Why Is Everybody OK With A Torture-Loving FBI Director?

J. Edgar Hoover would fucking love this guy.

Rick Perlstein at The Nation:

Some of us have been shouting from mountaintops, others from molehills: James Comey, currently sailing smoothly through Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for confirmation as chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was:

(a) in charge, and proudly so, of a “terrorism” case that began with a detention without charges, continued with made-up and spurious charges, and ended with a conviction won against an American whose treatment during confinement (on the American mainland) turned his brain to jello;

(b) general counsel for a defense contractor while it was busy hushing up a whistleblower who exposed $24 billion contract that they were building vessels for the Coast Guard, on a $24 billion contract, that buckled and leaked on the high seas;

(c) as of three months ago on the board of a bank, in charge of cleaning up their reputation after it paid a $1.92 billion fine for laundering drug money from Mexico; and

(d) the man who, as former FBI agent Colleen Rowley pointed out this morning in The New York Times, “sign[ed] off on most of the worst of the Bush administration’s legal abuses and questionable interpretations of federal and international law. He ultimately approved the C.I.A.’s list of “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including waterboarding, which experts on international law consider a form of torture.

Lots of shouting going on. But not much listening.

SNIP

Comey, it seems, is not a story even to those who generally give a shit.

It’s not like we’re totally dead to civil liberties, and the FBI’s violation of same; I have reason to know that for a fact. Compare to my piece from last month on Comey, which was tweeted out forty-three times, a piece I wrote last year on the FBI’s abuse of infiltrators and entrapment techniques in “terror” cases, which was tweeted 1,865 times. Now, that’s an important subject, also—one that senators should, but won’t, grill Comey on, too. But it’s not 433 times more important!

I asked a friend why she thought the entrapment piece caught on, and the Comey exposé hasn’t. I noted that the earlier piece focused on the infiltration and arrest of Occupiers. She replied, “I think that’s it. Occupy = nice white kids. Torture/surveillance = scary brown muslims.”

Is that it? Has our dull civic deadness come to that? We’re exhausted, that’s for sure. Notes one of my Facebook friends, “When our civic values are attacked from a few sides, some people are capable of outrage and will fight back. When they are attacked from all sides, over and over again, over a prolonged period of time, people lose the ability to react.”

“Eventually some administration will nominate John Yoo Attorney General and nobody will even deeply sigh.”

“Comatose, Mr. Perlstein, because we have come to accept that what we think no longer matters.”

Read the whole thing.