When I moved to the DC area, nearly two decades ago, I was sharing a house with Peace Corps returnees and Capitol Hill temps and aides. One of the things we did one night, as a matter of mutual safety, was to compare notes on chickenhawks so we'd know who to avoid. These chickenhawks had nothing to do with war. These chickenhawks were Congressmen and highly placed officials who had a taste for backing pages and aides into a corner and feeling them up, or going further than that. They had all the power, the pages and aides had none, and they got away with it because nobody wanted to complain and chance losing a prestigious (if low-paying) job at the start of their government career.
It wasn't a secret who was a chickenhawk, not among staff and temps. The small group of us made sure we all knew who they were and how to avoid them. And, overall, we were a group that might not interest a chickenhawk because the youngest of us was 22, the oldest in his late 40s. Since that time, the chickenhawks whom I was aware of have left Congress but that doesn't mean they're all gone. The Foley scandal is proof of that.
There's so much out there on this that I'm going to try to put it in some sort of order and context, just to sort out what we do and don't know. (Not all paragraphs will have links -- but all of the detail below will come from stories linked on this page.) If any of the people involved are your representatives, I urge you to phone their offices and make your feelings about this situation known to them. (They may turn off the fax or ignore email, but they have to answer the phone.) And, because only a fragment of voters are even online, talk about this with other people you know who vote (or those who don't who might be inspired to vote to get the incumbents out of office.) Don't let it be buried under the rug:
A little background: Congressional pages are high-school-aged kids, usually from families with some connection to Congress, who get to run errands and do very minor clerical work for Congressmen as a way to learn more about how our government works. These are not interns, who are college-aged or just out of grad school, usually age 21-25 or so. These are high school kids.
...This fear of retaliation from today’s take-no-prisoners Republican power structure in Washington has been a little-noted subtext to the stories about Foley’s sudden resignation on Sept. 29 over his e-mails to pages since 2003.
The congressional pages who received the “creepy” e-mails “didn’t do anything beside telling other pages about it,” said Matthew Loraditch, 21, who runs the U.S. House Page Alumni Association’s Internet message board. Loraditch, a senior at Towson University, explained that three of the former pages have refused to comment, citing fear of long-term damage to their ability to land jobs. [Washington Post, Oct. 2, 2006]
Fear of retaliation also has limited the willingness of adult Republican staffers from commenting about the Foley case.
“One House GOP leadership aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, conceded that Republicans had erred in not notifying the three-member, bipartisan panel that oversees the page system,” the Washington Post reported.
Politics of Fear
In a very perverse way, the story of the e-mails and the pages does represent one of the fundamental lessons of working in today’s one-party Washington: Whether in politics, intelligence or journalism, avoid doing or saying anything that offends powerful Republicans....
So, in the context of Washington political/media society, which has cowered in fear before the Bush administration and its aggressive right-wing allies for years, it shouldn’t be surprising that bright high school students who go to Washington to serve as congressional pages would catch on to the most pervasive message of all:
In a one-party political system in which power in concentrated in a few hands, it is not wise to offend the people in charge, even when one of them is writing you sexually offensive e-mails.
(More examples of abuse of power in the pursuit of political and personal gain are quoted at the link.) More on that here from the Washington Post.
Among the many depressing aspects of the downfall of Mark Foley--who has now done the inevitable checking-into-rehab thing--is that a number of young people could have blown the whistle on this deceptive congressman in recent years, but didn't.
The Washington Post tracked down a couple of them. Former page Patrick McDonald said that at a 2003 reunion he learned of sexual messages that Foley sent three or four ex-classmates and thought, "if this gets out, it will destroy him."
Matthew Loraditch says he has known for years about the "creepy" messages the Florida Republican sent three of his 2002 classmates. But no one wanted to come forward. "You take down a Congress member, and you can't end up trying to do something later," Loraditch said.
Now I don't want to come down on 16-year-old kids (though some are now as old as 21) who must have been intimidated by the whole thing. Indeed, the power imbalance between a big-shot member of Congress and a lowly page is part of what makes this infuriating.
