|
Banned
|
(I know this is "too long"....too complicated. I didn't make up the details. <b>Your president is a criminal...an enemy of consitutional government and of our bill of rights. If you read nothing else in this post, please read the excerpt from the Feb. 6, 2006 Newsweek article, and the highlighted areas in the April 6, 2006 senate hearing, as well as everything written by Marty Lederman, in the 3 linked pieces inside the senate hearing transcript.....PLEASE...it's more important than who got voted off American Idol and Simon's reaction to that vote....)
....roachboy, none of Comey's (in his sworn testimony....)"revelations" on May 15, were "new", they were revealed in Febraury, 2006:
Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11079547/site/newsweek/
<b>Domestic Spying: Bush Appointees Revolt</b>
They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for it. A NEWSWEEK investigation.
By Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
<b>Feb. 6, 2006 issue</b> - James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed. Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt, appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual passage. Comey thanked "people who came to my office, or my home, or called my cell phone late at night, to quietly tell me when I was about to make a mistake; they were the people committed to getting it right—and to doing the right thing—whatever the price. These people," said Comey, "know who they are. Some of them did pay a price for their commitment to right, but they wouldn't have it any other way."
One of those people—a former assistant attorney general named Jack Goldsmith—was absent from the festivities and did not, for many months, hear Comey's grateful praise. In the summer of 2004, Goldsmith, 43, had left his post in George W. Bush's Washington to become a professor at Harvard Law School. Stocky, rumpled, genial, though possessing an enormous intellect, Goldsmith is known for his lack of pretense; he rarely talks about his time in government. In liberal Cambridge, Mass., he was at first snubbed in the community and mocked as an atrocity-abetting war criminal by his more knee-jerk colleagues. ICY WELCOME FOR NEW LAW PROF, headlined The Harvard Crimson.
They had no idea. Goldsmith was actually the opposite of what his detractors imagined. For nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004, he had been the central figure in a secret but intense rebellion of a small coterie of Bush administration lawyers. Their insurrection, described to NEWSWEEK by current and former administration officials who did not wish to be identified discussing confidential deliberations, is one of the most significant and intriguing untold stories of the war on terror.
These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. <h3>Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law.</h3> They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men.
The rebels were not whistle-blowers in the traditional sense. ......
.....Addington was particularly biting with Goldsmith. During a long struggle over the legality of the August 2002 torture memo, Addington confronted Goldsmith, according to two sources who had heard accounts of the conversation: "Now that you've withdrawn legal opinions that the president of the United States has been relying on, I need you to go through all of OLC's opinions [relating to the war on terror] and let me know which ones you still stand by," Addington said.
Addington was taking a clever dig at Goldsmith—in effect, accusing him of undermining the entire edifice of OLC opinions. But he was not making a rhetorical point. Addington began keeping track of opinions in which he believed Goldsmith was getting wobbly—carrying a list inside his suit pocket.
Goldsmith was not unmoved by Addington's arguments, say his friends and colleagues. He told colleagues he openly worried that he might be putting soldiers and CIA officers in legal jeopardy. He did not want to weaken America's defenses against another terrorist attack. But he also wanted to uphold the law. Goldsmith, known for putting in long hours, went to new extremes as he reviewed the OLC opinions. Colleagues received e-mails from him at all hours of the night. His family—his wife, 3-year-old son and newborn baby boy—saw him less and less often. Sometimes he would take his older boy down to the Justice Department's Command Center on Saturdays, just to be near him.
By June 2004, the crisis came to a head when the torture memo leaked to The Washington Post. Goldsmith was worn out but still resolute. He told Ashcroft that he was formally withdrawing the August 2002 torture memo. With some prodding from Comey, Ashcroft again backed his DOJ lawyers—though he was not happy to engage in another battle with the White House. Comey, with Goldsmith and Philbin at his side, held a not-for-attribution background briefing to announce that the Justice Department was disavowing the August 2002 torture memo. At the same time, White House officials held their own press conference, in part to counter what they saw as Comey's grandstanding. A fierce behind-the-scenes bureaucratic fight dragged on until December, when the OLC issued a new memo that was hardly to the taste of human-rights activists but contained a much more defensible (and broader) definition of torture and was far less expansive about the power of the president to authorize coercive interrogation methods. The author of the revised memo, senior Justice Department lawyer Daniel Levin, fought pitched battles with the White House over its timing and contents; yet again, Comey's intervention was crucial in helping Levin and his allies carry the day.
