Someone Needs to Give Jane Harman an Award for This

by Glenn Greenwald
by Glenn Greenwald

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one of the most shameless and absurd spectacles to appear in Washington in some time:  the self-righteous, self-obsessed rage expressed by Blue Dog Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) – leading defender of Bush's illegal domestic eavesdropping programs – upon learning that one of her conversations had been legally eavesdropped upon as part of a criminal investigation into the actions of a suspected Israeli agent.  Over the weekend, Harman (along with half of the U.S. Congress) appeared at the AIPAC conference and continued her new anti-eavesdropping crusade, actually vowing to lead an investigation into potential eavesdropping abuses to assure that it would never happen again.  Atrios notes just some of the points that makes her behavior incomparably shameless.

But all that said, nothing can top this quote from Harman, uttered near the end of an AIPAC panel discussion after she realized that nobody was going to ask her about this matter and thus brought it up herself.  As reported by a pro-AIPAC blogger in attendance:

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said she is "not a victim" but a "warrior on behalf of our Constitution and against abuse of power" . . . .

But almost 40 minutes into the discussion Sunday morning, as moderator Dan Senor started to wrap up and asked the final question of the four panelists, no one had even mentioned the issue.  So Harman took the matter into her own hands – winding up with a spirited defense of the Constitution and AIPAC.

Jane Harman is a warrior on behalf of the Constitution and against abuse of power – that's the same Jane Harman who tried to bully The New York Times out of writing about Bush's illegal spying program, who succeeded in pressuring them not to publish their story until after Bush was re-elected, who repeatedly proclaimed the program to be "legal and necessary" once it was revealed, who called the whistle-blowers "despicable", who went on Meet the Press and expressed receptiveness to a criminal investigation of The New York Times for publishing the story, who led the way in supporting the Fourth-Amendment-gutting and safeguard-destroying FISA Amendments Act of 2008, and who demanded that telecoms be retroactively immunized for breaking multiple laws by allowing government spying on their customers without warrants of any kind.

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