Though our Constitution's Bond and Gagged and They've Chained it to a Chair - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

host · 05-15-2007, 09:19 AM

The thread title is a variation of another outrage, taken from the lyrics of a CS & N protest song inspired by the trial of the "Chicago 8" in the late '60's.....
<center><img src="http://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/images/BobbySealeBound_000.jpg"></center>

My reaction to the following is akin to my reaction so long ago, to the order of Judge Julius Hoffman to restrain Black Panther leader, Booby Seale, in his courtroom, in a manner similar to the illustration, above.

The following comes from James Comey, known mainly, until today, as the acting US Attorney General and American patriot who appointed his friend, US Attorney for So. Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald, to investigate the Plame CIA leak:

Quote:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/0...ary-committee/

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003221.php
Comey Details White House Attempt to Force Approval of Secret Program
By Paul Kiel - May 15, 2007, 11:31 AM

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey detailed the desperate late night efforts by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card to get the Justice Department to approve a secret program -- the warrantless wiretapping program.

According to Comey's testimony this morning, only when faced with resignations by a number of Justice Department officials including Comey, his chief of staff, Ashcroft's chief of staff, Ashcroft himself and possibly Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, did the White House agree to make changes to the program that would satisfy the requirements of the Justice Department to sign off on it (Comey refused to name the program, but it's apparent from the context and prior reports that this was the warrantless wiretapping program).

The events took place in March of 2004, when the program was in need of renewal by the Justice Department. When then-Attorney General John Ashcroft fell ill and was hospitalized, Comey became the acting-Attorney General.

The deadline for the Justice Department's providing its sign-off of the program was March 11th (the program required reauthorization every 45 days). On that day, Comey, then the acting AG, informed the White House that he "would not certify the legality" of the program.

According to Comey, he was on his way home when he got a call from Ashcroft's wife that Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card were on their way to the hospital*. Comey then rushed to the hospital (sirens blaring) to beat them there and thwart "an effort to overrule me."

After Comey arrived at the hospital with a group of senior Justice Department officials, Gonzales and Card arrived and walked up to Ashcroft, who was lying barely conscious on his hospital bed. "Gonzales began to explain why he was there, to seek his approval for a matter," Comey testified. But Ashcroft rebuffed Gonzales and told him that Comey was the attorney general now. "The two men turned and walked from the room," said Comey.

A "very upset" Andrew Card then called Comey and demanded that he come to the White House for a meeting at 11 PM that night.

After meeting with Justice Department officials at the Justice Deaprtment, Comey went to the White House with Ted Olson, then the Solicitor General to the White House. He brought Olson along, Comey said, because he wanted a witness for the meeting.

But Card didn't let Olson enter and Comey had a private discussion with Card. This discussion, Comey testified, was much "calmer." According to Comey, Card was concerned about reports that there were to be large numbers of resignations at Justice Department. Gonzales entered with Olson and the four had an apparently not very fruitful discussion.

The program was reauthorized without the signature of the attorney general. Because of that, Comey said, he prepared a letter of resignation. "I believed that I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that Justice Department said had no legal basis."

At this point, according to Comey, a number of senior Justice Department officials, including Ashcroft, were prepared to resign.

When Comey went in on that Friday, March 12th to give the White House its customary morning briefing, Comey said that the president pulled him aside. They had a 15 minute private meeting, the content of which Comey would not divulge. But Comey did suggest at the conclusion of that conversation that the president speak with FBI Director Mueller. And so that meeting followed. Following that meeting, Comey said that Mueller brought word that the Justice Department was to do whatever was "necessary" to make the program into one that the Justice Department could sign off on.

Comey said that it took two to three weeks for the Justice Department to do the analysis necessary to have the program approved. <h3>During that time, the program went on without Justice Department approval. </h3>

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/po...67f18f&ei=5070
.....The domestic eavesdropping program was publicly disclosed in mid-December by The New York Times. President Bush, in acknowledging the existence of the program in a televised appearance two weeks ago, said that tight controls had been imposed over the surveillance operation and that the program was reviewed every 45 days by top government officials, including at the Justice Department.

"The review includes approval by our nation's top legal officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the president," Mr. Bush said, adding that he had personally reauthorized the program's use more than 30 times since it began. He gave no indication of any internal dissent over the reauthorization.......

But following the Justice Department's suggested changes, the Justice Department (either Ashcroft or Comey) did sign off on the program.

More on this soon.

*Update: A commenter below rightly points out that, according to Comey, the call to Ashcroft's wife that Gonzales and Card were on their way to the hospital came from the president himself.

Update: Here's The New York Times' story last January first reporting word of Gonzales' bedside visit. Comey's, obviously, is a much fuller account.

Update: After hearing Comey's "shocking" account, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that it made him wonder anew how Gonzales could remain as the attorney general, since he evidently had so little respect for the rule of law.

Two things....more "evidence" that Ted Olson is truly fucking "everywhere", in this era.....from being at R. Emmett Tyrell's side during the conceiving and execution of the "Arkansas Project", against Clinton, to being the "fixer" in court in the Florida 2000 vote recount,to being the sole source of the 9/11 "boxcutters" story, to telling the SCOTUS that he could think of many examples where it was appropriate for the US government to lie to the American people, to being a principle in the law firm defending Rep. Jerry Lewis for his role in the Randy Cunningham scandal, the firm that just hired away the US Attorney in LA, Deborah Yang, with a $1.5 million bonus, who was investigating Jerry Lewis!

I think that it is pathetic that Comey had to muster Ted Olson that night they killed the US Constitution at the White House, to be his "witness", on behalf of the American people.....

If what Comey testified is a true account of what happened, do we continue to do nothing, take to the streets in a huge demonstration of protest and peaceful civil disobedience, followed by an overwhelming wave of popular sentiment that results in impeachment hearings against Bush.....or....yawn...what channel is the game on, honey?

Quote:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/014146.php
(May 15, 2007 -- 01:24 PM EDT)

Tony Snow on Comey testimony describing nighttime Gonzales/Card visit to hospital to get sign off on illegal wiretap program from half-conscious John Ashcroft: Comey's got "splashy testimony. Good for him."

dc_dux · 05-15-2007, 09:53 AM

Host...the House passed an amendment (245-178) in the Intel Appropriations bill last week that prohibits wiretapping without a FISA warrant:

Quote:

An amendment to the House Intelligence Reauthorization Bill by Representatives Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) states that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) shall be the exclusive means by which domestic electronic surveillance for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence information may be conducted, and makes clear that this applies until specific statutory authorization for electronic surveillance, other than as an amendment to FISA, is enacted.

"Congress has signaled that it will not allow the president to continue the National Security Agency’s illegal eavesdropping," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. "Passage of the Schiff/Flake amendment is Congress drawing a line in the sand. This amendment reaffirms that FISA is the law and it needs to be followed."
...
The Bill ends plans by the Bush Administration that would give the NSA the freedom to pry into the lives of ordinary Americans.

The ACLU noted that, despite many recent hearings about "modernization" and "technology neutrality," the administration has not publicly provided Congress with a single example of how current FISA standards have either prevented the intelligence community from using new technologies, or proven unworkable for the agents tasked with following them.

"We applaud Congressmen Schiff and Flake for their work to uphold the rule of law," said Michelle Richardson, ACLU Legislative Consultant. "Today is the first move towards Congress growing a backbone. We hope that the Senate will follow their lead and not be swayed by the administration and Department of Justice’s unconstitutional attempts to eviscerate FISA."
http://www.pressesc.com/01178899253_...vedropping_NSA

If the Senate includes a similar amendment, which is likely, Bush will have to veto the entire Intel funding bill.

host · 05-15-2007, 09:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

Host...the House passed an amendment (245-178) in the Intel Appropriations bill last week that prohibits wiretapping without a FISA warrant:

If the Senate includes a similar amendment, which is likely, Bush will have to veto the entire Intel funding bill.

Thank you dc_dux, I wasn't aware of that. If Bush vetoes the final bill that comes out of the conference committee and gets sent to the White House, and....even if he doesn't....in view of what Comey testified, my question from the OP remains unanswered:

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

......If what Comey testified is a true account of what happened, do we continue to do nothing, take to the streets in a huge demonstration of protest and peaceful civil disobedience, followed by an overwhelming wave of popular sentiment that results in impeachment hearings against Bush.....or....yawn...what channel is the game on, honey?......

Or, is this a sign of the beginning of protests that will restore accountability, and end the assault on our Consitutional Bill of Rights?

Quote:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...cize-gonzales/
May 14, 2007, 6:14 pm
Law School Classmates Criticize Gonzales

By David Stout

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who has been under fire from politicians in both parties, was assailed today by several dozen of his classmates at Harvard Law School, Class of 1982.

“As lawyers, and as a matter of principle, we can no longer be silent about this administration’s consistent disdain for the liberties we hold dear,” those classmates said in a letter to Mr. Gonzales today. “Your failure to stand for the rule of law, particularly when faced with a president who makes the aggrandized claim of being a unitary executive, takes this country down a dangerous path.”

The letter urged President Bush and Mr. Gonzales “to relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law we all learned to love many years ago.” But it stopped short of explicitly calling on Mr. Gonzales to step down.

The letter was delivered on the eve of another hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the dismissals of eight United States attorneys. (Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty announced today that he would resign. He cited family reasons, but he also had delivered controversial testimony earlier this year that one federal prosecutor had been let go to make way for a protege of Karl Rove, fueling Democratic charges of cronyism.)

Democrats have said the dismissals may have been for cynical political reasons, while Mr. Gonzales and his defenders have said they were proper. But whatever the reasons for the firings, Mr. Gonzales has acknowledged that they were handled badly.

President Bush has repeatedly expressed faith in the attorney general, who has vowed to stay on as long as he thinks he can be effective.

It was clear from the letter that his classmates’ unhappiness with Mr. Gonzales predated the controversy over the fired prosecutors. They accused him, for instance, of “sweeping aside the Geneva Conventions to justify torture” and generally trampling on civil liberties.

