Such talk reached new levels of intensity last year during futile efforts to cut off funding for the Iraq war, and again just last month when sizable Democratic defections paved the way to reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

And naturally, the unhappiness is leading to revived talk about a systematic effort in the future — presumably in 2010 — to intimidate or even defeat selected Democratic members of Congress, preeminently Blue Dogs, through primary challenges.

As DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas said on June 25:

As DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas said on June 25:

2010 is going to be the year we pivot from taking control of our government, to holding out [sic] accountable. Like Al Wynn this year, the corrupt, the tone-deaf, and the reactionary within Democratic ranks will face the possibility of primary battles. The infrastructure we’re building will be available for those courageous enough to take on the entrenched elite. But when we have candidates that inspire, and can develop the alternate funding sources to finance them, the combined might of the Pelosis and Hoyers won’t be enough to effect change. Just ask Donna Edwards.

Glenn Greenwald has articulated the case for that strategy — in combination with a generalized determination to make congressional Democrats as a group “pay a price” for perfidy or failure — quite forcefully.

There are three big problems with such a campaign: defining the targets amid wildly varying estimates of the necessary degrees of Democratic unity and progressivism; mustering the means to carry out primary challenges in territory not always hospitable to the net-roots point of view; and most of all, dealing with a post-Bush political environment in which many of the long-heard complaints about Democratic “timidity” may be far less relevant.

Greenwald seems to think that it’s self-evident that “complicity and capitulation” by Democrats are responsible for the extremely low approval ratings of the current Congress, and that the entire Democratic “base” shares his own feelings of betrayal on issues ranging from Iraq and FISA to the confirmation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

If Congress’ unpopularity (the norm rather than the exception, regardless of party control, over the past two decades) is mostly attributable to Democrats, why then (as Greenwald himself points out in rationalizing immediate efforts to reduce their numbers) are Democrats poised to make significant gains in both houses in November? Such limited polling as exists on perceptions of the two parties in Congress invariably shows higher ratings for Democrats than Republicans. Moreover, the disappointment and frustration of self-identified Democratic voters (the actual party “base,” as distinguished from the “activist base,” according to most definitions) with Congress’ record undoubtedly encompass some recognition of the residual power, via the veto pen and other executive powers, of even the weakest president. And aside from continuing public ambivalence about how, exactly, to end the war in Iraq, there’s simply not much evidence that issues like FISA or habeas corpus, much as they should matter to voters, actually do, even in the ranks of the Democratic “base.”

So if the “base” is supposed to bring congressional Democrats to heel, who gets to draw the lines separating the essential wheat from the disposable chaff?

It’s not as though there’s a stable and easily identifiable band of rebellious right-leaning Democrats in Congress who are screwing up everything. According to Congressional Quarterly’s (subscription-only) voting analysis, House Democrats achieved the highest level of party unity in history last year, with 92 percent sticking together on party-line votes (as compared with the low of 58 percent back in 1972). Senate Democrats’ party-unity rating in 2007 was 87 percent, just below their all-time high of 89 percent (achieved in 1999 and 2001), and far above the levels common in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

So advocates of intraparty disciplinary methods have to be selective, sometimes very, very selective. In April of last year, the progressive site OpenLeft launched a highly influential campaign to identify, persuade and/or eventually challenge 38 House Democrats dubbed “Bush Dogs.” In defining the term, OpenLeft co-founder Matt Stoller said:

Bush Dog Democrats are Democratic members of Congress who enable the right-wing through their support of Bush’s policies on core progressive values at key moments.

In this case, “core” and “key” were defined by exactly two House votes: the effort to cut off Iraq war funding and FISA. And that litmus test didn’t serve as a very stable way to isolate a hardcore of alleged miscreants: the “Bush Dog” list swelled to 70 after the latest Iraq and FISA votes.

But even if some ill-defined Democratic “base” can somehow find ways to agree on a consensus view of minimal party unity or ideological progressivism, there’s a question of means as well as ends. Do proponents of a culling exercise have sufficient resources, intellectual, organizational or financial, to kick ass and take names on the broad scale they often suggest as necessary?