But did they really think that if they told the outside world that the co-chair of the Exploited Children's Caucus was sending them, or their friends, graphic sexual messages, that their future careers would be ruined? That they would be washed up in politics? Isn't it more likely that they would be hailed as brave for doing the right thing...
Of course, the kids who didn't say anything were just part of a cone of silence that protected Foley. The question now is to what extent House Republican leaders stayed under that cone when they should have been taking action....
Now, thanks to this WashPost report , we learn that the FBI had some of the e-mails in July and failed to launch an investigation. Did no one take this seriously?
By the way, did Denny Hastert think that reading a statement before the cameras and then refusing to take questions was going to promote the appearance of openness?...
I mentioned yesterday that the St. Petersburg Times (and, we now learn, the Miami Herald[)] obtained last fall the earlier, milder e-mail from Foley to a 16-year-old, asking for a picture, but did not publish a story. Florida blogger Bob Norman unloads on the Times:
"This explanation is incredible. They didn't print the 'accusations' because the underaged congressional page who was complaining that a congressman was flirting with him on-line didn't want his name published? I can't tell you how pathetic is. They had the e-mails, they knew who the page was, what his name was, and verified he worked on Capitol Hill. But because the kid didn't want his young life thrown into absolute turmoil and chaos, they wouldn't go with the story and they let an obvious sexual predator continue to stalk the halls of Congress.
"Thank God that Brian Ross and ABC News had more sense."
This Wall Street Journal editorial isn't about Foley, but it's not unrelated, either:
"Republicans have many explanations for their paltry record, some of them even accurate. The troubles in Iraq sapped Mr. Bush's support, dividing Republicans while uniting Democrats who saw a chance to regain power this fall. Hurricane Katrina blew away whatever hope there was of spending restraint and changed the national conversation from GOP priorities. And Tom DeLay's ethical troubles, and eventual ouster as Majority Leader, created a leadership vacuum.
"Yet none of this excuses the more fundamental problem, which is that too many Republicans now believe their purpose in Washington is keeping power for its own sake. The reform impulse that won the House in 1994 has given way to incumbent protection. This is the root of the earmarking epidemic, which now mars every spending bill and has become a vast new opportunity for Member corruption. This is also part of what corrupted felons Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Jack Abramoff, Tony Rudy and Michael Scanlon. Power for its own sake also explains the House GOP's decision to join Senate Democrats in killing serious reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite $16 billion in accounting mistakes or fraud. The Members are in bed with the housing subsidy lobby . . .
"It is no credit to the performance of Republicans in this Congress that their best argument for re-election is the wartime flaws of their opponents."...
Here's the latest statement from Dale Kildee (D-MI), the (only) Democrat on the House Page Board, and he is furious:
In my 21 years as a Member of the House Page Board, every decision has been made on not just a bi-partisan basis but on a non-partisan basis, with our main concern always being the safety and wellbeing of the young teenagers who serve the U.S. House as pages.
I was outraged to learn that the House Republican leadership kept to itself the knowledge of Mr. Foley's despicable behavior toward the House Pages.
I am now equally outraged to learn that Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced today that there will be changes in the policies of the House Page program. Once again, I was not informed of the meeting today, nor was I consulted in any way about any proposed changes.
And once again, the House Republican leadership is following the same pattern of unilateral decision-making that caused this problem in the first place in the Mark Foley issue. Speaker Hastert's announcement this afternoon is yet another example of the House Republican leadership being more concerned with finding political cover for themselves than with the safety and wellbeing of the House pages.
You know, this is a very basic issue. The House leadership knew about -- and covered up for -- a child sex predator inside their very building. There's no goddamn "spin" that's going to make that go away. And in talking with other parents, I have to tell you -- anyone who is a parent is out for blood on this one. We can "disagree" over whether or not America should torture prisoners. We can "dispute" whether or not the President should be allowed to classify American citizens as "terrorists" based only on his own say-so, and lock them away without evidence or trial. We can "argue" over whether or not Tom DeLay's money laundering and the money laundering that has a goodly portion of the rest of the Republican House locked in ongoing scandal and indictment was only accidentally criminal, or astonishingly criminal.
But in the end, at the end of it all, you don't FUCKING COVER UP FOR A CHILD SEX PREDATOR. No. Matter. What.