Republicans often complain that the majority of lawyers have Democratic sympathies, and one of the signers, Eric Schneiderman, is a Democratic state senator from New York City. But David M. Abromowitz, a Boston lawyer and one of the signers, and another Boston lawyer who signed the letter, Matthew E. Epstein, said the lawyers who signed the letter were a varied bunch.

Mr. Gonzales’s Harvard classmate critics are to further express their dissatisfaction on Tuesday in a quarter-page advertisement in The Washington Post.

Mr. Abromowitz said there was “a range of views” among the critics on whether the letter should call on Mr. Gonzales to step aside. As for why it did not, Mr. Abromowitz said, “If he left, it wouldn’t solve the problem.”

The letter was the result of a spontaneous, unorganized effort that arose at the class’s recent reunion, Mr. Abromowitz said. He said about 75 of the approximately 500 members of the class were contacted, and that more than 50 signed the letter.

Quote:

http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/...ssma.html#more
Originally posted: May 15, 2007
Harvard classmates diss Gonzales

Posted by Andrew Zajac at 12:40 p.m. CDT

Sometimes that old school tie chafes.

More than 50 of Alberto Gonzales' Harvard Law School classmates have <b>taken the unusual step of buying a quarter page ad in today's Washington Post to publicly woodshed him for "your cavalier handling of our freedoms time and again" as White House counsel and AG.</b>

The ad lists Gonzales authorship of memos questioning the relevance of the Geneva Conventions, support for warrantless domestic spying and limits on habeas corpus protections and the politicized firings of U.S. attorneys as evidence of a dismissive approach to the rule of law.

Chicago attorney and Harvard Law Class of '82 secretary Jeff Smith offered some details of the effort in a statement_and_followon_email.

Grounds for Impeachment?

Quote:

http://thinkprogress.org/comey-testimony/

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, 5/15/07, Senate Judiciary Committee

COMEY: In the early part of 2004, the Department of Justice was engaged — the Office of Legal Counsel, under my supervision — in a reevaluation both factually and legally of a particular classified program. And it was a program that was renewed on a regular basis, and required signature by the attorney general certifying to its legality.

And the — and I remember the precise date. The program had to be renewed by March the 11th, which was a Thursday, of 2004. And we were engaged in a very intensive reevaluation of the matter.

And 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.

And at the end of that hour-long private session, he and I agreed on a course of action. And within hours he was stricken and taken very, very ill…

SCHUMER: (inaudible) You thought something was wrong with how it was being operated or administered or overseen.

COMEY: We had — yes. We had concerns as to our ability to certify its legality, which was our obligation for the program to be renewed.

The attorney general was taken that very afternoon to George Washington Hospital, where he went into intensive care and remained there for over a week. And I became the acting attorney general.

And over the next week — particularly the following week, on Tuesday — we communicated to the relevant parties at the White House and elsewhere our decision that as acting attorney general I would not certify the program as to its legality and explained our reasoning in detail, which I will not go into here. Nor am I confirming it’s any particular program. That was Tuesday that we communicated that.

The next day was Wednesday, March the 10th, the night of the hospital incident. And I was headed home at about 8 o’clock that evening, my security detail was driving me. And I remember exactly where I was — on Constitution Avenue — and got a call from Attorney General Ashcroft’s chief of staff telling me that he had gotten a call…

SCHUMER: What’s his name?

COMEY: David Ayers.

That he had gotten a call from Mrs. Ashcroft from the hospital. She had banned all visitors and all phone calls. So I hadn’t seen him or talked to him because he was very ill.

And Mrs. Ashcroft reported that a call had come through, and that as a result of that call Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to the hospital to see Mr. Ashcroft.

SCHUMER: Do you have any idea who that call was from?

COMEY: I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don’t know that for sure. It came from the White House. And it came through and the call was taken in the hospital.

So I hung up the phone, immediately called my chief of staff, told him to get as many of my people as possible to the hospital immediately. I hung up, called Director Mueller and — with whom I’d been discussing this particular matter and had been a great help to me over that week — and told him what was happening. He said, I’ll meet you at the hospital right now.

Told my security detail that I needed to get to George Washington Hospital immediately. They turned on the emergency equipment and drove very quickly to the hospital.

I got out of the car and ran up — literally ran up the stairs with my security detail.

SCHUMER: What was your concern? You were in obviously a huge hurry.

COMEY: I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to that.

SCHUMER: Right, OK.

COMEY: I was worried about him, frankly.

And so I raced to the hospital room, entered. And Mrs. Ashcroft was standing by the hospital bed, Mr. Ashcroft was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn’t clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off.

SCHUMER: At that point it was you, Mrs. Ashcroft and the attorney general and maybe medical personnel in the room. No other Justice Department or government officials.

COMEY: Just the three of us at that point.

I tried to see if I could help him get oriented. As I said, it wasn’t clear that I had succeeded.
<h3>
I went out in the hallway. Spoke to Director Mueller by phone. He was on his way. I handed the phone to the head of the security detail and Director Mueller instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances. And I went back in the room.</h3>

I was shortly joined by the head of the Office of Legal Counsel assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith, and a senior staffer of mine who had worked on this matter, an associate deputy attorney general.

So the three of us Justice Department people went in the room. I sat down…

SCHUMER: Just give us the names of the two other people.

COMEY: Jack Goldsmith, who was the assistant attorney general, and Patrick Philbin, who was associate deputy attorney general.

I sat down in an armchair by the head of the attorney general’s bed. The two other Justice Department people stood behind me. And Mrs. Ashcroft stood by the bed holding her husband’s arm. And we waited.

And it was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. They came over and stood by the bed. <b>They greeted the attorney general very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there — to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was — which I will not do.

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general.

SCHUMER: But he expressed his reluctance or he would not sign the statement that they — give the authorization that they had asked, is that right?

COMEY: Yes.

And as he laid back down, he said, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. There is the attorney general, and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left.

The two men did not acknowledge me. They turned and walked from the room. And within just a few moments after that, Director Mueller arrived. I told him quickly what had happened. </b>He had a brief — a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general and then we went outside in the hallway.

SCHUMER: OK.

Now, just a few more points on that meeting.

First, am I correct that it was Mr. Gonzales who did just about all of the talking, Mr. Card said very little?

COMEY: Yes, sir.

SCHUMER: OK.

And they made it clear that there was in this envelope an authorization that they hoped Mr. Ashcroft — Attorney General Ashcroft would sign.

COMEY: In substance. I don’t know exactly the words, but it was clear that’s what the envelope was.

<b>SCHUMER: And the attorney general was — what was his condition? I mean, he had — as I understand it, he had pancreatitis. He was very, very ill; in critical condition, in fact.

COMEY: He was very ill. I don’t know how the doctors graded his condition. This was — this would have been his sixth day in intensive care. And as I said, I was shocked when I walked in the room and very concerned as I tried to get him to focus.</b>

SCHUMER: Right.

OK. Let’s continue. What happened after Mr. Gonzales and Card left? Did you have any contact with them in the next little while?

COMEY: While I was talking to Director Mueller, an agent came up to us and said that I had an urgent call in the command center, which was right next door. They had Attorney General Ashcroft in a hallway by himself and there was an empty room next door that was the command center.

<b>And he said it was Mr. Card wanting to speak to me. I took the call. And Mr. Card was very upset and demanded that I come to the White House immediately.

I responded that, after the conduct I had just witnessed, I would not meet with him without a witness present.

He replied, What conduct? We were just there to wish him well.

And I said again, After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness. And I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States.</b>

SCHUMER: That would be Mr. Olson.

COMEY: Yes, sir. Ted Olson.

Until I can connect with Mr. Olson, I’m not going to meet with you.

<b>He asked whether I was refusing to come to the White House. I said, No, sir, I’m not. I’ll be there. I need to go back to the Department of Justice first.</b>

And then I reached out through the command center for Mr. Olson, who was at a dinner party. And Mr. Olson and the other leadership of the Department of Justice immediately went to the department, where we sat down together in a conference room and talked about what we were going to do.

And about 11 o’clock that night — this evening had started at about 8 o’clock, when I was on my way home. At 11 o’clock that night, Mr. Olson and I went to the White House together.

SCHUMER: Just before you get there, you told Mr. Card that you were very troubled by the conduct from the White House room (ph), and that’s why you wanted Mr. Olson to accompany you.

Without giving any of the details — which we totally respect in terms of substance — just tell me why. What did you tell him that so upset you? Or if you didn’t tell him just tell us.

COMEY: I was very upset. I was angry. I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me. I thought he had conducted himself, and I said to the attorney general, in a way that demonstrated a strength I had never seen before. But still I thought it was improper.

And it was for that reason that I thought there ought to be somebody with me if I’m going to meet with Mr. Card.

SCHUMER: Can you tell us a little bit about the discussion at the Justice Department when all of you convened? I guess it was that night.

COMEY: I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to go into the substance of it. We discussed what to do. I recall the associate attorney general being there, the solicitor general, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, senior staff from the attorney general, senior staff of mine. And we just — I don’t want to reveal the substances of those…

SCHUMER: I don’t want you to reveal the substance.

They all thought what you did — what you were doing was the right thing, I presume.

COMEY: I presume. I didn’t ask people. But I felt like we were a team, we all understood what was going on, and we were trying to do what was best for the country and the Department of Justice. But it was a very hard night.

SCHUMER: OK.

And then did you meet with Mr. Card?

COMEY: I did. I went with Mr. Olson driving — my security detail drove us to the White House. We went into the West Wing. Mr. Card would not allow Mr. Olson to enter his office. He asked Mr. Olson to please sit outside in his sitting area. I relented and went in to meet with Mr. Card alone. We met, had a discussion, which was much more — much calmer than the discussion on the telephone.

After — I don’t remember how long, 10 or 15 minutes — Mr. Gonzales arrived and brought Mr. Olson into the room. And the four of us had a discussion.

SCHUMER: OK.

And was Mr. — were you and Mr. Card still in a state of anger at one another at that meeting, or is it a little calmer, and why?

COMEY: Not that we showed.