Putting aside as debatable claims that threats of strong national net-roots support for primary challenges have had a big effect on potential targets (e.g., Reps. Jane Harman and Ellen Tauscher of California), there have only been two clear-cut examples of congressional Democratic targets going down to ideologically based primary challenges: Joe Lieberman in 2006 (who nonetheless won reelection after Connecticut Republicans supported his “independent” bid) and Albert Wynn in February of this year. Notably less successful high-profile efforts this year failed to topple Reps. Daniel Lipinski of Illinois in February and Leonard Boswell of Iowa in June. And July’s net-roots-backed challenge to Rep. John Barrow of Georgia — the Bush Dog to top all Bush Dogs — crashed and burned by better than a 3-to-1 margin.

I don’t mention this mixed record to mock the influence of the net roots or other progressive activists, or to doubt the energy of their efforts, but simply to note, as Markos Moulitsas often does, that the ability to affect individual contests depends almost entirely on local conditions. And elements of the “base” in far-flung congressional districts around the country sometimes have different ideas about the quality of their representation, or the realistic options for something better rather than worse, than do distant activists wielding lists. John Barrow’s not a unique example; the Democratic base voters in the districts that recently elected “Bush Dogs” in Mississippi and Louisiana in special elections probably aren’t going to warm to arguments that they need to risk reversing their historic victories in the name of progressive solidarity.

But even if I’m wrong about everything I’ve said until now, the biggest and most obvious problem with a vengeful effort to discipline Democrats deemed to have failed to stand up to Bush is that this whole measurement is about to become moot, particularly if Barack Obama wins in November. In an Obama administration, all the arguments about which tactic or strategy congressional Democrats should have used to win or “take a stand” on this or that issue in the Bush era will be relevant only in terms of which Bush policies can be reversed, since we’ll have a president and a Democratic congressional majority that’s — for the first time, perhaps, since 1965 — basically pulling in the same direction.

If intraparty fights break out, would an Obama administration take a detached position on them, or intervene in one way or another? (After all, Obama endorsed Lieberman’s primary candidacy in 2006 and also endorsed Barrow this year.) Will post-election challenges to House or Senate leaders (say, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer) emerge? What issues, if any, will represent intraparty flash points? And will a Democratic “big tent” wider than some progressives are comfortable with be an asset or a handicap to a President Obama, who has spoken so often of breaking the mold in Washington but also of overcoming stale partisan debates?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but nor, with all due respect, does Glenn Greenwald. The case for a backward-looking campaign to punish Democrats generally or specifically for their sins in the Bush era makes little sense five months before it mercifully ends. Let’s win big in November, keep the Big Tent up, see what the blessed new year brings, and remember that no one in particular can authoritatively speak for “base” or “swing” voters other than, well, voters.

If intraparty tensions persist, there will be plenty of time then to pick up sides and keep, or settle, scores.

While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.

Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA’s working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.

The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi’s and Conyers’ offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses — and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.

“If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration’s attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don’t know,” says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.

“You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse,” says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don’t know [the extent of] what laws have been violated.”

The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government’s extensive use of military assets — including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes — for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.

Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA’s use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government’s extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Department’s list of “specially designated global terrorists” to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, “our cities would be ablaze.” A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government’s “inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect.”

“It’s not just the ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program,’” agrees Gregory T. Nojeim from the Center for Democracy and Technology, referring to the Bush administration’s misleading name for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. “We need a broad investigation on the way all the moving parts fit together. It seems like we’re always looking at little chunks and missing the big picture.”

A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration’s alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as “Main Core,” the database reportedly collects and stores — without warrants or court orders — the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.

According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as “an emergency internal security database system” designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA’s use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.

The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for the surveillance program — former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel — testified before Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the White House. Although they refused to discuss the highly classified details behind their concerns, the New York Times later reported that they were objecting to a program that “involved computer searches through massive electronic databases” containing “records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans.”

According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.

Hamilton’s company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors’ Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. “It operates just like Google,” Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.

Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software — and its outstanding ability to search other databases — to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database.

Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA’s use of PROMIS involved something “so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem,” Hamilton told me. He added, “I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core.” Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw’s behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.

Hamilton says James B. Comey’s congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft’s dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. “It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans,” he told me.

Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government’s use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, “he turned white as a sheet.”

An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, “could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.”

