Sometime in early 1992 I was driving alone from Los Angeles to see some friends and celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I remember a particular stretch of Interstate 10 as I passed down from the mountains of Las Cruces into the river valley of El Paso. Off to my right, on the far side of the Rio Grande, stood Ciudad Juarez. It made for a sorry cityscape, with acres and acres of dilapidated housing. By contrast, El Paso was positively sparkling. I wondered to myself how two cities…two cities so far from anywhere, could be so different from each other. And it occurred to me that the answers lay in Mexico City and Washington DC…in the Constitution and rule of law on the one hand and incompetence and corruption on the other.

In our system of government nothing is more important than the separation of powers represented by the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judiciary.

If we lose those checks and balances it will only be a matter of time before we lose everything. There will be nothing to distinguish El Paso from Cuidad Juarez. Our country will lose its unique characteristics that have made it so successful.

That is the biggest threat from Bushism. There’s no need to throw words like ‘fascism’ around. What they are doing is much slower and, therefore, more insidious than the methods employed by Franco, Pinochet, and Mussolini. Murray Waas has an excellent piece up about how the Vice-President tried to shut down the congressional inquiry of 9/11 by siccing the FBI on congress, and how he threatened to completely cut off congressional oversight of our intelligence agencies.

Early on the morning of June 20, 2002, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., received a telephone call at home from a highly agitated Dick Cheney. Graham, who was in the middle of shaving, held a razor in one hand as he took the phone in the other.

The vice president got right to the point: A story in his morning newspaper reported that telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency on September 10, 2001, apparently warned that Al Qaeda was about to launch a major attack against the United States, possibly the next day. But the intercepts were not translated until September 12, 2001, the story said, the day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Because someone had leaked the highly classified information from the NSA intercepts, Cheney warned Graham, the Bush administration was considering ending all cooperation with the joint inquiry by the Senate and House Intelligence committees on the government’s failure to predict and prevent the September 11 attacks. Classified records would no longer be turned over to the Hill, the vice president threatened, and administration witnesses would not be available for interviews or testimony.

Moreover, Graham recalled in an interview for this story, Cheney warned that unless the leaders of the Intelligence committees took action to discover who leaked the information about the intercepts — and more importantly, to make sure that such leaks never happened again — President Bush would directly make the case to the American people that Congress could not be trusted with vital national security secrets.

“Take control of the situation,” Graham recalls Cheney instructing him.

The guilty party appears to have been the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL). He leaked to Carl Cameron of Fox News and Dana Bash of CNN. Just like Tim Russert, Cameron admitted this information in a FBI interview only to turn around and refuse to testify about it before a grand jury. This was all established after Graham, Shelby, Goss, and Pelosi referred the leak to the FBI. But John Ashcroft decided against putting Cameron in jail so that he might get the testimony to put a fellow Republican in prison.

The thing is, Shelby wasn’t the only leaker. Both Bob Graham and the House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss came to believe that Congress had been set up.

Graham says that even if Shelby had leaked information about the intercepts to the press, Graham believes with some degree of certainty that certain executive branch officials did so as well. Although CNN broke the story, the next-day stories in The Post and USA Today contained details that Hayden had not disclosed to the Intelligence committees, Graham said. “That would lead a reasonable person to infer the administration leaked as well, or what they were doing was trying to set us up… to make this an issue which they could come after us with.”…

…Graham said, “Looking back at it, I think we were clearly set up by Dick Cheney and the White House. They wanted to shut us down. And they wanted to shut down a legitimate congressional inquiry that might raise questions in part about whether their own people had aggressively pursued Al Qaeda in the days prior to the September 11 attacks. The vice president attempted to manipulate the situation, and he attempted to manipulate us.” Graham added: “But if his goal was to get us to back off, he was unsuccessful.”

Graham said that Goss shared his concerns. In 2003, according to Graham, he speculated to Goss that the White House had set them up in an effort to sabotage the joint September 11 congressional inquiry. Graham says that Goss responded: “I often wondered that myself.”…

…At the time of Cheney’s phone call in June 2002, Graham and other lawmakers on the Intelligence committees suspected that the vice president viewed the leaking of the NSA intercepts as an opportunity to try to curtail what he believed were nettlesome congressional inquiries.

Cheney certainly considered the investigations to be nettlesome:

On Meet the Press on Sept. 19, 2002, Moderator Tim Russert asked Dick Cheney about a charge made by then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle “that you called him several times and urged him not to investigate the events of Sept. 11.”

“Tom’s wrong,” the vice president said. “I think in this case – well, let’s say a misinterpretation. What I did do was work, at the direction of the president, with the leadership of the Intelligence committees to say, ‘We prefer to work with the Intelligence committees.'”

The following Sunday, the senator was Russert’s guest. After playing a tape of Cheney’s statement, Russert asked Daschle, “Did the vice president call you and urge you not to investigate the events of Sept. 11?” Daschle flatly contradicted Cheney: “Yes, he did, Tim, on Jan. 24, and then on Jan. 28 the president himself at one of our breakfast meetings repeated the request.”

Russert persisted: “It wasn’t, ‘Let’s not have a national commission, but let’s have the Intelligence committees look into this,’ it was ‘No investigation by anyone, period’?”

“That’s correct,” Daschle said. “[T]hat request was made” by Cheney not only on Jan. 24 and by Mr. Bush four days later, but “on other dates following” as well.

But it wasn’t just 9/11 that Dick Cheney wanted to keep hidden. We now know that Cheney had authorized the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens on American soil (although monkey-boy probably signed a slip of paper along the way). They were well into their extraordinary rendition program. They were deep into fixing the facts around the policy of invading Iraq. The FBI was getting nowhere in their anthrax investigation. And Tom Ridge was doing more to terrorize the American public with his color-coded charts, plastic sheeting, and duct tape, than Usama bin-Laden ever accomplished. This was 2002. This was THE YEAR OF FEAR…the most unpleasant year any of have lived through and, hopefully, ever will.

But Bush and Cheney just keep plodding along. Now they’re eliminating the Senate’s role in approving federal prosecutors. What will be next?