SCHUMER: Right.

COMEY: It was much more civil than our phone conversation, much calmer.

SCHUMER: Why? Why do you think?

COMEY: I don’t know. I mean, I had calmed down a little bit. I’d had a chance to talk to the people I respected. Ted Olson I respect enormously.

SCHUMER: Right. OK.

Was there any discussion of resignations with Mr. Card?

COMEY: Mr. Card was concerned that he had heard reports that there were to be a large number of resignations at the Department of Justice.

SCHUMER: OK. OK.

And the conversations, the issue, whatever it was, was not resolved.

COMEY: Correct. We communicated about it. I communicated again the Department of Justice’s view on the matter. And that was it.

SCHUMER: Right.

And you stated that the next day, Thursday, was the deadline for reauthorization of the program, is that right?

COMEY: Yes, sir.

<b>SCHUMER: OK.

Can you tell us what happened the next day?

COMEY: The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality. And I prepared a letter of resignation, intending to resign the next day, Friday, March the 12th.

SCHUMER: OK.</b>

And that was the day, as I understand it, of the Madrid train bombings.

COMEY: Thursday, March 11th, was the morning of the Madrid train bombings.

SCHUMER: And so, obviously, people were very concerned with all of that.

COMEY: Yes. It was a very busy day in the counterterrorism aspect.

SCHUMER: Yet, even in light of that, you still felt so strongly that you drafted a letter of resignation.

COMEY: Yes.

SCHUMER: OK.

And why did you decide to resign? COMEY: I just believed…

SCHUMER: Or to offer your resignation, is a better way to put it?

<b>COMEY: I believed that I couldn’t — I couldn’t stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis. I just simply couldn’t stay.</b>

SCHUMER: Right. OK.

Now, let me just ask you this. And this obviously is all troubling.

As I understand it, you believed that others were also prepared to resign, not just you, is that correct?

COMEY: Yes.

SCHUMER: OK.

Was one of those Director Mueller?

COMEY: I believe so. You’d have to ask him, but I believe so.

SCHUMER: You had conversations with him about it.

COMEY: Yes.

SCHUMER: OK.

How about the associate attorney general, Robert McCallum?

COMEY: I don’t know. We didn’t discuss it.

SCHUMER: How about your chief of staff?

COMEY: Yes. He was certainly going to go when I went.

SCHUMER: Right.

How about Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff?

COMEY: My understanding was that he would go as well.

SCHUMER: And how…

COMEY: I should say…

SCHUMER: Please.

COMEY: … to make sure I’m accurate, I…

SCHUMER: This is your surmise, not…

COMEY: Yes.

I ended up agreeing — Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff asked me something that meant a great deal to him, and that is that I not resign until Mr. Ashcroft was well enough to resign with me. He was very concerned that Mr. Ashcroft was not well enough to understand fully what was going on. And he begged me to wait until — this was Thursday that I was making this decision — to wait til Monday to give him the weekend to get oriented enough so that I wouldn’t leave him behind, was his concern.

SCHUMER: And it was his view that Mr. Ashcroft was likely to resign as well?

COMEY: Yes.

SCHUMER: So what did you do when you heard that?

COMEY: I agreed to wait. I said that what I would do is — that Friday would be last day. And Monday morning I would resign.

SCHUMER: OK.

Anything else of significance relevant to this line of questioning occur on Thursday the 11th, that you can recall?

COMEY: No, not that I recall.

SCHUMER: Thank you.

Now, let’s go to the next day, which was March 12. Can you tell us what happened then?

COMEY: I went to the Oval Office — as I did every morning as acting attorney general — with Director Mueller to brief the president and the vice president on what was going on on Justice Department’s counterterrorism work.

We had the briefing. And as I was leaving, the president asked to speak to me, took me in his study and we had a one-on-one meeting for about 15 minutes — again, which I will not go into the substance of. It was a very full exchange. And at the end of that meeting, at my urging, he met with Director Mueller, who was waiting for me downstairs.

He met with Director Mueller again privately, just the two of them. And then after those two sessions, we had his direction to do the right thing, to do what we…

SCHUMER: Had the president’s direction to do the right thing?

COMEY: Right.

We had the president’s direction to do what we believed, what the Justice Department believed was necessary to put this matter on a footing where we could certify to its legality.

And so we then set out to do that. And we did that.

SCHUMER: OK.

So let me just (inaudible) — this is an amazing story, has an amazing pattern of fact that you recall. […] So in sum, it was your belief that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card were trying to take advantage of an ill and maybe disoriented man to try and get him to do something that many, at least in the Justice Department, thought was against the law? Was that a correct summation?

COMEY: I was concerned that this was an effort to do an end-run around the acting attorney general and to get a very sick man to approve something that the Department of Justice had already concluded — the department as a whole — was unable to be certified as to its legality. And that was my concern.

SCHUMER: OK.

And you also believe — and you had later conversations with Attorney General Ashcroft when he recuperated, and he backed your view?

COMEY: Yes, sir.

SCHUMER: Did you ever ask him explicitly if he would have resigned had it come to that?

COMEY: No.

SCHUMER: OK.

But he backed your view over that what was being done, or what was attempting to being done, going around what you had recommended, was wrong, against the law?

COMEY: Yes.

And I already knew his view from the hour we had spent together going over it in great detail a week before the hospital incident.

SCHUMER: Yes.

And the FBI director, Mueller, backed your view over that of Mr. Gonzales as well — is that right? — in terms of whether the program could continue to be implemented the way Counsel Gonzales wanted it to be. The only reason I hesitate is it was never Director Mueller’s job or position to be drawing a legal conclusion about the program; that he was very supportive to me personally. He’s one of the finest people I’ve ever met and was a great help to me when I felt a tremendous amount of pressure and felt a bit alone at the Department of Justice.

But it was not his role to opine on the legality.

SCHUMER: How about Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel? Did he opine on the legality?

COMEY: Yes. He had done a substantial amount of work on that issue. And it was largely OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel’s work, that I was relying upon in drawing my — in making my decision.

SCHUMER: OK. Just two other questions.

Have you ever had the opportunity to recall these events on the record in any other forum?

COMEY: No.

SCHUMER: OK. And…

COMEY: I should…

SCHUMER: Go ahead.

COMEY: I was interviewed by the FBI and discussed these events in connection with a leak investigation the FBI was conducting.

SCHUMER: And you gave them these details then.

COMEY: Yes.

SCHUMER: Thank you.

COMEY: But not — by forum I’ve never testified about it.

SCHUMER: And after you stood your ground in March of 2004, did you suffer any recriminations or other problems at the department?

COMEY: I didn’t. Not that I’m aware of.

....so loquitur, you suggest that we should all calm down....not over react, when we have the testimony of the man who was acting Attorney General of the US, on a night in 2004, when he was so intimidated by the president's "men", Gonzales and Card, that...anticipating their imminent arrival to the critically ill John Ashcroft's room that he was standing in, with Ahscroft's wife, he found it necessary to do this:

Quote:

........"...I went out in the hallway. Spoke to Director Mueller by phone. He was on his way. I handed the phone to the head of the security detail and Director Mueller instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances. And I went back in the room."........

...as he anticipated that Gonzales and Andrew Card were coming, on behalf of Bush, to demand that Ashcroft sign an opinion that was contradicting a provision of our constitutional Bill of Rights, in the opinion of both Ashcroft and Comey, and that Gonzales and Card were potentially determined enough to physically remove Comey from Ashcroft's hospital intensive care unit room, if he tried to prevent their coercion of Ashcroft.

Then, a little later, when Comey refused to meet alone with Card, Comey said that Card lied, disputing what Comey himself had just witnessed Gonzales and Card attempting to do in Ashcroft's room, in front of Comey.

Comey is better acquainted with these thuggish enemies of the state than I am, and they initimidated him.....<h3>did he over react?</h3> He kept his mouth shut about this for nearly three years, and discussed what happened only when he was under oath, being questioned in a senate committee hearing, today.

Elphaba · 05-15-2007, 03:40 PM

Quote:

He kept his mouth shut about this for nearly three years, and discussed what happened only when he was under oath, being questioned in a senate committee hearing, today.

The only reason that he was testifying under oath now, vs. three years ago is that Congressional oversight has only recently become active again. Under the present administration, whistle blowers have found themselves under attack without protective recourse. It is not for me to criticize Comey's courage, given the extent Bushco took to discredit Wilson. (Please note that I do not extend an ounce of sympathy to that bastard, Tenant).

Each day brings more good news that Congressional oversight is alive and well and challenging the excesses of this administration. For example, the Military Commissions Act is going to be addressed soon.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051407R.shtml

tecoyah · 05-16-2007, 04:42 AM

Why do I feel I just read a rejected script of the "West Wing"....written by the folks that pen "24"?

Likely, Gonzales has no recollection of any of this.

host · 05-16-2007, 10:52 AM

This forum seems moribund since late last week. Since I suspect that we are closer to an imminent constitutional crisis between congress and the executive branch than we have been since Nixon ordered his Attorney General, Elliott Richardson, to fire the special prosecutor who was zeroing in on executive branch illegalities, it is all the more disappointing that there is no "in depth" discussion of much of anything....here at TFP Politics.....

Following the recap article on what was reported during the Nixon era, I posted a reader's opinion from another site, that interprets what James Comey testified to yesterday, and the larger implications of what it meant, in a much clearer and briefer way than I could attempt to present it. It explains my reaction to Comey's testimony and how it influenced me to start and title this thread.