The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive government intrusion into Americans’ lives than has been previously known. With respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU’s Steinhardt, it would be “pretty frightening stuff.”

The Inslaw case also points to what may be an extensive role played by the NSA in financial spying inside the United States. According to reports over the years in the U.S. and foreign press, Inslaw’s PROMIS software was embedded surreptitiously in systems sold to foreign and global banks as a way to give the NSA secret “backdoor” access to the electronic flow of money around the world.

In May, I interviewed Norman Bailey, a private financial consultant with years of government intelligence experience dating from the George W. Bush administration back to the Reagan administration. According to Bailey — who from 2006 to 2007 headed a special unit within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela — the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early 1980s.

From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President Reagan’s National Security Council, called “Follow the Money,” that used NSA signals intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union and its allies. PROMIS, he told me, was “the principal software element” used by the NSA and the Treasury Department then in their electronic surveillance programs tracking financial flows to the Soviet bloc, organized crime and terrorist groups. His admission is the first public acknowledgement by a former U.S. intelligence official that the NSA used the PROMIS software.

According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a significant shift in resources from human spying to electronic surveillance, as a way to track money flows to suspected criminals and American enemies. “That was the beginning of the whole process,” he said.

After 9/11, this capability was instantly seen within the U.S. government as a critical tool in the war on terror — and apparently was deployed by the Bush administration inside the United States, in cases involving alleged terrorist supporters. One such case was that of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Oregon, which was accused of having terrorist ties after the NSA, at the request of the Treasury Department, eavesdropped on the phone calls of Al-Haramain officials and their American lawyers. The charges against Al-Haramain were based primarily on secret evidence that the Bush administration refused to disclose in legal proceedings; Al-Haramain’s lawyers argued in a lawsuit that was a violation of the defendants’ due process rights.

According to Bailey, the NSA also likely would have used its technological capabilities to track the charity’s financial activity. “The vast majority of financial movements of any significance take place electronically, so intercepts have become an extremely important element” in intelligence, he explained. “If the government suspects that a particular Muslim charitable organization is engaged in collecting funds to funnel to terrorists, the NSA would be asked to follow the money going into and out of the bank accounts of that charity.” (The now-defunct Al-Haramain Foundation, although affiliated with a Saudi Arabian-based global charity, was founded and based in Ashland, Ore.)

The use of a powerful database and extensive watch lists, Bailey said, would make the NSA’s job much easier. “The biggest problems with intercepts, quite frankly, is that the volumes of data, daily or even by the hour, are gigantic,” he said. “Unless you have a very precise idea of what it is you’re looking for, the NSA people or their counterparts [overseas] will just throw up their hands and say ‘forget it.’” Regarding domestic surveillance, Bailey said there’s a “whole gray area where the initiation of the transaction was in the United States and the final destination was outside, or vice versa. That’s something for the lawyers to figure out.”

Bailey’s information on the evolution of the Reagan intelligence program appears to corroborate and clarify an article published in March in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the NSA was conducting domestic surveillance using “an ad-hoc collection of so-called ‘black programs’ whose existence is undisclosed.” Some of these programs began “years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.” Among them, the article said, are a joint NSA-Treasury database on financial transactions that dates back “about 15 years” to 1993. That’s not quite right, Bailey clarified: “It started in the early ’80s, at least 10 years before.”

Main Core may be the contemporary incarnation of a government watch list system that was part of a highly classified “Continuity of Government” program created by the Reagan administration to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack. Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered to be threats to national security. The emergency measures for domestic security were to be carried out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army.

In the late 1980s, reports about a domestic database linked to FEMA and the Continuity of Government program began to appear in the press. For example, in 1986 the Austin American-Statesman uncovered evidence of a large database that authorities were proposing to use to intern Latino dissidents and refugees during a national emergency that might follow a potential U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. During the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in 1987, questions to Reagan aide Oliver North about the database were ruled out of order by the committee chairman, Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, because of the “highly sensitive and classified” nature of FEMA’s domestic security operations.

