"First, do no Harman..." (UPDATE)

Should I rethink my position on Nancy Pelosi's position on who should head up the extremely important intel committee?

I've been adamant that Alcee Hastings -- Pelosi's reported choice -- should not get the job, due to his involvement with a bribery scandal in the early 1980s. That was a serious matter -- but one which occurred a long time ago. (See update below)

Pelosi, we are told, dislikes Jame Harman, the logical choice for the post based on seniority. I am no uncritical fan of Harman, a former supporter of the Iraq misadventure. You may recall that a free ad for her primary opponent, Marcy Winograd, ran on in the margins of this very blog. Harman has been accused of an unethical relationship with AIPAC.

In the words of Homer Simpson: Can't someone else do it?

Here are the other Democratic members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

Silvestre Reyes, Texas
Leonard L. Boswell, Iowa
Bud Cramer, Alabama
Anna G. Eshoo, California
Rush D. Holt, New Jersey
Dutch Ruppersberger, Maryland
John Tierney, Massachusetts

A few people have pushed for Reyes, but I must confess that, after the past six years, I have had it up to frigging here with Texans. Ruppersberger has a good record of fighting organized crime, but he has been in Congress only since 2003. (See update below.) Cramer is too close to the Republicans. I know too little about Boswell to say anything about him one way or the other.

Ann Eshoo has been on the job since 1993. I understand that she has good relations with Nancy Pelosi. She's great on the issues of civil rights and internet privacy. (The latter is not unrelated to current intelligence debates.) Eshoo is the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence. She represents Silicon Valley and (I am told) speaks fluent Geek, with just a touch of a Nerd accent.

Rush Holt has been on the job since 1998. He deserves our highest praise for sponsoring a bill requiring all voting machines to produce a paper record. (His interest in that issue is quite understandable, given his thin margins of victory.) Some evidence indicates that the various vote fraud scandals overlap the murky worlds of spook-dom; Holt would be well-positioned to look into such allegations. He is the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy.

John Tierney, who has been in office since 1997, wrote these words for The Nation:

Prisoners being held secretly, without counsel and apparently indefinitely. The Vice President imploring senators to exempt the CIA from US law, treaties and international norms prohibiting torture. A war justified by unsupportable information. Accounts of misconduct at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and secret prisons beyond US borders. Extensive use of national security letters to obtain, without warrant or subpoena, information on American citizens.

Just who is minding American intelligence? The answer should be Congress.

And:

Claiming security concerns, executive-branch agencies increasingly restrict or delay access to vital intelligence--often preventing or delaying Congress, or all but a handful in Congress, from having the facts. Then, even if the intelligence is shared with some, documents are classified to prohibit broader sharing. While the Bush Administration has used security threats to justify its excessive classification, emerging threats actually make the need for "real-time sharing" of sensitive information more urgent. The Congressional Joint Inquiry into September 11 strongly raised this issue, but few people took notice.

There may be some arcane congressional tradition which would prevent Pelosi from handing the task to Eshoo, Holt or Tierney. I don't care. Any of those three would be preferable to either Harman or Hastings.

UPDATE: Lukery reminds us that Ruppersberger made Sibel Edmonds' "Dirty Dozen" list, and for good reason:

Ruppersberger is pro-secrecy, unreasonable secrecy, without oversight - he's pro-NSA's illegal eavesdropping, and he has let down a major whistleblower case - a high profile case - from someone who is also a constituent. This despite the fact that Ruppersberger is on 2 relevant committees.

The whistleblower in question was Russ Tice of the NSA. Tice was egregiously snubbed by his congressman, Dutch Ruppersbergr -- who was also a factor behind the creation of the DNI post now held by John Negroponte.

As for Alcee Hastings: Josh Marshall notes that a 1997 report revealed that the FBI agent who provided much of the evidence against Hastings in the bribery scandal had credibility problems of his own:

And he noted that the agent in the Hastings case, Michael Malone, had "engaged in very substantial misconduct" and in particular had lied to judges reviewing Hastings case about whether a particular forensic test had been done.

John Conyers, who had thunderously denounced Hastings, was "very disturbed" to learn that testimony from a key FBI agent in the case might have been false. On the other hand, cops have been known to salt the case against someone who was actually guilty...

Hmmm. Alcee Hastings. Once more, my mind goes back to that song from Oliver: "I think I better think it out AGAIN!"