I think that all of the Bush Cheney agenda....from installing Karl Rove in a white house office in 2001, blending the political and administrative functions of the executive branch, into one partisan mechanism bent on consolidating power and keeping it permanently, is what everything from hiring Abramoff's Susan Ralston as an aid to Rove and Bush, to the fake "voter fraud" prosecutions by DOJ prosectuors, and the firing of the US Attorneys who resisted, to the disregard for the FISA court, <b>is all about.</b> Controlling lobbyists campaign contributions, (K Street Project) discouraging the oppostion vote,(Phoney DOJ Vote Fraud "task force", inspired by the concerns of Bush and Rove, and the flawed Felon Voter Purge Lists from Bush's bro, in FLA....) and illegal surveillance of political adversaries,(NSA telephone bill monitoring, Illegal abuse of FISA court, illegal monitoring of domestic calls and telephone records of news reporters) using a tight knit group of trusted republicans brought by Bush from Texas (Meiers and Gonzales), and via the hiring of 150 Regent University alumni by Kay Cole James, along with whatever trusted political operatives linked to Rove, Norquist, Abramoff, and the Council for National Policy, that could be mustered and unleashed on the formerly less organized, less religiousized and less republicanized federal government.

<b>IF you disagree with the reader's "take" on the Comey senate testimony, what do you think what he said, implies, and if you do agree, what do you think Sen. Patrick Leahy and his committee should do, in response? Since it is usually left to the Attorney General to determine if further investigation is indicated, it looks like we're fucked, there. All that seems open as an option to get to the bottom of what Comey was describing, are impeachment hearings in the houes, IMO.</b>

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...s/102173-2.htm

Nixon Forces Firing of Cox; Richardson, Ruckelshaus Quit
President Abolishes Prosecutor's Office; FBI Seals Records

By Carroll Kilpatrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 21, 1973; Page A01

In the most traumatic government upheaval of the Watergate crisis, President Nixon yesterday discharged Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus.

The President also abolished the office of the special prosecutor and turned over to the Justice Department the entire responsibility for further investigation and prosecution of suspects and defendants in Watergate and related cases.

Shortly after the White House announcement, FBI agents sealed off the offices of Richardson and Ruckelshaus in the Justice Department and at Cox's headquarters in an office building on K Street NW.

An FBI spokesman said the agents moved in "at the request of the White House."

Agents told staff members in Cox's office they would be allowed to take out only personal papers. A Justice Department official said the FBI agents and building guards at Richardson's and Ruckelshaus' offices were there "to be sure that nothing was taken out."

Richardson resigned when Mr. Nixon instructed him to fire Cox and Richardson refused. When the President then asked Ruckelshaus to dismiss Cox, he refused, White House spokesman Ronald L. Ziegler said, and he was fired. Ruckelshaus said he resigned.

Finally, the President turned to Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, who by law becomes acting Attorney General when the Attorney General and deputy attorney general are absent, and he carried out the President's order to fire Cox. The letter from the President to Bork also said Ruckelshaus resigned.

These dramatic developments were announced at the White House at 8:25 p.m. after Cox had refused to accept or comply with the terms of an agreement worked out by the President and the Senate Watergate committee under which summarized material from the White House Watergate tapes would be turned over to Cox and the Senate committee.

In announcing the plan Friday night, the President ordered Cox to make no further effort to obtain tapes or other presidential documents.

Cox responded that he could not comply with the President's instructions and elaborated on his refusal and vowed to pursue the tape recordings at a televised news conference yesterday.

That set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the departure of Cox and the two top officials of the Justice Department and immediately raised prospects that the President himself might be impeached or forced to resign.

In a statement last night, Cox said: "Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people."

The action raised new questions as to whether Congress would proceed to confirm House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to be Vice President or leave Speaker of the House Carl Albert (D-Okla.) next in line of succession to the highest office in the land.

Richardson met at the White House in the late afternoon with Mr. Nixon and at 8:25 p.m. Ziegler appeared in the White House press room to read a statement outlining the President's decisions.

The President discharged Cox because he "refused to comply with instructions" the President gave him Friday night through the Attorney General, Ziegler said.

Furthermore, Ziegler said, the office of special prosecutor was abolished and its functions have been turned over to the Department of Justice.

The department will carry out the functions of the prosecutor's office "with thoroughness and vigor," Ziegler said.

Mr. Nixon sought to avoid a constitutional confrontation by the action he announced Friday, the press secretary said, to give the courts the information from the tapes which the President had considered privileged.

That action was accepted by "responsible leaders in the Congress and in the country," Ziegler commented, but the special prosecutor "defied" the President's instructions "at a time of serious world crisis" and made it "necessary" for the President to discharge him.

Before taking action, Ziegler said, the President met with Richardson to instruct him to dismiss Cox, but Richardson felt he could not do so because it conflicted with the promise he had made to the Senate, Ziegler said.

After Richardson submitted his resignation, the President directed Ruckelshaus to dismiss Cox. When Ruckelshaus refused to carry out the President's directive, he also was "discharged," Ziegler said. The President's letter to Bork said Ruckelshaus resigned......

Quote:

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003232.php

Trust the Washington press corps to lunge for the process story, and ignore the substance.

<b> When the warrantless wiretap surveillance program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form the program took in that period, although some details have been leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off on it.</b> In fact, Comey reveals, <b>the entire top echelon of the Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required.</b> They just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running such a program.

This wasn't an emergency program; more than two years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies. It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been saying, for weeks, that they would withhold
approval. But at the eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of the program, unaltered.

Continued:

I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over, it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the process, he’s not doing it for kicks. <h3>Similarly, when the President sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man, and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being stubborn.</h3>

It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the rules under which the government can obtain physical search warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story, but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional investigation that we ought to be having.

Quote:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...7/05/15/comey/

Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday May 16, 2007 06:16 EST
Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal

(updated below - updated again - Update III)

.....Comey repeatedly stated that it appeared that Ashcroft was not even oriented to his surroundings. Compare that to Tony Snow's disgustingly dismissive defense yesterday of the behavior of Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales: "Trying to take advantage of a sick man -- because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn't work?"

But more revealingly, just consider what it says about this administration. Not only did Comey think that he had to rush to the hospital room to protect Ashcroft from having a conniving Card and Gonzales manipulate his severe illness and confusion by coercing his signature on a document -- behavior that is seen only in the worst cases of deceitful, conniving relatives coercing a sick and confused person to sign a new will -- <h3>but the administration's own FBI Director thought it was necessary to instruct his FBI agents not to allow Comey to be removed from the room.

Comey and Mueller were clearly both operating on the premise that Card and Gonzales were basically thugs.</h3> Indeed, Comey said that when Card ordred him to the White House, Comey refused to meet with Card without a witness being present, and that Card refused to allow Comey's summoned witness (Solicitor General Ted Olson) even to enter Card's office. These are the most trusted intimates of the White House -- the ones who are politically sympathetic to them and know them best -- and they prepared for, defended themselves against, the most extreme acts of corruption and thuggery from the President's Chief of Staff and his then-legal counsel (and current Attorney General of the United States).

Does this sound in any way like the behavior of a government operating under the rule of law, which believes that it had legal authority to spy on Americans without the warrants required for three decades by law?

<b>....and now, one of those "thugs" is himself the Attorney General, and if the president having his back is an indication, he must be doin' a heckofa job,"....right?</b>

**Watch the video of James Comey's Senate tesitmony describing the hospital "showdown":</b>

Quote:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/014173.php

(May 16, 2007 -- 01:42 PM EDT)

As discussed, here's the video of yesterday's testimony by former Deputy AG James Comey. Their section of questioning where Comey discusses the hospital showdown is about 25 minutes. We've tried to edit it down by cutting out a few relatively non-essential passages. And we got it down to about 15 minutes.

We'll be posting a shorter version with just a few key passages a bit later.

Elphaba · 05-16-2007, 04:47 PM

If Congress chooses to investigate Gonzales, would he not have to recuse himself and request a independent prosecutor? Ashcroft did much the same at the time of the Plame affair which led to the assignment of Patrick Fitzgerald.

I agree that Bush intends to keep Gonzales in place to prevent congressional investigations into the Administration, but Gonzales *must* recuse himself if he is the focus of an investigation. The resignation of the DOJ's #2 adds a new dimension to the US Attorney firings, in addition to the testimony of Gooding. Comey represents just one of the dog's cornering this rat.

host · 05-17-2007, 04:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elphaba

If Congress chooses to investigate Gonzales, would he not have to recuse himself and request a independent prosecutor? Ashcroft did much the same at the time of the Plame affair which led to the assignment of Patrick Fitzgerald.

I agree that Bush intends to keep Gonzales in place to prevent congressional investigations into the Administration, but Gonzales *must* recuse himself if he is the focus of an investigation. The resignation of the DOJ's #2 adds a new dimension to the US Attorney firings, in addition to the testimony of Gooding. Comey represents just one of the dog's cornering this rat.

.....snooze on....fellow TFP-ers....I'm puttin' the popcorn in the microwave and turnin' on the TeeVee....OUTRAGE ?....<h6>....what outrage ?</h6>

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews
No Dissent on Spying, Says Justice Dept.

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 17, 2007; Page A06

<h2>The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program.</h2>

<h1>The department's affirmation of Gonzales's remarks raised fresh questions about the nature of the classified dispute,</h1> which former U.S. officials say led then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and as many as eight colleagues to discuss resigning.

Testifying Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Comey declined to describe the program. He said it "was renewed on a regular basis" and required the attorney general's signature.

He said a review by the Justice's Office of Legal Counsel in spring 2004 had concluded the program was not legal.

Comey said he and the others were prepared to resign when the White House renewed the program after failing to get a certification of its legality -- first from him and later from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, while Ashcroft was ill and heavily sedated at George Washington University Hospital.

Gonzales, testifying for the first time in February 2006 about the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which involved eavesdropping on phone calls between the United States and places overseas, told two congressional committees that the program had not provoked serious disagreement involving Comey or others.

"None of the reservations dealt with the program that we are talking about today," Gonzales said then.

Four Democratic senators sent a letter to Gonzales yesterday asking, "do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it," prompting the Justice Department's response.

Quote:

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/16/...-gonzales-nsa/

Senators Question Whether Gonzales Lied Under Oath About NSA Wiretapping Program

feingold4.jpgA group of senators led by Russ Feingold (D-WI) sent Alberto Gonzales a letter today highlighting an apparent lie Gonzales told while testifying under oath last year about the NSA warrantless spying program.