In September 2001, according to “The Rise of the Vulcans,” a 2004 book on Bush’s war cabinet by James Mann, a contemporary version of the Continuity of Government program was put into play in the hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when Vice President Cheney and senior members of Congress were dispersed to “undisclosed locations” to maintain government functions. It was during this emergency period, Hamilton and other former government officials believe, that President Bush may have authorized the NSA to begin actively using the Main Core database for domestic surveillance. One indicator they cite is a statement by Bush in December 2005, after the New York Times had revealed the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, in which he made a rare reference to the emergency program: The Justice Department’s legal reviews of the NSA activity, Bush said, were based on “fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government.”

It is noteworthy that two key players on Bush’s national security team, Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, have been involved in the Continuity of Government program since its inception. Along with Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s first secretary of defense, both men took part in simulated drills for the program during the 1980s and early 1990s. Addington’s role was disclosed in “The Dark Side,” a book published this month about the Bush administration’s war on terror by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer. In the book, Mayer calls Addington “the father of the [NSA] eavesdropping program,” and reports that he was the key figure involved in the 2004 dispute between the White House and the Justice Department over the legality of the program. That would seem to make him a prime witness for a broader investigation.

Getting a full picture on Bush’s intelligence programs, however, will almost certainly require any sweeping new investigation to have a scope that would inoculate it against charges of partisanship. During one recent discussion on Capitol Hill, according to a participant, a senior aide to Speaker Pelosi was asked for Pelosi’s views on a proposal to expand the investigation to past administrations, including those of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. “The question was, how far back in time would we have to go to make this credible?” the participant in the meeting recalled.

That question was answered in the seven-page memo. “The rise of the ‘surveillance state’ driven by new technologies and the demands of counter-terrorism did not begin with this Administration,” the author wrote. Even though he acknowledged in interviews with Salon that the scope of abuse under George W. Bush would likely be an order of magnitude greater than under preceding presidents, he recommended in the memo that any new investigation follow the precedent of the Church Committee and investigate the origins of Bush’s programs, going as far back as the Reagan administration.

The proposal has emerged in a political climate reminiscent of the Watergate era. The Church Committee was formed in 1975 in the wake of media reports about illegal spying against American antiwar activists and civil rights leaders, CIA assassination squads, and other dubious activities under Nixon and his predecessors. Chaired by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the committee interviewed more than 800 officials and held 21 public hearings. As a result of its work, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required warrants and court supervision for domestic wiretaps, and created intelligence oversight committees in the House and Senate.

So far, no lawmaker has openly endorsed a proposal for a new Church Committee-style investigation. A spokesman for Pelosi declined to say whether Pelosi herself would be in favor of a broader probe into U.S. intelligence. On the Senate side, the most logical supporters for a broader probe would be Democratic senators such as Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who led the failed fight against the recent Bush-backed changes to FISA. (Both Feingold and Leahy’s offices declined to comment on a broader intelligence inquiry.)

The Democrats’ reticence on such action ultimately may be rooted in congressional complicity with the Bush administration’s intelligence policies. Many of the war on terror programs, including the NSA’s warrantless surveillance and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” were cleared with key congressional Democrats, including Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Rockefeller, and former House Intelligence chairwoman Jane Harman, among others.

The discussions about a broad investigation were jump-started among civil liberties advocates this spring, when it became clear that the Democrats didn’t have the votes to oppose the Bush-backed bill updating FISA. The new legislation could prevent the full story of the NSA surveillance programs from ever being uncovered; it included retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that may have violated FISA by collaborating with the NSA on warrantless wiretapping. Opponents of Bush’s policies were further angered when Democratic leaders stripped from their competing FISA bill a provision that would have established a national commission to investigate post-9/11 surveillance programs.

The next president obviously would play a key role in any decision to investigate intelligence abuses. Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, is running as a champion of Bush’s national security policies and would be unlikely to embrace an investigation that would, foremost, embarrass his own party. (Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s spokesman on national security, declined to comment.)

Some see a brighter prospect in Barack Obama, should he be elected. The plus with Obama, says the former Church Committee staffer, is that as a proponent of open government, he could order the executive branch to be more cooperative with Congress, rolling back the obsessive secrecy and stonewalling of the Bush White House. That could open the door to greater congressional scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence community, since the legislative branch lacked any real teeth under Bush. (Obama’s spokesman on national security, Ben Rhodes, did not reply to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment.)

But even that may be a lofty hope. “It may be the last thing a new president would want to do,” said a participant in the ongoing discussions. Unfortunately, he said, “some people see the Church Committee ideas as a substitute for prosecutions that should already have happened.”