By then, Goldsmith was gone from Justice. He and his wife (who is a poet) and two children had moved to Cambridge, where Goldsmith had taken a job on the Harvard Law faculty. Other dissenting lawyers had also moved on. Philbin, who had been the in-house favorite to become deputy solicitor general, saw his chances of securing any administration job derailed when Addington, who had come to see him as a turncoat on national-security issues, moved to block him from promotion, with Cheney's blessing; Philbin, who declined to comment, was planning a move into the private sector. Levin, whose battles with the White House took their toll on his political future as well, left for private practice. (Levin declined to comment.) Comey was working for a defense contractor.
But the national security/civil liberties pendulum was swinging. Bellinger, who had become legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, began pushing, along with lawyers in the Pentagon, to roll back unduly harsh interrogation and detention policies. After the electronic eavesdropping program leaked in The New York Times in December 2005, Sen. Arlen Specter announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee would hold hearings that will start next week. The federal courts have increasingly begun resisting absolutist assertions of executive authority in the war on terror. After Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, pleaded not guilty to perjury charges in the Plame leak case, Addington took Libby's place. He is still a force to be reckoned with in the councils of power. And he still has the ear of the president and vice president; last week Bush was out vigorously defending warrantless eavesdropping. But, thanks to a few quietly determined lawyers, a healthy debate has at last begun.
|
(If you read the entire preceding article, <b>consider that Cheney chose Addington to succeed Scooter Libby....</b>)
Just over a month after the February, 2006, democrats in the house tried to press Gonzales on the news report about the "revolt", and Gonzales claimed that it was not related to <b>That program.</b>
The problem since then was, that republicans who controlled all congressional committees, instead of providing oversight and demanding accountability and disclosure, instead provided political cover for the criminal acts of the executive branch. It was not until the election last November, in spite of this:
Quote:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/014185.php
(May 16, 2007 -- 09:57 PM EST // link)
More (from McClatchy ...)
Quote:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwash...//17236461.htm
The Justice Department last year considered firing two U.S. attorneys in Florida and Colorado, states where allegations of voter fraud and countercharges of voter intimidation have flown in recent years, congressional investigators have learned.
That brings to nine the number of battleground election states where the Bush administration set out to replace some of the nation's top prosecutors. In at least seven states, it now appears, U.S. attorneys were fired or considered for firing as Republicans in those states urged investigations or prosecutions of alleged Democratic voter fraud.
The two prosecutors who were targeted were Gregory Miller, the U.S. attorney for the northern district of Florida in Tallahassee, and Bill Leone, the former acting U.S. attorney for Colorado.
|
The other obvious point -- they're all swing states, which should come as no surprise since <h3>it's all of a piece. The bogus 'vote fraud' charges are voter suppression tactic aimed at keeping the level of minority voting down in close races.</h3>
|
<b>....voters managed to elect a democratic party congressional majority (by the slimmest of margins in the senate....and finally, congressional oversight committees chaired by democrats with subpoena power were able to pick up where this house committee hearing from April, 6, 2006, left off:</b>
Quote:
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:...lnk&cd=3&gl=us
<b>Page 1</b>
House Judiciary Committee Members’ Questions for Attorney General
Gonzales on the NSA Warrantless Surveillance Activity
Excerpted from April 6, 2006 testimony during the House Judiciary Committee General
Department of Justice Oversight Hearing.
Quote:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...n16346244/pg_1
House Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Department of Justice
Washingtonpost.com, April 6, 2006
.... And, Mr. Attorney General, would you please stand, raise you right hand, take the oath?
Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are giving before this committee today will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
Let the record show the witness answered it in the affirmative.
Mr. Attorney General, the floor is yours......
|
<b>SENSENBRENNER: Thank you very much, Mr. Attorney General.
The chair recognizes himself for five minutes for questions.
Mr. Attorney General, in early February, I sent to you an oversight letter requesting
detailed information on the NSA terrorist surveillance program.
The department's responses provided much substantive information on the legal basis for
the program. However, there was one question at the center of this committee's
jurisdiction over the program that was not answered adequately.
This question related to the legal debate preceding the implementation of this program,
and was prompted by reports that some high-level officials involved in the discussion
over the legality of the program who did not agree with its legal basis.