As ThinkProgress noted this morning, Gonzales said in 2006 that there was no “serious disagreement about the program,” a claim that flies in the face of the extraordinary testimony delivered by former Justice official James Comey yesterday. In the letter, the senators ask Gonzales if he stands by his claim:

You testified last year before both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the <b>House Judiciary Committee about this incident. On February 6, 2006, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, you were asked whether Mr. Comey and others at the Justice Department had raised concerns about the NSA wiretapping program. You stated in response that the disagreement that occurred was not related to the wiretapping program confirmed by the President in December 2005, which was the topic of the hearing. …</b>

We ask for your prompt response to the following question: In light of Mr. Comey’s testimony yesterday, <h3>do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it?</h3>

As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Peter Swire wrote this morning, Gonzales’s testimony raises two possibilities:

1) Comey’s objections apply to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that Gonzales was discussing. If so, then Gonzales quite likely made serious mis-statements under oath. And Gonzales was deeply and personally involved in the meeting at Ashcroft’s hospital bed, so he won’t be able to claim “I forgot.”

2) Perhaps Comey’s objections applied to a different domestic spying program. That has a big advantage for Gonzales — he wasn’t lying under oath. But then we would have senior Justice officials confirming that other “programs” exist for domestic spying, something the Administration has never previously stated.

Read the full letter <a href="http://websrvr80il.audiovideoweb.com/il80web20037/ThinkProgress/2007/document.pdf">HERE.</a>

....and, don't the revelations from Comey, two days ago..... make this seem like a deliberate falsehood:

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0060320-7.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
March 20, 2006

President Discusses War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom

......Q Could you explain why living within the legislation that allowed your administration to get a warrant from a secret court within 72 hours after putting in a wiretap wouldn't be just as effective?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I appreciate the question. He's talking about the terrorist surveillance program that was -- created quite a kerfuffle in the press, and I owe an explanation to. Because our people -- first of all, after September the 11th, I spoke to a variety of folks on the front line of protecting us, and I said, is there anything more we could be doing, given the current laws? And General Mike Hayden of the NSA said there is. The FISA law -- he's referring to the FISA law, I believe -- is -- was designed for a previous period, and is slow and cumbersome in being able to do what Mike Hayden thinks is necessarily -- called hot pursuit.

And so he designed a program that will enable us to listen from a known al Qaeda, or suspected al Qaeda person and/or affiliate, from making any phone call outside the United States in, or inside the United States out -- with the idea of being able to pick up quickly information for which to be able to respond in this environment that we're in. I was concerned about the legality of the program, and so I asked lawyers -- which you got plenty of them in Washington -- (laughter) -- to determine whether or not I could do this legally. And they came back and said, yes. That's part of the debate which you're beginning to see.

<b>I fully understood that Congress needed to be briefed. And so I had Hayden and others brief members of the Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, House members and senators, about the program. The program is under constant review. I sign a reauthorization every -- I'm not exactly sure -- 45 days, say. It's something like that. In other words, it's constantly being reviewed. There's an IG that is very active at the NSA to make sure that the program stays within the bounds that it was designed.</b>

I fully understand people's concerns about it, but ours is a town, by the way, in Washington, where when you don't connect the dots, you're held up to Congress, and when you do connect the dots, you're held up to Congress. I believe what I'm doing is constitutional, and I know it's necessary. And so we're going to keep doing it. (Applause.)

roachboy · 05-17-2007, 06:14 AM

this is alarming....it turns out that 3-dland is suddenly a flutter of activity so i am still sorting this out, trying to fashion linkages between the multiple areas of problematic information...the general issues at stake in this seem to be mired in a swamp of detail at the moment, and the reporting of it seems for some reason to mirror this, as if there is something reassuring about burying the logic in this manner. so i am still sorting. i'll probably work out something to say soon, but it is not so easy yet.....

Elphaba · 05-17-2007, 08:33 AM

A month or so ago I made an attempt to identify the numerous investigations that Congress had underway and the best I was able to find were the Senate and House hearings schedules by committee.

There is a tremendous amount of work going on to reverse this administration's attack on our constitution, and what is published in various news sources represents a small fraction of that work. My outrage was expressed with each new discovery of the actions of this imperial presidency. Today, I experience hope and renewed confidence in the balance of powers spelled out by our constitution.

Of course, Gonzales is a liar. Has anyone thought otherwise since it was learned that he paved the way for torture?

host · 05-17-2007, 08:52 AM

(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......

dc_dux · 05-17-2007, 09:01 AM

This latest example of unethical or illegal practices at DoJ goes beyond Gonzales lies or failed memory and directly back to Bush's desk at the WH.

Not only did Bush evidently authorize Gonzales to subvert the process to get Ashcroft to approve the warrantless wiretapping from his hospital bed, but Bush later blocked at internal DoJ investigation by denying the necessary security clearance to the Office of Professional Responsibility (which was revealed at a hearing last year):

Quote:

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that...President Bush personally put an end to an internal Justice Department investigation into the role DOJ lawyers played in designing the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program. During a Department of Justice oversight hearing, committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) asked Gonzales why officials from the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility could not obtain necessary security clearances from the NSA. Gonzales told the panel that "the president of the United States makes the decision." DOJ officials said in May that the internal investigation had been dropped.
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchas...probe-into.php
***

Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.

Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0315nj1.htm

Host ...I agree that there are numerous issues and/or actions by Bush/Cneney that warrant an impeachment inquiry, with this "abuse" being the latest. But as to your latest plea:

Quote:

....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

The fact remains, that neither a majority of the public or, more importantly, a majority of the Congress, have reached the conclusion that an impeachment inquiry is in the best interest of the country.

And unless or until even more compelling evidence of potential criminal behavior is uncovered, impeachment is just not gonna happen. We can argue whether that is right or wrong, but the fact is that it is a polical reality.

****
In the meatime, for those who have forgotten the lies, ethical lapses, and other activities that have become what is without doubt the most scandalous six years in my lifetime, Slate has an "illustrated guide:

Having a hard time keeping track of all 10,000 GOP scandals? Between fired U.S. attorneys, deleted RNC e-mails, sexually harassed pages, outed CIA agents, and tortured Iraqi prisoners—not to mention the warrantless wiretapping, plum defense contracts, and golf junkets to Scotland—you could be forgiven for losing track of which congressman or Bush administration flunky did which shady thing. Renzi—now, was that the guy with the skeezy land deal? Or the woman Paul Wolfowitz promoted?

We're not saying that Democrats never do anything shady. (Cash-stuffed freezers come to mind.) But as the saying goes, with great power come great opportunities to screw up royally. And if your memory is as hazy as ours, you could probably use a handy refresher.

http://slate.com/features/2007/scand...candalmap.html

(or text version: http://www.slate.com/id/2165980/)

host · 05-17-2007, 09:58 AM

<h1>Hey</h1>.....<h8>Decider...</h8>

If you think that you can get through this with a bullshit answer like this one,
you've got another "think" coming.....I guarantee it, you disgrace to the office of Potus:

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20070517.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 17, 2007

President Bush Participates in Joint Press Availability with United Kingdom Prime Minister Blair
Rose Garden

....Q Thank you, sir. There's been some very dramatic testimony before the Senate this week from one of your former top Justice Department officials, who describes a scene that some senators called "stunning," about a time when the wireless -- when the warrantless wiretap program was being reviewed. Sir, did you send your then Chief of Staff and White House Counsel to the bedside of John Ashcroft while he was ill to get him to approve that program? And do you believe that kind of conduct from White House officials is appropriate?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Kelly, there's a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn't happen; I'm not going to talk about it. It's a very sensitive program. I will tell you that, one, the program is necessary to protect the American people, and it's still necessary because there's still an enemy that wants to do us harm.

And therefore, I have an obligation to put in place programs that honor the civil liberties of the American people; a program that was, in this case, constantly reviewed and briefed to the United States Congress. And the program, as I say, is an essential part of protecting this country.

And so there will be all kinds of talk about it. As I say, I'm not going to move the issue forward by talking about something as highly sensitive -- highly classified subject. I will tell you, however, that the program is necessary.

Q Was it on your order, sir?

PRESIDENT BUSH: As I said, this program is a necessary program that was constantly reviewed and constantly briefed to the Congress. It's an important part of protecting the United States. And it's still an important part of our protection because there's still an enemy that would like to attack us. No matter how calm it may seem here in America, an enemy lurks. And they would like to strike. They would like to do harm to the American people because they have an agenda. They want to impose an ideology; they want us to retreat from the world; they want to find safe haven. And these just aren't empty words, these are the words of al Qaeda themselves.

And so we will put in place programs <b>to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people, and programs that we constantly brief to Congress.</b>

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Hi, Tom.....

roachboy · 05-17-2007, 10:28 AM

thanks for no. 11 and 12....they were most helpful, folks.
at some levels, this is not surprising, given the legal philosophy that the administration appears to endorse.
but, like everyone else, what i am stuck on is: what exactly the fuck was/is happening in the context of this surveillance program?
apart from that, the situation as we now know it is clear enough so long as i stay within the general parameters of the surveillance narrative.

gonzales really has no choice at this point but to resign it seems to me.
he appears to have committed perjury.

sorting still, so please indulge a couple confusions/questions:

no. 1:
host: given that you have been tracking this more closely than i have been able to---the linkages between the abramoff scandal and this one? could you lay out how you see them as interlocking or reference older materials that you have put up that might clarify this please?
this may be more an aide-de-mémoire than anything else...but i'd appreciate it (now that i have more time than i have over the past couple months, i'd like to get back up to speed on this)

confusion/question no. 2:
is there anything beyond symmetry that would lead one to think that the same kind of blurring of boundaries between partisan political actions and abuse of power that is obvious in the firings of the various prosecutors carries over into the black hole at the center of this matter?
there are obvious overlaps of players.
there are obvious consistencies of actions.
but these have the status of symmetries so far as i can tell.

what all this looks like is really problematic: an attempt on the part of the administration to fundamentally alter the system of governance to the advantage of what amounts of a quasi-dictatorial executive branch made possible (a) by the figleaf of this idiotic "war on terror" and (b) by the republican controlled congress which seems to have conducted itself in a manner that is really insupportable.

the other piece that is missing--though i suspect i might be able to fill in ths blank logically--but to avoid that temptation for the moment--is the goal.
what is being presented here via the press accounts is largely pitched as ad hoc creeping of institutional advantage by the executive, enabled by the above. but if i understand this correctly, it seems that it could be also understood as aspects of a concerted project. again, i think i have an idea of what it might be--but how would you characterize it?

dc_dux · 05-17-2007, 11:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

what all this looks like is really problematic: an attempt on the part of the administration to fundamentally alter the system of governance to the advantage of what amounts of a quasi-dictatorial executive branch made possible (a) by the figleaf of this idiotic "war on terror" and (b) by the republican controlled congress which seems to have conducted itself in a manner that is really insupportable.

the other piece that is missing--though i suspect i might be able to fill in ths blank logically--but to avoid that temptation for the moment--is the goal.
what is being presented here via the press accounts is largely pitched as ad hoc creeping of institutional advantage by the executive, enabled by the above. but if i understand this correctly, it seems that it could be also understood as aspects of a concerted project. again, i think i have an idea of what it might be--but how would you characterize it?