So it shouldn’t be surprising that, in the same spirit, John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are going after Barack Obama on similar grounds. Just in the last week, the RNC has sent out two detailed press releases titled “Obama vs. Obama,” and forwarded around a few news articles with headlines like “Flipping and Flopping.” Meanwhile, McCain and his aides and allies are hammering Obama for changing his mind on whether the troop surge in Iraq has helped calm the situation there. “It seems to me this is not just the kind of normal political flip-flop, back and forth,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent who has become one of McCain’s most aggressive surrogates, said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday morning.

Admittedly, the goal this time is a little different — the GOP is trying to paint Obama as just another politician, whose policy positions are determined by what helps him with voters, not by what he believes is right. (With Kerry, the idea was to make him look weak and waffling compared to Bush.) The basic strategy, though, is the same. Republicans will play up any shifts on issues, blasting Obama when he varies at all from what he’s said in the past on everything from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Second Amendment to the death penalty.

In some cases — foremost with warrantless wiretapping, where Obama went back on a pledge to filibuster the bill he wound up voting for — the charges against Obama may be deserved. On others, like Iraq — where Obama has said all along he’d seek guidance from the Pentagon on how best to withdraw U.S. troops within 16 months — the shift is more in how he’s talking about the issue, not what his essential policy is.

McCain, though, is a surprising choice to be a charter member of the U.S. Consistency Patrol. He’s done his fair share of “reversals,” as the Republicans call Obama’s shifts, in this campaign. He changed his position on offshore oil drilling (from opposed to in favor), on sweeping immigration reform (from in favor to opposed), and on tax cuts (from opposed to in favor). Democrats are trying to spotlight that track record, themselves; the goal is to chip away at McCain’s image as a maverick — to remind voters that in fact, he agrees with his fellow Republicans far more than he disagrees. For someone who named his campaign bus the “Straight Talk Express,” the moves add up to a potential vulnerability.

This summer’s focus on flip-flops has managed to obscure meaningful discussion of policies. The campaigns and the media alike are rolling up procedural issues (Obama’s decision not to take public financing for the general election) with substantive ones (McCain’s decision that tax cuts he once said he “could not in good conscience” vote for weren’t so bad after all) into one big, catch-all category. Aides on both sides sound eerily similar.

“They’ve all been for the sake of political expedience,” RNC spokesman Alex Conant said about Obama’s policy shifts.

“We’ve seen a very clear pattern now of him putting political calculations first,” the Democratic National Committee’s Damien LaVera said of McCain. On Tuesday night, the campaigns even issued dueling memos on the subject.

Often, the attacks come off as blatantly tactical. For instance, when the GOP blasts Obama for supporting FISA legislation the White House wanted and McCain supported (but didn’t show up to vote for), it’s hard to believe there’s much real outrage behind the zinger.

By now, catching politicians changing their tune is easier than ever. Thanks to YouTube and the candidate’s own Web sites, clips or transcripts (or both at once) of just about anything either of them has ever said is available instantly. And the 2004 campaign seems to have lodged in political writers’ and operatives’ heads the idea that finding even the smallest contradictions between current rhetoric and past record represents an important discovery.

What this discounts, though, is how American voters may really feel about each candidate’s evolving campaign in 2008. They probably don’t want to see their candidate abandoning campaign promises once they take office — but after seven long years of a Bush administration that refused to change course until it was too late, they may see something entirely different in a leader who is not locked into the first thoughts he had on a given issue. This election may prove to be the one in which the flip-flop, as political weapon, finally fizzles. Both Obama and McCain are trying to play up their commitment to changing the country’s course. And it may be that as that course looks increasingly difficult, voters will pay the most attention to how the candidates are adapting to and planning to deal with the war or the economy, rather than punishing them for lacking George W. Bush’s dogmatism.

Mayer responded “that inside the White House there [had] been growing fear of criminal prosecution, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the Geneva Conventions applied to the treatment of the detainees,” and that it was this fear that led the White House to demand (and, of course, receive) immunity for past interrogation crimes as part of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. But Mayer noted one important political impediment to holding Bush officials accountable for their illegal torture program:

An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.