Your response in the letter was, quote, "The president sought and received the advice of
lawyers in the Department of Justice and elsewhere before the program was authorized
and implemented. The program was first authorized and implemented in October 2001."
I'd like to ask you the question again today, Mr. Attorney General, so hopefully you can
provide a more complete answer -- and there are five parts to the question.
First, please explain how the proposal for the program was reviewed before it was
authorized and initiated.
Second, who was included in this review prior to the program going into effect?
Third, what was the timeline of discussions that took place?
Fourth, when was the program authorized?
And fifth, was the program implemented in any capacity before receiving legal approval?
Thank you.</b>
GONZALES: Mr. Chairman, I don't know that I have all parts of your question. What I
can say is that...
SENSENBRENNER: I can help you if you have forgotten. <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NTQ/is_2006_April_6/ai_n16346244/pg_6">( Click to view 2nd scource of this transcript to verify autenticity )</a>
GONZALES: All right. The program was not -- was not -- implemented before the
president received legal advice regarding the scope of his authority to authorize this kind
of program.
GONZALES: The program was authorized by the president in October of 2001.
Mr. Chairman, the program implicates some very tough legal issues. It implicates the
requirements of the Fourth Amendment. It implicates FISA, which is a very complicated
statute -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It implicates the authorization to use
military force. And it implicates the president's inherent authority as commander in chief.
And when you have these kinds of issues to be discussed and analyzed by lawyers, you're
going to have good, healthy debate. We encourage good, healthy debate about tough
issues. That's how you get to the right answers.
What I can say is that there was a great deal of debate and discussion about the program.
The disagreement -- and there were some disagreements. Some of the disagreements have
been the subject of some newspaper publications.
<b>Page 2</b>
<h3>What I've testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee was that the disagreements that
have been the subject of newspaper stories did not relate to the program that the president
disclosed to the public in his radio address in December of 2005. It related to something
else. And I can't get into that, Mr. Chairman.</h3>
Quote:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/05/w...smith-and.html
<b>Thursday, May 17, 2007
What Was "The Program" Before Goldsmith and Comey?</b>
Marty Lederman
<b>"We're doing what?"</b>
That's a quotation from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?ei=5090&en=e32072d786623ac1&ex=1292389200&pagewanted=print">the original Risen & Lichtblau New York Times article</a> that broke the unlawful wiretapping story., attributed to "a senior government official [who] recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation."
What, indeed, was the nature of the "program" before Goldsmith, Comey and Ashcroft -- those notorious civil libertarian extremists -- called a halt to it, and threatened to resign if the President continued to break the law? And what was the nature and breadth of its legal justification? I am hardly alone in realizing that these are the most important questions arising from the recent Comey testimony. It's the question of the night, all over the Web. (When will the mainstream press catch on? And more importantly, as I asked in my last post -- When will the Congress insist on comprehensive and public hearings, both on this and on the legal support for the Administration's torture practices?)
Was it a full-bore data-mining program of some sort, akin to the TIA program that Congress had de-funded? (John Yoo suggests as much in his new book.) Something involving the FBI as well as the NSA (hence the central role of the FBI Director in the Comey narrative)? A program in which once a U.S. person was suspected of receiving a call from a suspected Al Qaeda individual, that U.S. person's calls were all monitored thereafter? These are among the theories receiving a good deal of speculation this evening. There's a lot of great stuff to read -- this is just the tip of the iceberg:.....
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/05/c...d-it-must.html
<b>Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Can You Even Imagine How Bad it Must Have Been?</b>
Marty Lederman
I want to put yesterday's incredible Comey testimony in some context, to demonstrate just how otherworldly this story is -- and what an extraordinary tale it tells about the nature of the officials who are running our government.....
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/09/s...-but-true.html
<b>Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Silver Linings (or, the Strange But True Fate of the Second (or was it the Third?) OLC Torture Memo)
</b>
Marty Lederman
Back in January I began posting on this blog about the law of interrogation and torture. What prompted me to do so was not an expertise or interest in that area of the law; nor was it even the infamous Office of Legal Counsel "Torture Memo" of August 1, 2002, which had been leaked to the public several months earlier. Instead, I was motivated to blog here because of a very promising development at the office in which I had previously worked—namely, the superseding OLC memo issued on December 30, 2004, eight days before my first post here.
