Palin is a distraction. The real bad guys are still at work.

In this time of Palin diaries and convention rhetoric, I have been holding back writing this diary for the right moment. Everyone seems to be so concerned about what Sarah Palin has done in the past that they fail to realize that she really has no effect unless she gets elected. The people who got our country into the position that it is in are still at work, part of them trying to get McCain elected, and part of them still fleecing our society for every penny they can. I decided to write a diary to refocus on those people and give a little perspective on what is really going on right now besides the election.

In every endeavor, in every organization, there are “planning” people and “action” people. In my business, the Engineering people are the planners, and the Operations people are the action people. The normal dynamic is that engineers are horrible operators, and vice-versa. Upon looking at the Bush Administration, I noticed a similar dynamic and I found that most people have missed the clear definition of who the engineers are and who the operators are.

The” engineers” in the Bush Administration are very visible and very obvious. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Alberto Gonzales are easily named examples of people who are actually creating plans for the things that the government is doing. They are outspoken, brute-force people who can lie to you without blinking an eye or giving a tell. It is a common misconception that Karl Rove is the master operative, in addition to being a planner. I have a different idea about who the “Operations Manager” is in the current administration actually is.

The people who have been put into action to further the goals of the Bush Administration are lawyers working in the Justice Department and in the Department of Homeland Security. These people have been hand-picked and groomed for their task by DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. They have been protégés of Chertoff when he was the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, a partner at Latham & Watkins, counsel to the Senate committee investigating the Clintons, or in charge of the DOJ’s Criminal Division. I believe you have probably heard of the four that I will highlight below.

In 2004, a company called CCA, Corrections Corporation of America, had a lobbyist on staff who lobbied the DHS for the ability to house illegal immigrants after they were apprehended by ICE activities. This would allow private companies to build detention facilities and lease prison space to the government. This change in policy would facilitate the prisoners from the new DHS plan ENDGAME, which was very similar to Oliver North’s controversial Rex-84 “readiness exercise” for COG in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary “refugees,” in the context of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the United States. This lobbying succeeded and privately owned prisons became the detention centers of choice for ICE. In 1996, CCA’s revenue from holding immigrants jumped 21 percent, to $95 million from $70 million in 2004.
This lobbyist’s name was Philip Perry, a partner with Chertoff at Lanham and Watkins, and works with him on the Whitewater investigation. He also happens to be Dick Cheney’s son-in-law, married to Dick’s daughter Elizabeth. Perry was later named the general counsel of DHS in 2005. Once he came to DHS, he continued his path for making money at the expense of illegal immigrants and their families by bringing in another Chertoff disciple and fellow Cornell grad Julie Myers.

Ms. Myers was recess appointed by President Bush to the post of assistant secretary for Immigration Customs and Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security on January 9th, 2006, despite the fact that Ms. Myers was only 36 at the time and had never managed a large department or dealt extensively with immigration issues. Ms. Myers is also married to John Wood, Chief of Staff to Mr. Chertoff, and is the niece of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers. In 2006, ICE ramped up the detention of immigrants. There were about 500 ICE workplace raids in 2002, and 3,600 in 2006. On average, ICE pays $95 a day per immigrant that it detains, yet research indicates that other, far cheaper, methods can work almost as well in making sure immigrants show up in court. These alternative methods are called intensive supervision. Using this method, almost 90% of immigrants showed up for their court hearings. This intensive supervision costs an average of $14 per detainee per day, according to congressional testimony by Julie Myers. But in fiscal year 2007, ICE spent only $44 million on intensive supervision methods and $1.2 billion on detention. Legislation sponsored in 2006 by representatives Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) and Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) in the House would authorize the agency to develop another 8,000 detention beds, which must be provided by private contractors such as CCA "whenever possible."

In January of 2006, The Army Corps of Engineers gave a contract to KBR (yes, that KBR) for $385 million to build “emergency detention centers”. From the Halliburton website, “the contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." The number of immigrant raids and the profits of these private prison corporations have skyrocketed since. I guess we know the real reason behind "immigration reform" now.

Another Chertoff protégé, Alice Fisher, was nominated and recess appointed by President Bush to be Assistant Attorney General (Criminal Division) at the Department of Justice. Ms. Fisher was a Partner with Latham & Watkins, LLP. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. Earlier in her career, Ms. Fisher served as Deputy Special Counsel to the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development and Related Matters. One of the reasons Ms. Walker was not approved by the Senate due to questions about her involvement in the policy making concerning prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. She apparently had a role in overseeing the methods of prisoner treatment during intelligence extraction. Vermont Senator Patrick J. Leahy said in his May 12, 2005, statement. "I am somewhat concerned, however, that Ms. Fisher is nominated for one of the most visible prosecutorial positions in the country without ever having prosecuted a case, and she brings to the position minimal trial experience in any context," he said. Another reason for her unpopularity was her conflict of interest due to her involvement with the Tom Delay legal defense team.

One of her subordinates, Noel Hillman, was the lead investigator for the DeLay and the Abramoff cases. From Newsweek magazine, “The probe is being overseen by Noel Hillman, a hard-charging career prosecutor who heads the Public Integrity Section and who has a long track record of nailing politicians of all stripes. But politics almost certainly will creep into the equation. Hillman's new boss will soon be Alice Fisher, who is widely respected but also a loyal Republican socially close to DeLay's defense team. The larger question is whether Justice -- run by Bush's buddy Alberto Gonzales -- will aggressively seek evidence that could lead to DeLay or to other Republicans in Congress. "I just don't know that they have the stomach for it," said a lawyer close to the probe.” Hillman is also a Chertoff protégé, hired as a federal prosecutor by Chertoff when Chertoff was New Jersey’s U.S. attorney. He became the lead Justice Department prosecutor in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. His political ambitions had been thwarted when he had approached Bush about a federal judgeship and been turned down. However, the investigation into Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist, took a surprising turn when the Justice Department said the chief prosecutor in the inquiry would step down because he had suddenly been nominated to a federal judgeship by President Bush. Some claimed that Bush essentially "bribed" Hillman to look the other way concerning the Abramoff investigation and the White House, and that negotiations had been underway for this move for over a year, while Hillman was prosecuting the case. Hillman is currently a federal judge in New Jersey, and has been involved recently with the Don Siegelman case. He apparently was the hatchet man at Justice concerning Gov. Siegelman when he was the head of the Public Integrity Section, a position he was appointed to by Chertoff.

One more Chertoff protégé is Tim Griffin who was a special assistant to Chertoff, when Chertoff was the assistant attorney general at the Justice Department's criminal division. During five months on that job, Griffin "tracked" issues for Chertoff, such as extradition and provisional arrest, according to Griffin's résumé. There is so much I could write about Griffin, I won’t even start.

I guess the entire point of this long and tedious diary (hey, it is not a short one, so I guess I won’t be asked to please delete ) is that the wolves are still in charge of the hen house. The introduction of Sarah Palin and even the candidacy of John McCain have served as great distractions for the stuff that is still going on. Michael Chertoff has succeeded in poisoning our legal system for the benefit of “loyal Bushies”. He is definitely the sharp end of the stick in implementing the criminal policies and ideas of our current administration. We must remain vigilant, even with all the hoopla about teen pregnancy and mooseburgers.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. Enlighten the people generally and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. -- Thomas Jefferson