As we witness not just Republicans, but also Democrats in Congress, acting repeatedly to immunize executive branch lawbreaking and to obstruct investigations, it’s vital to keep that fact in mind. With regard to illegal Bush programs of torture and eavesdropping, key Congressional Democrats were contemporaneously briefed on what the administration was doing (albeit, in fairness, often in unspecific ways). The fact that they did nothing to stop that illegality, and often explicitly approved of it, obviously incentivizes them to block any investigations or judicial proceedings into those illegal programs.

In December of last year, The Washington Post revealed:

Four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

The article noted that other Democratic members who received briefings on the CIA’s interrogation program included Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman. While Harman sent a letter to the CIA asking questions about the legality of the program, none ever took any steps to stop or even restrict the interrogation program in any way.

Identically, numerous key Democrats in Congress — including Rockefeller and Harman — were told that Bush had ordered the NSA to spy on American without warrants and outside of FISA. None of them did anything to stop it. In fact, while Rockefeller wrote a sad, hostage-like, handwritten letter to Dick Cheney in 2003 (which he sent to nobody else) — assuring Cheney that he would keep the letter locked away “to ensure that I have a record of this communication” — Harman was a vocal supporter of the illegal NSA program. Here’s what she told Time in January, 2006 in the wake of the NYT article revealing the NSA program:

Some key Democrats even defend it. Says California’s Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee: “I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”

Harman then went on Fox News and pronounced that the NSA program was “legal and necessary” and proudly said: “I support the program.” Even worse, in February, 2006, Harman went on “Meet the Press” and strongly suggested that the New York Times should be criminally prosecuted for having reported on the illegal program. And indeed, in 2004, Harman demanded that the NYT‘s Eric Lichtblau not write about the NSA program. As Lichtblau wrote in his recent book about a 2004 conversation with Harman:

“You should not be talking about that here,” she scolded me in a whisper. “They don’t even know about that,” she said, gesturing to her aides, who were now looking on at the conversation with obvious befuddlement. “The Times did the right thing by not publishing that story,” she continued. I wanted to understand her position. What intelligence capabilities would be lost by informing the public about something the terrorists already knew — namely, that the government was listening to them? I asked her. Harman wouldn’t bite. “This is a valuable program, and it would be compromised,’ she said. I tried to get into some of the details of the program and get a better understanding of why the administration asserted that it couldn’t be operated within the confines of the courts. Harman wouldn’t go there either. “This is a valuable program,” she repeated.

In light of this sordid history of active complicity, is it really any wonder that these leading Democrats are desperate to quash any investigations or judicial adjudications of Bush administration actions that they knew about and did nothing to stop, in some cases even actively supporting?

Yesterday, I was on Warren Olney’s To the Point discussing the FISA controversy. The guest interviewed immediately before me was Jane Harman (and before her was Lichtblau). Harman was vigorously spouting every false talking point to defend her vote in favor of telecom immunity and the new FISA law, including the painfully absurd claim that the new FISA law actually “makes the law stronger than the original law. It’s a better law.” She kept saying things like this to justify her support for terminating the lawsuits arising out of the illegal NSA program:

OLNEY: But back to the question, though, of the phone companies. Why was it that one company, Qwest, seemed to think that there were serious questions to be raised about this and the others didn’t? Can you tell us that?

HARMAN: Well, I respect what Qwest did. Qwest said that the strict letter of FISA isn’t being followed, as I understand it. That was some very careful lawyering.

The other telecoms that complied with requests believed — so they say — that they were complying with valid requests from the Government. And remember that when this happened, it was shortly after 9/11 and so forth —

OLNEY: Yeah, but if they didn’t, and privacy was violated, shouldn’t they be held to account?

HARMAN: I think that a process should be followed. I think the people who should be held to account are the people who made the decision not to follow FISA, and those were not the telecom executives.

Actually, “the people who made the decision not to follow FISA” most certainly did include the telecom executives — as well as people like Jane Harman herself who, in her capacity as ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, was told about the illegal spying program and supported it as “legal and necessary,” and even tried to bully journalists into refraining from exposing it.