In that first post, I tried to summarize the ways in which the second memo was a comprehensive, and thus fairly astonishing, repudiation of the first. Although I continued to have serious concerns with even the second memo, I emphasized that in issuing the latter memo, OLC had "taken a critically important step toward restoring the Office's reputation for providing rigorous and impartial legal advice: [T]he new memo's author—Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin—and other OLC attorneys who undoubtedly contributed to the careful and difficult work on the memo, deserve considerable praise (and, from those of us who revere the Office, sincere thanks for respecting many of the Office's best practices and traditions)." [Now is as good a time as any to repeat my initial disclosure: I worked as an Attorney-Advisor at OLC from 1994-2002, and I was still at the Office when it issued the 2002 Torture Opinion. I did not know anything about that Opinion, however—not even of its existence—until it became the subject of public debate in the summer of 2004, long after I had left OLC. Nothing in my posts here reflects any confidential information I may have learned while at OLC.]
Unfortunately, most of my subsequent torture-related posts here have been about more disturbing developments within, or documents emanating from, the Administration—disingenuous legal analysis; unprecedented assertions of Executive authority; dissembling, cicumlocution, and unwarranted secrecy on some of the most important public questions in the current war; etc. In order to devote more focused attention to teaching and ol'-fashioned dead-tree forms of writing, I've decided to take a break for a while from torture-related blogging. (I'll be happy to link to important documents as they're released; but I'll have to leave the parsing to others.)
Fortunately, a recent document disclosure provides an opportunity to break on a positive note. Those documents provide reason to think that perhaps OLC's institutional reversal began one year earlier than the December 2004 Levin torture memo—in December 2003, even prior to the revelation of the Abu Ghraib photos—when OLC repudiated yet another, even more far-reaching, memo in which the office had authorized legally dubious forms of interrogation. Moreover, the new documents suggest that the repudiation of OLC's conclusions might have been triggered by something as simple as a change in personnel at OLC—namely, the October 2003 confirmation of Jack Goldsmith to be the head of the office.
Some background is in order here, in order to explain why the December 2003 OLC reversal is so noteworthy:.....
|
SENSENBRENNER: One of the questions that was asked was: Who was included in the
review prior to the program being authorized?
GONZALES: Mr. Chairman, who is read into the program is a classified matter, so I
can't get into specific discussions about specifically who was involved in reviewing the
legal authorities for the president of the United States in authorizing this program.
What I can say is that lawyers throughout the administration were involved in providing
legal advice to the president.
<b>SENSENBRENNER: Mr. Attorney General, how can we discharge our oversight
responsibilities if every time we ask a pointed question we're told that the answer is
classified?</b>
Congress has an inherent constitutional responsibility to do oversight. We are attempting
to discharge those responsibilities. And I think that saying how the review was done and
who did the review is classified is stonewalling.
And if we were to properly determine whether or not the program was legal and funded --
because that's Congress' responsibility -- we need to have answers. And we're not getting
them.
GONZALES: Respectfully, Mr. Chairman, our analysis as to the legality of the program
is reflected in the 42-page white paper that was provided to the Congress.
Irrespective of who was involved in preparing that analysis, that analysis represents...
SENSENBRENNER: Respectfully, Mr. Attorney General, that's your white paper. We
read the white paper. We have legitimate oversight questions and we're told it's classified.
So we can't get to the bottom of this.
Maybe there ought to be some declassification involved.
CONYERS: There's no better illustration of the constitutional crisis we are in today than
the fact that the president is openly violating our nation's laws by authorizing the
National Security Agency to engage in warrantless surveillance of United States' citizens.
And, with all due respect, sir, the department has made the situation worse by virtue of a
series of far-fetched and constitutionally dangerous after-the-fact legal justifications that
you have proffered.
Who can seriously expect members of Congress to believe that the use-of-force
resolution that was authorized included domestic surveillance when you, yourself,
admitted, and I quote, "It would have been difficult, if not impossible," end quotations, to
amend FISA to provide the wiretap authority?
In terms of inherent constitutional authority, if the Supreme Court didn't let President
Truman use his authority to take over the steel mills during the Korean War in 1952, and
wouldn't let President Bush in 2005 use the authority to indefinitely hold enemy
combatants, it is hard to credibly argue that the court would permit unauthorized
domestic spying today.
Every member of this panel wants the Justice Department to listen in on communications
by terrorists. That's why we created a special FISA court and created, in addition, a 72-
<b>Page 3</b>
hour emergency exception to it, and made literally dozens of changes to FISA, at your
request, over the last five years.
