No Testify For You!!!

According to NPR this morning, the Justice Department was just rebuffed in Federal court in its attempt to deny Congress the right to call a Federal prisoner to testify before a Congressional Committee. The Justice Department claimed that Congress had no authority to do so.

This appears to be an unprecedented move. From what I have gleaned, it appears that, since the founding of the republic, the Executive Branch has never tried to deny Congress the right to call a witness who happens to be in Federal prison. Ever.

The Justice Department claimed, I am not making this up, that they were worried for the safety of the members of Congress when the prisoner was testifying.

What did this beast of a man do that would make him such a threat?

He used other people's identities to falsely claim tax refunds from the IRS. With a computer.

I guess he's just too dangerous for the US Marshal Service to handle. Despite the fact that Marshal Service has brought dozens other felons to testify before Congress and were able to keep them from causing mayhem. Maybe none of them were of dangerous computer identity thieves. I don't know.

Cripes. Will the Bush regime stop at nothing to prevent any shred of oversight?

I happen to be reading "The Lucifer Effect", by Philip Zimbardo, the guy who ran the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 where a bunch of students were randomly selected to be either guards or prisoners and within six days the experiment had to be terminated because the guards were abusing the prisoners. His thesis, in large part, is that without oversight almost anyone, even the most normal person, can be induced by circumstances to commit evil acts.

And yet the Bushies think that the Executive Branch of the government of the most powerful nation in the world should be run in complete secrecy with no oversight...

Food for thought.