Exactly the same thing happened with Jay Rockefeller and Bush’s torture program. It is absolutely the case that, as Mayer pointed out yesterday and as I wrote about at the time, Bush officials faced serious danger of criminal liability in the wake of the 2006 Hamdan ruling that the Geneva Conventions applied to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. But the Military Commissions Act, passed several months after the Hamdan ruling, took care of that problem by immunizing the lawbreakers. Jay Rockefeller was right there supporting that retroactive immunity, too — thereby helping to block investigations and prosecutions for illegal torture programs about which Rockefeller knew and in which he was complicit.

This is exactly the dynamic which Law Professor, Fourth Amendment expert, and Simple-Minded, Confused Leftist Hysteric Jonathan Turley was describing on MSNBC on June 19:

I mean, the Democrats never really were engaged in this. In fact, they repeatedly tried to cave in to the White House, only to be stopped by civil libertarians and bloggers. And each time they would put it on the shelf, wait a few months, they did this before, reintroduced it with Jay Rockefeller’s support, and then there was another great, you know, dustup and they pulled it back. . . .

I think they’re simply waiting to see if the public’s interest will wane and we’ll see that tomorrow, because this bill has, quite literally, no public value for citizens or civil liberties. It is reverse engineering, though the type of thing that the Bush administration is famous for, and now the Democrats are doing — that is to change the law to conform to past conduct.

It’s what any criminal would love to do. You rob a bank, go to the legislature, and change the law to say that robbing banks is lawful. . . .

This is a very frightening bill. What people have to understand is that FISA itself is controversial. This court issued tens of thousands of warrants granted applications for surveillance without turning down any. Only recently did they turn down two. . . . What you’re seeing in this bill is an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It is something that allows the president and the government to go in to law-abiding homes on their word alone, their suspicion alone, and to engage in warrantless surveillance. That’s what the framers that drafted the Fourth Amendment wanted to prevent. . . .

Well, there’s no question in my mind that there is an obvious level of collusion here. We now know that Democratic leadership knew about the illegal surveillance program almost from its inception. Even when they were campaigning about fighting for civil liberties, they were aware of an unlawful surveillance program as well as a torture program. And ever since that came out, the Democrats have been silently trying to kill any effort to hold anyone accountable because that list could very well include some of their own members.

And, I’m afraid this is Washington politics at the worst. And, so, I think that what you’re seeing with this bill is not just caving in to a very powerful lobby, but also caving in to sort of the worst motivations on Capitol Hill since 9/11. You know, the administration was very adept at bringing in Democrats at a time when they knew they couldn’t refuse, to make them buy in to this program, and now that investment is bearing fruit.

So, of course key Congressional Democrats who were made aware of these illegal torture and surveillance programs are going to protect the Bush administration and other lawbreakers. If you were Jay Rockfeller or Nancy Pelosi, would you want there to be investigations and prosecutions for torture programs that, to one degree or another, you knew about? If you were Jane Harman, wouldn’t you be extremely eager to put a stop to judicial proceedings that were likely to result in a finding that surveillance programs that you knew about, approved of, and helped to conceal were illegal and unconstitutional?

When President Bush and Vice President Cheney celebrated the signing of the new FISA bill at the White House along with Jay Rockefeller, Steny Hoyer and Jane Harman (see the wonderful photos here), they weren’t just celebrating with the political officials who helped protect them from consequences for illegal acts. They were celebrating with those who were participants in those acts, and who were therefore just as eager for immunity and an end to judicial proceedings as Bush officials themselves.

UPDATE: Jane Mayer appeared for a Washington Post chat today and the following exchange occurred:

New York, N.Y.: In your interview with Harper’s yesterday, you said this about why war crimes prosecutions are unlikely: “An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.”

What did you mean by that? Who specifically is compromised “who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge” — Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, Jay Rockefeller? — and how are they “compromised”?

Jane Mayer: The ranking members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were briefed dozens of times about the CIA’s interrogation and detention program over the past seven years — so any member who has held one of those posts has arguably been complicit. Some say they tried to object, internally. But either because of the threat of violating national security, or, because of the fear of the political price of dissent, these figures in both parties would find it very hard at this point to point the finger at the White House, without also implicating themselves.