But don't tell us that you don't have resources to protect our citizens' privacy by
completing the FISA paperwork, not when you have a budget of more than $22 billion
and 112,000 employees at your disposal.
And finally, Mr. Attorney General, if we're truly interested in combating terror in the 21st
century we must move beyond symbolic gestures and color-coded threat levels and begin
to make the hard choices needed to protect our great nation.
Let me suggest that if we really want to prevent terrorists from targeting our cities and
our citizens, we need to stand up to the gun lobby and keep guns out of the hands of
suspected terrorists.
If we really want to prevent bombings like those which have devastated London and
Madrid, we need to challenge the explosives industry to help us regulate sales of black
and smokeless powder.
If we want to protect our ports, our trains and railroads and other easy terrorist targets, we
need to stop passing new tax cuts for the wealthy and start fully funding our homeland
security needs and effectuate all of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations.
CONYERS: The reasons the terrorists hate us is because we respect the rights and
liberties of all our citizens and cherish the rule of law.
If we really want to defeat the terrorists, we should support and honor these (inaudible),
not cast them aside.
When we disobey our own laws, when our executive branch ignores Congress and
thumbs its nose at the courts -- which we've seen in this domestic spying program and
time and time again over the last five years -- we not only make our nation less free, we
make it less safe.
And thank you, Mr. Chairman......
<b>Page 7</b>
.....JACKSON LEE: And respectfully, General, my time is short: Could you answer the
question of whether there's domestic surveillance and what happened with the re-
districting case?
GONZALES: I appreciate it. I thought I heard your question to be whether or not can
you assure us that there has not been domestic surveillance.
What I can confirm is what the president disclosed to the American people. This is what
he authorized.
Can I tell you that mistakes have not happened? I can't give you assurances that the
operation has been operated perfectly. What I can tell you is that we have had the
inspector general of the NSA involved in this program. We have had the Office of
Oversight and Compliance out of NSA reviewing this program -- this is from the
inception.
There are monthly due-diligence meetings involved where the senior officials out at NSA
get together and talk about how the program is operating in order to ensure that the
program is operating in a way that's consistent with what the president has authorized.
That's their objective.
And I've been told by the lawyers at NSA and others at NSA: There has never been a
program at NSA that has had as much oversight and review than this program has.
BERMAN: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you, Mr. Attorney General, for being here.
I'm distressed by the administration's positions and your answers on this issue of this
electronic surveillance program that has come out.
<b>Page 8</b>
I noticed, in response to Mr. Conyers' question, you talked about the healthy debate
within the Justice Department. Mr. Delahunt found an article in Newsweek magazine
which describes that healthy debate.
BERMAN: A group of Justice Department lawyers involved in a rebellion basically
against lawyers centered in the Office of the Vice President, and with the
acknowledgement of the deputy attorney general at the time, led resistance against a
president who wanted virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror, <h3>demanding that the
White House stop using what they saw as far-fetched rationales for riding roughshod over
the law and the Constitution. These lawyers fought to bring government spying and
interrogation methods within the law.</h3>
The results of this was -- ostracized, denied promotions and otherwise retaliated against
for taking their positions.
<h3>GONZALES: So the story says, sir.
BERMAN: That's what the story says.</h3>
In response to Mr. Schiff's question, explain to me why my thinking is wrong here.
You're doing these things incidental to war. Mr. Schiff poses a question, if the president
at his discretion concludes that electronic surveillance of two persons in the United States
is incidental to the war on terror that we are fighting -- and that Congress would like to be
your partner on, and not simply a potted plant in this fight -- if the president decides in
his discretion that this is incidental to war and without simply, perhaps by informing a
few members of Congress, does he have the power, under your argument -- does he have
the authority under your argument to engage in that kind of surveillance...
GONZALES: Congressman...
BERMAN: ... without a warrant?
GONZALES: ... respectfully, we could spend all day talking about hypotheticals. What
I've outlined is...
BERMAN: Well, but your argument...
GONZALES: ... the framework that we would use in analyzing that question.
BERMAN: But the question isn't whether you're doing it, the question is whether you
have the authority to do it.
GONZALES: Well, again, you're asking me to provide a legal answer to a question, and
what I've given for you is the framework in which we would analyze...
