ hair because things are basically going well in our country. Sure, there are some problems here and there. But it hardly rises to the level of a crisis or anything where we need to be so serious and act as though there are things that ought to distract from our constant entertainment.

Things like war crimes, torture, aggressive and illegal wars, and the destruction of the rule of law are things that, by definition, don’t happen to or in the United States. Those are principles which only apply to the dark, dank, wicked places — not here. Thus, the Yoo memoranda and what they spawned are not a big deal because they don’t reflect anything fundamentally wrong and evil with our government, because, as America, we’re immune from anything like that ever happening. So even when conclusive evidence of those things emerges, there’s no reason to pay attention to it. They’re just isolated matters from the boring past, no reason to act as though there’s anything deeply wrong here and certainly no reason to distract us from the vapid, petty chatter in which they wallow.

Why worry about a lying Attorney General when we can talk about gutter balls and hair care?