What part of that do these people still not understand? I'm straight-up serious, here -- how do you get to the point where you are that depraved, that you think a man soliciting sexual information and meetings from sixteen year old kids over the internet -- and meeting them in person -- is "just another scandal"? Tony Snow? Brit Hume? Any of you folks, you wanna take that one on?
Hastert had better figure out damn quick that the rest of the country isn't messing around on this one. I don't know exactly how he got his GOP-style version of "morality" so twisted and decomposed that even this doesn't faze him, but he had better at least have the common sense to stand the hell out of the way.
Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act (SAFETY) of 2006 - Amends the federal criminal code to prohibit: (1) financial transactions that facilitate access to, or the possession of, child pornography; (2) the operation of a child exploitation enterprise; and (3) the use of deceptive wording or images to deceive persons, including minors, into viewing obscene material on the Internet.
Increases criminal penalties for: (1) registered sex offenders who commit a felony offense involving a child; and (2) activities involving the sexual exploitation of children and child pornography.
Amends the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990 to: (1) increase monetary penalties for willful failure of electronic communication service providers to report child pornography; and (2) impose new penalties for negligent failure to report.
Requires commercial website operators to place warning marks prescribed by the Federal Trade Commission on web pages that contain sexually explicit material.
Includes within the definitions of racketeering activity and money laundering the crimes of child pornography and child sexual exploitation. Expands civil remedies for victims of sex crimes against children.
Establishes in the Department of Justice an Office on Sexual Violence and Crimes against Children.
Authorizes additional (not less than 200) U.S. attorneys in FY2007 to prosecute crimes relating to the sexual exploitation of children.
Directs the Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to increase the number of Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces.
Directs the Attorney General to make grants to states, local governments, Indian tribes, and nonprofit organizations to establish and maintain programs for the prevention of sexual offenses against minors.
Amends the USA PATRIOT Act to increase funding for regional computer forensic laboratories.
Foley also sponsored H.R. 4905, which provides for registration of sex offenders and notificaiton of their whereabouts; H.R. 3132, the Children's Safety Act of 2005; and H.R. 2423, to improve the national program to register and monitor individuals who commit crimes against children or sex offenses, all of which are in the House Judiciary Committee.
...The ultimate irony in this scandal is that up and until he got caught, Mark Foley was doing everything right—at least as far as the GOP’s base is concerned. Religious conservatives don’t seriously believe that gay men to become straight; they don’t believe in “ex-gays” anymore than still-gays do. (Wanna stop a straight person from making the ex-gay argument? Ask him if he’d let his daughter marry one.) They want us to be closeted, like Mark Foley, a single man and a public figure who refused to answer direct questions about his sexuality one way or the other. (Has any straight man ever refused to reveal his sexual orientation?) Just like Mark, the GOP’s base want all of us to deny who we are, to go without intimate adult relationships, to live our lives alone, and to refuse to answer all direct questions about our sexuality. To the GOP, Mark Foley was a good homo.
Which is probably why the GOP leadership was only too willing to cover-up for Foley. Foley had been covering-up for them for years—covering up his sexuality—so why shouldn’t they return the favor? So what if closet cases tend to act out in sexually inappropriate ways? A few raped altar boys and skeeved out congressional pages are a price the gay-haters are willing to pay if it means fewer out homos....
A new toll-free hotline has been installed for pages, former pages and their families to report incidents. How many will dare to use it? Will their calls reporting abusive situations be treated with the casual disregard that Foley's subjects found?
Blunt and other GOP leaders are quick to express outrage and call for investigations of Foley now that the story has been exposed, but where is the investigation of their handling of the matter when it was first brought to their attention? Why did they not at the time alert the three-member bipartisan panel that oversaw the page system? Where are the explorations of their connections to Foley? Roy Blunt's poltical action committee donated nearly $5,000 to Foley this year alone. Foley gave a thousand dollars to the gubernatorial campaign of Blunt's son, Matt Blunt.