BERMAN: The framework you've given -- there is a law about detention of people.
GONZALES: 4001-A.
BERMAN: Yes, there's a law about detention. The authorization for the use of force
trumps that law because the president feels that he has the powers incidental to engaging
that war to trump that law.
GONZALES: You're mischaracterizing...
BERMAN: To cite President Wilson -- what he did before the Supreme Court ever said
that surveilling conversations between private parties constituted an unreasonable search
and seizures, and before there was a FISA law -- is not an argument.
You should have at least the intellectual honesty, it seems to me, to explain why the
intervention of both the Supreme Court decisions on electronic surveillance and the
passage of a FISA law don't affect what President Wilson might or might not have done
or how he did it.
<b>Page 9</b>
No one wants you -- as Mr. Conyers said -- no one in this Congress wants you not to be
able to surveil even domestic parties who are suspected or for whom there's any
reasonable belief that they may be engaged or planning or participating in some way in
terrorist activities.
We want you to have that power.
We do think that part of this is having some third party check whether there's some
reasonable relationship between what the facts are and what you want to do.
BERMAN: That's all we're asking about.
And I just -- I find your notion that this is somehow solely within the executive's
prerogatives based on being incident to a war -- it makes the whole debate about the
Patriot Act ridiculous.
What are the standards? You come in and you admit last year that relevance should be a
standard for seizing business records. Why? If it's incidental to war in the mind of the
president, why are we spending time here playing around in something like a Young
Democratic or Young Republican convention with resolutions that have no meaning
when you have this inherent power that incidental to the power of the commander in
chief during war?
GONZALES: But, of course, sir, in that discussion about business records, we were
talking about business records of everyone for different circumstances. We were limited -
- focused on records relating to Al Qaida, our enemy in a time of war. So it's a much
different debate -- much, much different debate.
I don't what your -- your question....
|
.....and here is a background interpretation of why Ashcroft's hospital room was "rushed" by thugs Gonzales and Card, on the orders of thugs Cheney and Bush:
Quote:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003242.php
<b>The President's Secret Program: A Timeline</b>
By Paul Kiel - May 17, 2007, 10:50 AM
Ever since James Comey's testimony Tuesday, there's been a renewed burst of speculation about just what secret domestic surveilance program<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/16/senators-gonzales-nsa/">(s)</a> the administration has been running.
Marty Lederman over at Balkinization offers <a href="http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-was-program-before-goldsmith-and.html">a great rundown</a> of the best guesses about what the administration has been up to.
But Comey's testimony and new details <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/washington/17comey.html?ex=1337054400&en=70e5494fb76dcdd8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">in The New York Times</a> this morning mean that it's now possible to lay out a timeline of why all of this came to a head in March of 2004 when the program had been going on for more than two years at that point.
<b>A TPM Reader writes in to lay it all out:</b>
Quote:
We’re starting to see a timeline emerge on the confrontation between the White House and Justice on domestic spying.
The first date to mark on your calendar, I think, is October 3, 2003. That’s when the Senate confirms Jack L. Goldsmith as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. In June, with Goldsmith’s nomination before the senate, John Yoo had left his job as the deputy at OLC to return to his teaching gig at Boalt.
Fast forward to December 11, 2003, when Comey is confirmed as Deputy Attorney General. He immediately assumes a more aggessive posture than his predecessor, Larry Thompson. The Times reports this morning that “with Mr. Comey’s backing, Mr. Goldsmith questioned what he considered shaky legal reasoning in several crucial opinions, including some drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.”
But that was just the beginning. Thompson had not been authorized access to the details of the NSA program. But, reports the NYTimes, “Comey was eventually authorized to take part in the program and to review intelligence
material that grew out of it” (1/1/06). He set Goldsmith to the task of sorting through the program’s dubious legality. Goldsmith’s “review of legal memoranda on the N.S.A. program and interrogation practices became a source of friction between Mr. Comey and the White House,” the Times reports today. <b>And we know from Comey’s testimony that by “the White House,” we mean, principally, Dick Cheney and David Addington.</b>
Continued:
Up until this moment, Ashcroft had been signing off on the program every 45 days. That means his signature was last required in late January, shortly after Comey assumed his post, and perhaps even before he’d been authorized access to the program. Suddenly, the March 11 date comes into clearer focus. For the first time, trained and qualified attorneys within the Justice Department had conducted a careful review of the program. Comey took the evidence he had gathered to Ashcroft, as he testified on Tuesday: “A week before that March 11th deadline, I had a private meeting with the attorney general for an hour, just the two of us, and I laid out for him what we had learned and what our analysis was in this particular matter.” By the end of that meeting, Ashcroft and Comey had “agreed on a course of action,” to wit, that they “would not certify the program as to its legality.”