Here is my quick take on it.

There has been a 6+ year coodinated effort by the White House and Republcan Congress to attempt to guarantee a long-term Repub majority BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

On the Congressional side, it was through the K Street Project, coordinated by Tom Delay and Rick Santorum. Here is how CREW describes it at its most basic level:

Republicans "basically made it a pay-to-play system," says Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "It wasn't just that they said to fire Democratic lobbyists and only hire Republicans, it was, 'We won't talk to you if you aren't giving us money.'"

Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta says the effort went far beyond a job bank. "In many cases, companies and trade associations were threatened with adverse government consequences if they hired Democrats," he says.
http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/23127

On the White House side, the process was to politicize the Executive Branch to levels never before seen in order to potentially influence Congressional elections in key states, again by any means necessary.

Through a coordinated WH and DoJ effort, US Attorneys were encouraged to investigate "voter fraud" even without evidence of such fraud, in key states (MO, OH, AZ, CO, WA, etc) where Repub Congressional seats may be vulnerable (or Dem seat achieveable). The idea being that such investigations, even without indictments or charges, would potentially inhibit minority voters. When some US Attorneys failed to make it a priority, they were fired.

Other White House actions include the Rove "PowerPoint" presentations to political appointees at numerous agencies during work hours (a violation of the Hatch Act), again with the purpose of using those agencies to benefit vulnerable Repub members of Congress.

There you have it....my short and sweet analysis (with more to come when I have time)

host · 05-17-2007, 11:18 AM

rb, it seems to be a coordinated effort, by any means necessary, to continue the "baby steps" that were evident in the Iran/Contra scandal.... it's an extra legal, slow motion coup d'etat....obtaining and keeping power by a combination of enlisting convicts from the Reagan era, like Elliott Abrams, and a "bus load" of neocons/JINSA/PNAC A-holes, "income producers" like Abramoff to finance and navigate the legislative "agenda",
(the "pro-business" portion that was not related to Cheney's energy corporations buddies), combined with an alliance with christian fundy CNP billionaires, (the Kay Coles James - Regent University executive branch hiring campaign) and Rove's "merged" college republican legacy (Abramoff, Reed, Norquist....), with the transformation of the DOJ into a vote suppression mechanism that has it's roots in Rove's strategizing, Jeb Bush's Florida felons voter purge list, and harkens back to Lee Atwater's recitation of Phillip's refinement of the "Southern Strategy" that put Nixon in office.....

....along the way....since the early '60's when the republicans discovered that they could neutralize the black vote and lure in the southern white voters forced by the Johnson legislation to end segregation....lure in voters who had no common interests with the wealthy white, "Rockefeller republicans" (of which Nixon was one....) they obviously ran up politic debts that needed to be paid back to wealthy benefactors and corporations, that seem to create a need for an everlasting, imperialistic "war footing", that also nurtures an excuse for transfer of the power formerly reserved for the people, into a "war pressidency", run "behind the curtain" by his "deciderness", Dick Cheney.

They seem to have tried to practice a "no sleazy republican operative left behind", strategy, reaching at least as far back as into the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations.... Rove from 1972's "CREEP", Rummy and Cheney from Nixon/Ford, John Roberts and Ted Olson from the Reagan legal braintrust, as well as all of the contra-players, and circa 70's college republican leaders who were willing to sign on in 2000.

Notice how few of Bush '41 inner circle, besides Cheney, who are still around. It's a politically obsessed, power corrupted cabal enabled by race baiting vote supression, and exploitation of the christian fundies....(it's hard to see if the CNP is slave to these fucks, or their master....or maybe both.)

I see it as all of the motives and players and amassed playbook of dirty tricks, in a "blow off top", not unlike a stock mania or a housing bubble. They've come together via Jeb's 2000 felon's purge list and the partisan SCOTUS ruling facilitated by Reagan and Bush '41 appointments, and the last six years are the results of all of them coming together, working in a common interest to exclude the majority of Americans....the lower 85 percent, from power.

....and now, unless they attempt to execute an actual armed coup, we might be witnessing the execution of a Waxman/Pelosi/Schumer/Leahy plan to take all of it back, for the rest of us.....if you believe in fairy tales, I guess !

The ideology that financed it, until Abramoff and Delay/Norquist/Reed/Rove figured out how to get folks like casino owning (or wanting) Indian tribes and Marianas sweatshop operators to pay the "to play"....selling legislative initiatives and regulatory agency oversight to them....came from the Coors and the John Olin and Richard Mellon Scaife fortunes, Prince auto parts, the Ocean Spray cranberry fortune, etc. mixed with the Tim LaHay rapturists, Bob Jones/Falwell.Robertson, CIA's Irving Kristol and William F. Buckley Jr., snd all of the moths attracted the bright light of these misguided "John Bircher" billionaires....who built heritage foundation, AEI, and all of the other phony "think tanks" that, along with shill's like Buckley's nephew Bozell III, demonized the media to reverse Walter Cronkites perceived status as "most trusted man in America", facilitating Reagan's "noble war" message, enabling the new militarism that replaced the disdain for war and all things military of the late '70's.

With the mainstream media painted as a "liberal" "the other" kind of monster, the "think tanks", Bozell, and "townhall.com" and foxnews could be the new propaganda organs of this politcal monstrosity that we are only beginning to swat like a moth or squash like a roach.....because, when you look what they actaully offer to most Americans, are they, their methods, or their message and actual agenda, anything else but an insect like infestation, a plague of locusts?

Elphaba · 05-17-2007, 02:39 PM

Quote:

no. 1:
host: given that you have been tracking this more closely than i have been able to---the linkages between the abramoff scandal and this one? could you lay out how you see them as interlocking or reference older materials that you have put up that might clarify this please?
this may be more an aide-de-mémoire than anything else...but i'd appreciate it (now that i have more time than i have over the past couple months, i'd like to get back up to speed on this)

I have been following Host's research on Abramoff for a few years so I believe I can tie some of these relationships together.

Susan Ralston, who will be testifying before congress with immunity, is key to everything that Rove has influenced. This is huge in that all roads appear to lead to Rove and yet he has remained beyond reach. Ralston was the personal assistant to Abramoff who became Rove's assistant early in the administration. It is believed that she facilitated much of Abramoff's interests while working for Rove, and she is currently under investigation for extravagant gifts given by Abramoff. She is motivated by a desire to stay out of prison.

As Rove's assistant, Ralston has direct knowledge of Rove's many machinations, including the outing of Plame and the firing of US Attorneys. She may also have information concerning his election dirty tricks, compromises of the Hatch Act, and how Rove's emails went missing. This woman has the potential to take down the entire inner circle of the Bush Administration.

Do I believe in fairie tales? No, but I am always a sucker for a happy ending.

roachboy · 05-17-2007, 06:09 PM

thanks folks. very helpful. mulling this over....

host · 05-20-2007, 03:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

thanks folks. very helpful. mulling this over....

roachboy....some more to mull over:

(I grouped, by similarity, the lines of Bush's answers to two seemingly simple questions from a member of the white house press corps. The lines from his answers that were in response to the second question, are italicized. I am impressed by his answers to the point that <b>I believe that the opposite of every point that Bush emphasized repeatedly, is probably much closer to being accurate....and his fear that most of us know it</b>, triggered his impulsive repetition.... fascinating, repulsive, tragic !)

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20070517.html

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 17, 2007

President Bush Participates in Joint Press Availability with United Kingdom Prime Minister Blair
Rose Garden

....Q Thank you, sir. There's been some very dramatic testimony before the Senate this week from one of your former top Justice Department officials, who describes a scene that some senators called "stunning," about a time when the wireless -- when the warrantless wiretap program was being reviewed. Sir, did you send your then Chief of Staff and White House Counsel to the bedside of John Ashcroft while he was ill to get him to approve that program? And do you believe that kind of conduct from White House officials is appropriate?

Q Was it on your order, sir?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Kelly, <b>there's a lot of speculation</b> about what happened and what didn't happen;
And so there will be <b>all kinds of talk about it.</b>

<b>I'm not going to talk about it.</b>
As I say, <b>I'm not going to move the issue forward by talking about something</b> as highly <b>sensitive</b> -- highly classified subject.