The Republican response to charges that they should have acted forcefully and much earlier has been a weak excuse: they knew only of the initial emails, not the instant messages. That evasion is exposed and quashed by a reader at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, and given emphasis here:
There's a weak excuse emerging from Republicans for Foleygate - they might have known about the e-mails to Rep. Alexander's page, but they never knew about the explicit IMs. Too much of the media coverage right now is centering on that question, as if knowledge of the IMs is the only way to show the leadership was remiss.
But that's irrelevant, and here's why: Once ABC got hold of the e-mails, it took them one day to flush out the IMs. That's what an actual investigation looks like. The Republican leadership simply didn't want to know how bad the Foley situation was. That's just as morally negligent as if they had started digging and found the IMs.
Roy Blunt's connections to the disgraced Foley demand an accounting of his role in the coverup of the Foley scandal. At least one Republican has shown the courage to call for a full accounting of the leadership:
Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said any leader who had been aware of Mr. Foley’s behavior and failed to take action should step down. “If they knew or should have known the extent of this problem, they should not serve in leadership,” Mr. Shays said.
In a meadow near Windsor one fine day in 1215, King John, under pressure from disgruntled nobles, affixed his royal seal to the Magna Carta, clause 39 of which provided:
No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
The War on Terror is often framed as a clash between western champions of modernity and the medieval mindset of Salafis. Yet these days our own commitment to even medieval guarantees of due process often seems, at best, half-hearted. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday, the Pentagon and CIA are developing "long term solutions" for terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay and various CIA facilities whom the government intends neither to release nor, due to lack of evidence, to try in court. Proposals include the construction of "Camp 6" (a belated sequel, perhaps, to Slaughterhouse Five), a $25 million prison to house 200 people. Indefinitely.
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations committee, has already distanced himself from the idea, agreeing with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) that "some modicum of due process" is required before even foreigners are imprisoned for life. Yet with details still maddeningly vague at this stage, nobody seems entirely sure yet just what makes a modicum.
The Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush this summer established that detainees at Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray have a right to some sort of review of their designation as enemy combatants. Most of the 550 prisoners (a term the administration continues to reject—"detainees," please) still held at Guantanamo have since been affording such a hearing. Two have been recommended for release. This indicates either that the military did a remarkably good job of filtering when, prior to the Court's decision, it released some 200 prisoners deemed of little intelligence value, or that these "combatant status review tribunals" have a distinctly marsupial character. In November, Washington, D.C., Disctrict Court Judge James Robertson ordered a halt To the trial by tribunal of Salim Ahmed Hamdn, alleged to be Osama bin Laden's chauffeur, repudiating "the government's argument that the President has untrammeled power to establish military tribunals," and some 50 other detainees have filed challenges to the review process, alleging that it fails to provide due process.
Civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate, who writes about the rights of detainees in a January reason cover story, suspects the government may attempt to sidestep the controversy by "plunging into one of the glaring loopholes in the Supreme Court's decision. The Court's ruling in Rasul turned on its finding that, despite being located on Cuban soil, Camp X-Ray is de facto under the "complete jurisdiction and control" of the United States. That leaves open the possibility, says Silverglate, that a U.S.-sponsored prison on foreign soil, over which another government exercised greater nominal control, might escape such scrutiny. And if the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act, passed by the House of Representatives this fall, is any indication, legislators are eager to make it easier for the Director of Homeland Security to render aliens into the hands of foreign governments, whether or not they have any connection to the country to which they're being sent....
We decided long ago, at least when it comes to domestic justice, that there are abysses into which a free society will not stare, even at the cost of assuming significant risk. But when those same risks come clothed in the words war and terror, we become suddenly timorous, fearful of holding ourselves to even dramatically watered down evidentiary standards lest we release one guilty man along with 10 innocents.
We are at war. But even wars have rules, and even prisoners of war are supposed to be tried for war crimes or, at war's end, released. The rules are trickier now: Absent the prospect of signing a treaty for cessation of hostilities with a denationalized radical ummah, the war isn't over until we say so. For practical purposes, if the government has its way, that will mean we assume the power to watch men, so long as they're foreigners, grow old and die in a cage, either here or abroad, without affording them even the mildest presumption of innocence. If we genuinely believe that freedom is "God Almighty's gift to each and every person in the world," we must step back from that abyss.