Thereupon follows the late-night drama that’s already been exhaustively chronicled. I’d simply note that one of the people in that hospital room was Goldsmith. <b>On March 11, the President made the determination that the program was appropriate and lawful, and reauthorized it without Justice signing off.</b>
On the morning of March 12, the president, faced with open revolt, backed down. The Times reported on what happened next last year: “The White House suspended parts of the program for several months and moved ahead with more stringent requirements on the security agency on how the program was used, in part to guard against abuses. The concerns within the Justice Department appear to have led, at least in part, to the decision to suspend and revamp the program, officials said. The Justice Department then oversaw a secret audit of the surveillance program” (01/01/06). Comey’s testimony refines that a little. He claims that it was a matter of weeks before the program was brought into compliance.
There’s a sad coda to this story. On June 17, 2004, Goldsmith announced his resignation after scarcely a year on the job.
What to make of this long narrative?
Simply this. The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected.
When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again.
So what were they fighting over? Who knows. But there’s certainly evidence to suggest that the underlying issue was was whether constitutional or statutory protections of civil liberties ought to be binding on the president in a time of war. The entire fight, in other words, was driven by the expansive notion of executive power embraced by Cheney and Addington. And here's the kicker - it certainly sounds as if the program was fairly easily adjusted to comply with the law. It wasn't illegal because it had to be; it was illegal because the White House believed itself above the law.
PS: There’s hope we’ll find out what was really going on. I’d highlight this portion of Specter’s remarks from the hearing: “Mr. Comey, it's my hope that we will have a closed session with you to pursue the substance of this matter further. Because your standing up to them is very important, but it's also very important what you found on the legal issue on this unnamed subject, which I infer was the terrorist surveillance program. And you're not going to comment about it. I think you could. I think you could even tell us what the legalisms were. Doesn't involve a matter of your advice or what the president told you, et cetera. But I'm going to discuss it with Senator Leahy later and see about pursuing that question to try to find out about it.”
And then Leahy, in response: “We will have a closed-door hearing on this. Senator Specter and I are about to have a briefing on aspects of this.” Can’t wait to hear what leaks out of that.
|
|
....and maybe....just maybe, Americans.... 60 million of who voted yesterday to determine which contestants would stay to compete in the talent competition on the "American Idol" TV Show...or go,
will regain accountability and checks and balances of their government, if, in addition to Comey's May 15 testimany, this is another encouraging sign:
Quote:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/novak/3...OVAK17.article
<b>Immunity request has some in GOP worried</b>
Senior Rove aide called to testify in one of Waxman's many investigations
May 17, 2007
BY ROBERT NOVAK Sun-Times Columnist
On the day presidential senior adviser Karl Rove administered a tongue-lashing to an Illinois Republican congressman, disturbing news about his former executive assistant was spread on Capitol Hill. GOP House members learned that Susan Ralston is requesting immunity to testify before Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman's investigating committee.
She was an assistant to Jack Abramoff, Washington super-lobbyist and Republican fund-raiser, in 2001 when he recommended her for the top job with Rove as he entered the White House. As Rove's gatekeeper, Ralston became special assistant to the president and the highest-ranking Filipino American in the administra- tion. For Waxman, she is a link between the disgraced, imprisoned Abramoff and Rove, a principal political target of the Democratic-controlled Congress.
As House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman, Waxman is tirelessly making life miserable for a confused administration during George W. Bush's last two years as president. Bringing down Rove ranks high on Grand Inquisitor Waxman's agenda. But Ralston appears to be seeking immunity for self-protection rather than nailing her former boss.
Rove, architect of two victorious presidential campaigns, was in Democratic cross hairs long before Republicans lost control of Congress. Democrats were bitterly disappointed when he was not indicted in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case. They have targeted Rove in investigating the dismissal of U.S. attorneys, and the Waxman committee sought testimony from Ralston about Rove's e-mails. She was deposed behind closed doors last month prior to her request for immunity......
|
Last edited by host; 05-17-2007 at 09:01 AM..
|