It's a very <b>sensitive program</b>. I will tell you that, one,
the <b>program is necessary</b> to protect the American people,
And the <b>program, as I say, is an essential part of protecting this country.</b>
I will tell you, however, that the <b>program is necessary.</b>
<i>As I said, this program is a <b>necessary</b> program</i>
<i>It's an important part of protecting the United States.</i>
and it's <b>still necessary</b> because there's <b>still an enemy that wants to do us harm.</b>
<i>And it's still an important part of our protection because there's still an <b>enemy</b> that would like to <b>attack us</b>.<br> No matter how calm it may seem here in America, an <b>enemy lurks</b>. <br>And they would <b>like to strike</b>.<br> They would <b>like to do harm</b> to the American people because they have an agenda.<br>

And therefore, I have an obligation to put in place <b>programs that honor the civil liberties of the American people;</b>
<i>And so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people,</i>

a <b>program</b> that was, in this case, <b>constantly reviewed and briefed to the United States Congress.</b>
<i> that was <b>constantly reviewed</b> and <b>constantly briefed to the Congress.</b></i>
<i>and programs that we <b>constantly brief to Congress</b>.</i>

<i>They want to impose an ideology; they want us to retreat from the world; they want to find safe haven. And these just aren't empty words, these are the words of al Qaeda themselves.</i>

<b>I thought that the sentences spoken by the POTUS, above, display a level of repetition, occuring as they do, in just two, one paragraph responses, that is beyond excessive....if communicated by anyone, let alone by the POTUS, in such a public setting, concerning such important circumstances. </b>

I think that Bush's answers related to Comey's May 15th senate testimony, are a fitting example/summation and epitaph for his [p]residency....a constantly repeated message of fear and lies intended to facilitate a consolidation of power and "unalienable" rights formerly guaranteed to the people and/or the congress of the US.

What is happening as a result of congressional investigations driven questioning of principles in the executive branch, was described well, I think, last september:

Quote:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
Sept. 18, 2006

Bush owes us an apology
by Keith Olbermann

....An apology is this President's only hope of regaining the slightest measure of confidence, of what has been, for nearly two years, a clear majority of his people.

Not "confidence" in his policies nor in his designs nor even in something as narrowly focused as which vision of torture shall prevail -- his, or that of the man who has sent him into apoplexy, Colin Powell.

In a larger sense, the President needs to regain our confidence, that he has some basic understanding of what this country represents -- of what it must maintain if we are to defeat not only terrorists, but if we are also to defeat what is ever more increasingly apparent, as an attempt to re-define the way we live here, and what we mean, when we say the word "freedom."

Because it is evident now that, if not its architect, this President intends to be the contractor, for this narrowing of the definition of freedom.

The President revealed this last Friday, as he fairly spat through his teeth, words of unrestrained fury directed at the man who was once the very symbol of his administration, who was once an ambassador from this administration to its critics, as he had once been an ambassador from the military to its critics.

The former Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

This President's response included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of threatening to hold one's breath, but within it contained one particularly chilling phrase.

"Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," he was asked by a reporter. "If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don't you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you're following a flawed strategy?"

“If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic,” Bush said. “It's just -- I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.

Of course it's acceptable to think that there's "any kind of comparison."

And in this particular debate, it is not only acceptable, it is obviously necessary, even if Mr. Powell never made the comparison in his letter.

Some will think that our actions at Abu Ghraib, or in Guantanamo, or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, are all too comparable to the actions of the extremists.

Some will think that there is no similarity, or, if there is one, it is to the slightest and most unavoidable of degrees.

What all of us will agree on, is that we have the right -- we have the duty -- to think about the comparison.

And, most importantly, that the other guy, whose opinion about this we cannot fathom, has exactly the same right as we do: to think -- and say -- what his mind and his heart and his conscience tell him, is right.

All of us agree about that.

Except, it seems, this President.....

host · 07-29-2007, 08:48 PM

...and here is a revelation, if it's true:

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/op...=1&oref=slogin
Editorial
Mr. Gonzales’s Never-Ending Story

Published: July 29, 2007

.....Both men say that in March 2004 — when Mr. Gonzales was still the White House counsel — the Justice Department refused to endorse a continuation of the wiretapping program because it was illegal. (Mr. Comey was running the department temporarily because Attorney General John Ashcroft had emergency surgery.) <h3>Unwilling to accept that conclusion, Vice President Dick Cheney sent Mr. Gonzales and another official to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to get him to approve the wiretapping.</h3>

Mr. Comey and Mr. Mueller intercepted the White House team, and they say they watched as a groggy Mr. Ashcroft refused to sign off on the wiretapping and told the White House officials to leave. Mr. Comey said the White House later modified the eavesdropping program enough for the Justice Department to sign off....

aceventura3 · 07-30-2007, 07:36 AM

On 60 Minutes last night they replayed their segment on the Prescription Drug legislation, how it was passed and how many of the key players may have been paid off (my interpretation) by drug companies to get the bill past. The cost to tax payers and profits to drug companies will be in the billions. The House has passed a measure to allow the government to negotiate prices similar to the way the VA does, but the measure is locked-up in the Senate.

The above situation is real. Democrats have a basis for real criticism of Republicans and the Bush administration. There may be some real ethical violation. And there can be some real savings, in the billions, to the American people. This real issue is being ignored, while Congress is fighting this very public battle over Gonzales, a battle that they will loose and a battle that has no real impact on anything important to other than Gonzales' reputation. What is wrong with this picture?

dc_dux · 07-30-2007, 09:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

On 60 Minutes last night they replayed their segment on the Prescription Drug legislation, how it was passed and how many of the key players may have been paid off (my interpretation) by drug companies to get the bill past. The cost to tax payers and profits to drug companies will be in the billions. The House has passed a measure to allow the government to negotiate prices similar to the way the VA does, but the measure is locked-up in the Senate.

The above situation is real. Democrats have a basis for real criticism of Republicans and the Bush administration. There may be some real ethical violation. And there can be some real savings, in the billions, to the American people. This real issue is being ignored, while Congress is fighting this very public battle over Gonzales, a battle that they will loose and a battle that has no real impact on anything important to other than Gonzales' reputation. What is wrong with this picture?

What is wrong with this picture?

Besides the fact that it is a threadjack?

It is an inaccurate assessment of the problem.

I would suggest the picture below presents a more accurate pictture of the problem you raised regarding the need to reform the Medicare prescription drug program that was forced through the Repub Congress in 2005.

Reform of the Medicare prescription drug program to include negotiating prices for drugs is just one of many reforms blocked by the obstructionist Republicans in the Senate through the abuse of parliamentary procedures (or at the very least, the unprececented use of such procedures in the recent history of the Senate)

The Senate (and House) can conduct necessary oversight investigations, includling potential (and proven) wrong-doing at the DOJ, the agency expected to uphold and enforce the law without political influence....AND, af the same time, enact important priority legislation that has MAJORITY support ....if there was not the unprecendented level of obstruction.

/end threadjack

aceventura3 · 07-30-2007, 12:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

What is wrong with this picture?

Besides the fact that it is a threadjack?

Accused of a threadjack, what is my plea? Not guilty. I merely point out that while many are focused on Gonzales and a pointless pursuit of some truth that has no relevance to the peoples business (I know, its my opinion), billion dollar issues are getting little or no attention. This is a thread about Gonzales' testimony to congress, so is my point.

Quote:

It is an inaccurate assessment of the problem.

I merely described the problem as presented on 60 Minutes. I admit not knowing much about the issue, because I am not directly affected by the legislation, and I have not felt the impact on my taxes yet. 60 Minutes made a point about the vote being taken at 3:00 am, to keep the shenanigans off of prime time CSPAN coverage. For some reason they don't want this issue to see the light of day.

Quote:

I would suggest the picture below presents a more accurate pictture of the problem you raised regarding the need to reform the Medicare prescription drug program that was forced through the Repub Congress in 2005.

Reform of the Medicare prescription drug program to include negotiating prices for drugs is just one of many reforms blocked by the obstructionist Republicans in the Senate through the abuse of parliamentary procedures (or at the very least, the unprececented use of such procedures in the recent history of the Senate)

Isn't my post saying the same thing? Didn't I state that this is a real area of concern? Didn't I state that the Democrats have a legitimate beef with Republicans on this issue? Didn't I state...oh, never mind.

Why the hostile tone? Where is that Democratic party spirit of diplomacy, finding common ground, the willingness to be civil with those who disagree with your point of view on most issues. Poof!?! Did it just disappear? Did it ever exist? Will we ever see it again? Please tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel...

Quote:

The Senate (and House) can conduct necessary oversight investigations, includling potential (and proven) wrong-doing at the DOJ, the agency expected to uphold and enforce the law without political influence....AND, af the same time, enact important priority legislation that has MAJORITY support ....if there was not the unprecendented level of obstruction.

Certainly, I agree that Congress can do more than one thing at a time. I just expect them to work on those things that will have the biggest impact, first. By impact, I don't mean what will get them re-elected, but more in-line with the people's business. No wonder the Congressional approval ratings are so low. I heard a theory on talk radio, that Bush is actually happy with Congress running around in circle chasing their figurative tail.

I am legitimately concerned over the cost of this program, the government not negotiating price, Congresspersons and their aids selling out to drug companies, have drug lobbyist write the legislation, billions in windfall profits to drug companies with no check and balances, etc, etc., there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed by "the secret program(s)" involving Gonzales' testimony.

Quote:

/end threadjack

It ain't over, until its over.

dc_dux · 07-30-2007, 03:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Why the hostile tone?

I get hostile when I think of how this administration has abused the Dept of Justice for political purposes.

From lies about the warrantless wiretap program and FISA violations (we dont know the extent because Bush refuses to allow an internal DOJ investigation or provide any documentation to Congress), to the abuse of national security letters under the Patriot Act, to politicizing both political and career attorneys like no previous administration, to allegedly suppressing minority voters through "caging" programs in the 2004 election, to undermining the work of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division....

Quote:

there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed by "the secret program(s)" involving Gonzales' testimony

The Constitution has been harmed....the checks and balances of the three branches of government have been harmed.....the privacy of citizens has been harmed....the right of some citizens to vote has been harmed.......

None of the above may not be direct "pocket book" issues, but they potentially have a far greater impact over the long term.

Thats why I get hostile

reconmike · 07-30-2007, 06:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

What is wrong with this picture?

Besides the fact that it is a threadjack?
/end threadjack

Cute DC, why is it you never call out the king of the threadjack Host?
Could the reason be he is also on the way left side of the see-saw also?