That’s rather definitive. Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman and Jay Rockefeller were all previous ranking members of the Intelligence Committee, all received these briefings, and were thus “compromised” and “complicit” in exactly the way that Mayer just described, because — as Mayer put it — they “would find it very hard at this point to point the finger at the White House, without also implicating themselves.” That is one very significant reason why so many Congressional Democrats — including the leadership — are so supportive of immunity for Bush lawbreakers and the blocking of any investigations into the lawbreaking.

UPDATE II: Here are the fruits of all of this. Watch samplings of the interrogation videos of the 15-year-old Guantanamo detainee here.

Obama eventually responded to the group with a statement that simply rephrased some things he had already said. And then he voted for the bill.

Since then, there have been calls for the group to disband. I suspect those with the loudest voices were never particularly fond of the group, but there are others who sincerely doubt the utility of the group now that the FISA vote has passed, and want to know why we haven’t already cached ourselves.

I cannot speak for the entire group; we’re still hashing out the details of our post-vote structure.

Speaking for myself, however, I see several reasons for the group to continue. The main one is to try to reverse the near-decade-long Republican assault on American values. Every tool available should be used to further that goal; maintaining a line of open and frank communication with our party’s standard-bearer is one of the most important tools in the progressive toolbox.

Notwithstanding the candidate’s protestations, it has been clear in recent weeks that Obama has been distancing himself from the progressives who carried him to victory in the Democratic primary. That’s his choice, but all choices have consequences. A likely consequence to this tactic may be that many of the newly energized voters who were so keen on volunteering and voting for him in the primary will be turned off by his rightward shift. I think it is important to give those voters a place on MyBo.com to continue doing what we can to pressure Obama to “dance with those who brung him.”

The progressives who constitute the Democratic Party’s activist base learned a lesson from the 2000 election; Ralph Nader will almost certainly not be a factor in the 2008 presidential election because left-leaning voters are not willing to throw their votes away. That said, there is — or should have been — another side to the Nader coin. If the base learned that every vote is sacred, what was the take-away for elected Democrats? Nader used to say there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. Judging from Democratic behavior since recovering Congress in 2006, Nader may even get some change back for his dime in 2008.

From the moment George W. Bush took office and ripped this country to the right, Democrats in Congress ran after him like abandoned puppies afraid of being left alone in a dark house. They gave him extreme tax cuts for the wealthy, backed his rush to war, enacted draconian bankruptcy reform legislation and stood by meekly (or actively helped) as he trampled civil liberties and the Bill of Rights.

The Democratic establishment should have learned that we need a Democratic Party that will draw clear distinctions between itself and the Republicans, but it has not. Political cynicism on the left is growing, and with good reason. We won both houses of Congress back in 2006, but we’ve seen almost nothing change. Most recently, a bipartisan coalition — which included Barack Obama — voted to subvert justice by granting the telecom special interests retroactive immunity for lawlessly spying on Americans. (It’s worth noting that the capitulating House Democrats received over twice the telecom campaign contributions that their constitutional stalwart colleagues did.)

By using the tools provided by MyBo.com in this new way — call it friendly feedback — we’re providing the Obama campaign with an opportunity to engage its base, and letting progressive Obama supporters who are nonetheless critical of his shift to the center know that we aren’t alone in the wilderness. The effort constitutes an opportunity for the campaign to increase hope and enthusiasm. Democrats simply cannot afford to give away any third-party votes in 2008, and I think maintaining an activist, progressive, pro-civil liberties presence on MyBo.com is a way to keep Obama’s progressive base tied to his candidacy, rather than drifting into third-party irrelevance.

I would even suggest our efforts are good for Barack Obama personally. He is now surrounded by Washington insiders. By providing Obama with a touchstone from outside the Beltway, I hope he will allow us to guide him toward the instincts he developed as a Chicago community organizer rather than those of a Beltway all-star.

As I write, there are early reports that Obama’s June fundraising totals were disappointing. (There is no official confirmation yet.) The Obama campaign is denying a Wall Street Journal report about this, but the Washington Post also reports that his Internet fundraising is off. Much has been made of the small-donor base Obama cultivated so assiduously. Could it be that a drought of progressive enthusiasm based on his FISA flip stunted his crop last month?

We’ll find out eventually. Meanwhile, everything our MyBo.com group has done so far comports perfectly with Obama’s vision for involving the American people in government decision making. He’s called on us to be the change we want to see; we’re going to do that to the best of our abilities.