Now I'll threadjack, something in politics that actually means something in my daily life, hey fucking democrats of New Jersey where the hell is my god dam property tax relief Corzine and you MF crooks promised with your last crooked election?

host · 08-02-2007, 07:02 AM

Cheney confirmed that he had the power to order the president's two closest aids to Ashcroft's ICU bed in 2004, and Cheney and Mueller contradict Gonzales's sworn testimony to congress....interesting that the FBI and Cheney undermine the carefully crafted defense of Gonzales...that he did not perjure himself...

Quote:

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/07/w...-part-427.html

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Who's the Decider? (Part 427)

Marty Lederman

Larry King: Did you dispatch the White House Chief of Staff and the Counsel to the President to the Attorney General's hospital room to try to get him to sign off on the NSA surveillance program?

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3X3hNtrGhg">Dick Cheney</a>: "I don't recall that I gave instructions to that effect."

* * * *

What's interesting is that Cheney pretended to wrack his brain to recall whether he gave the fateful "instructions." As if that might actually have happened -- as if there would be nothing out of the ordinary if the Vice President had "instructed" the President's two closest advisors to try to squeeze a cabinet official.

<h3>Any other Vice President in the history of the Republic would have responded in a way that revealed how absurd the question was (i.e., how absurd it should be), to wit:</h3>

"I don't give instructions to those persons. They work for the President, not for me. Indeed, when they do act, they act as agents of the President. I can make recommendations, of course. But that's really beside the point, because ultimately it's the President's call whether to send his two c-losest advisers to bring pressure to bear on a cabinet official."

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051602715.html
No Dissent on Spying, Says Justice Dept.

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 17, 2007; A06

The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program.

The department's affirmation of Gonzales's remarks raised fresh questions about the nature of the classified dispute, which former U.S. officials say led then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and as many as eight colleagues to discuss resigning.

Testifying Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Comey declined to describe the program. He said it "was renewed on a regular basis" and required the attorney general's signature.

He said a review by the Justice's Office of Legal Counsel in spring 2004 had concluded the program was not legal.

Comey said he and the others were prepared to resign when the White House renewed the program after failing to get a certification of its legality -- first from him and later from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, while Ashcroft was ill and heavily sedated at George Washington University Hospital.

Gonzales, testifying for the first time in February 2006 about the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which involved eavesdropping on phone calls between the United States and places overseas, told two congressional committees that the program had not provoked serious disagreement involving Comey or others.

"None of the reservations dealt with the program that we are talking about today," Gonzales said then.

Four Democratic senators sent a letter to Gonzales yesterday asking, "do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it," prompting the Justice Department's response.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_r...er_gonzo_.html

Freeze! D.C. lawmen feud over Gonzo

Congressional hearing chills FBI-Justice relations

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Monday, July 30th 2007, 4:00 AM

WASHINGTON - A chill akin to a new Ice Age has frozen the relationship between the FBI and the Justice Department following a very public split between the agencies' leaders.

FBI chief Robert Mueller nuked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in a congressional hearing last week, essentially calling the nation's top lawman a liar.

Since then, a distinctly cold air has settled between FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Ave. and the main Justice building directly across the street.

"You could open an ice rink between the buildings," one Mueller aide said.

<h3>Mueller was asked about a March 2004 confrontation at then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital sickbed.

James Comey, acting attorney general at that time, has told Congress that then-White House counsel Gonzales tried to get the sedated Ashcroft to approve the National Security Agency's secret wiretapping program.

Comey rejected the program as illegal and said the seriously ill Ashcroft resisted considerable pressure from Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card to rubber-stamp it.

Appearing on Tuesday, Gonzales testified that he talked to Ashcroft about "other intelligence activities" - not the NSA's domestic spying.

But Mueller testified he "had an understanding the discussion was on an NSA program."

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said "confusion is inevitable" when officials discuss classified activities in public.

FBI officials bristled at that.

"If you read the [FBI] director's testimony, it is anything but confusing," said a top Mueller ally at the FBI.</h3>

Yesterday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called on Gonzales to quickly clear up the confusion, otherwise "this is going to have a devastating effect on law enforcement."

Mike Fedarcyk, a retired senior FBI official called Mueller's shot at Gonzales a "jawdropper inside the bureau."

Mueller, who was not in the hospital room, spoke to Ashcroft right after Gonzales left and testified he took notes about the incident. Fedarcyk said that appeared to be insurance against a White House counterattack.

"Usually you take notes to protect yourself. He used them to throw Gonzales under the bus. That's huge," Fedarcyk said.

"This is not partisan politics. It's a bold, strategic, calculated move."

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...31/lkl.01.html
Interview With Vice President Dick Cheney

Aired July 31, 2007 - 21:00 ET

....Q In that regard, The New York Times -- which, as you said, is not your favorite -- reports it was you who dispatched Gonzales and Andy Card to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital in 2004 to push Ashcroft to certify the President's intelligence-gathering program. Was it you?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't recall -- first of all, I haven't seen the story. And I don't recall that I gave instructions to that effect.

Q That would be something you would recall.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I would think so. But certainly I was involved because <h3>I was a big advocate of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and had been responsible and working with General Hayden and George Tenet to get it to the President for approval. By the time this occurred, it had already been approved about 12 times by the Department of Justice.</h3> There was nothing new about it.

Q So you didn't send them to get permission.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't recall that I was the one who sent them to the hospital.....

05-16-2007, 04:47 PM	#7 (permalink)
Elphaba Deja Moo Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA	If Congress chooses to investigate Gonzales, would he not have to recuse himself and request a independent prosecutor? Ashcroft did much the same at the time of the Plame affair which led to the assignment of Patrick Fitzgerald. I agree that Bush intends to keep Gonzales in place to prevent congressional investigations into the Administration, but Gonzales must recuse himself if he is the focus of an investigation. The resignation of the DOJ's #2 adds a new dimension to the US Attorney firings, in addition to the testimony of Gooding. Comey represents just one of the dog's cornering this rat. __________________ "You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." Molly Ivins - 1944-2007

05-17-2007, 06:14 AM	#9 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	this is alarming....it turns out that 3-dland is suddenly a flutter of activity so i am still sorting this out, trying to fashion linkages between the multiple areas of problematic information...the general issues at stake in this seem to be mired in a swamp of detail at the moment, and the reporting of it seems for some reason to mirror this, as if there is something reassuring about burying the logic in this manner. so i am still sorting. i'll probably work out something to say soon, but it is not so easy yet..... __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-17-2007, 08:33 AM	#10 (permalink)
Elphaba Deja Moo Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA	A month or so ago I made an attempt to identify the numerous investigations that Congress had underway and the best I was able to find were the Senate and House hearings schedules by committee. There is a tremendous amount of work going on to reverse this administration's attack on our constitution, and what is published in various news sources represents a small fraction of that work. My outrage was expressed with each new discovery of the actions of this imperial presidency. Today, I experience hope and renewed confidence in the balance of powers spelled out by our constitution. Of course, Gonzales is a liar. Has anyone thought otherwise since it was learned that he paved the way for torture? __________________ "You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." Molly Ivins - 1944-2007

05-17-2007, 10:28 AM	#14 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	thanks for no. 11 and 12....they were most helpful, folks. at some levels, this is not surprising, given the legal philosophy that the administration appears to endorse. but, like everyone else, what i am stuck on is: what exactly the fuck was/is happening in the context of this surveillance program? apart from that, the situation as we now know it is clear enough so long as i stay within the general parameters of the surveillance narrative. gonzales really has no choice at this point but to resign it seems to me. he appears to have committed perjury. sorting still, so please indulge a couple confusions/questions: no. 1: host: given that you have been tracking this more closely than i have been able to---the linkages between the abramoff scandal and this one? could you lay out how you see them as interlocking or reference older materials that you have put up that might clarify this please? this may be more an aide-de-mémoire than anything else...but i'd appreciate it (now that i have more time than i have over the past couple months, i'd like to get back up to speed on this) confusion/question no. 2: is there anything beyond symmetry that would lead one to think that the same kind of blurring of boundaries between partisan political actions and abuse of power that is obvious in the firings of the various prosecutors carries over into the black hole at the center of this matter? there are obvious overlaps of players. there are obvious consistencies of actions. but these have the status of symmetries so far as i can tell. what all this looks like is really problematic: an attempt on the part of the administration to fundamentally alter the system of governance to the advantage of what amounts of a quasi-dictatorial executive branch made possible (a) by the figleaf of this idiotic "war on terror" and (b) by the republican controlled congress which seems to have conducted itself in a manner that is really insupportable. the other piece that is missing--though i suspect i might be able to fill in ths blank logically--but to avoid that temptation for the moment--is the goal. what is being presented here via the press accounts is largely pitched as ad hoc creeping of institutional advantage by the executive, enabled by the above. but if i understand this correctly, it seems that it could be also understood as aspects of a concerted project. again, i think i have an idea of what it might be--but how would you characterize it? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-17-2007, 11:18 AM	#16 (permalink)
host Banned	rb, it seems to be a coordinated effort, by any means necessary, to continue the "baby steps" that were evident in the Iran/Contra scandal.... it's an extra legal, slow motion coup d'etat....obtaining and keeping power by a combination of enlisting convicts from the Reagan era, like Elliott Abrams, and a "bus load" of neocons/JINSA/PNAC A-holes, "income producers" like Abramoff to finance and navigate the legislative "agenda", (the "pro-business" portion that was not related to Cheney's energy corporations buddies), combined with an alliance with christian fundy CNP billionaires, (the Kay Coles James - Regent University executive branch hiring campaign) and Rove's "merged" college republican legacy (Abramoff, Reed, Norquist....), with the transformation of the DOJ into a vote suppression mechanism that has it's roots in Rove's strategizing, Jeb Bush's Florida felons voter purge list, and harkens back to Lee Atwater's recitation of Phillip's refinement of the "Southern Strategy" that put Nixon in office..... ....along the way....since the early '60's when the republicans discovered that they could neutralize the black vote and lure in the southern white voters forced by the Johnson legislation to end segregation....lure in voters who had no common interests with the wealthy white, "Rockefeller republicans" (of which Nixon was one....) they obviously ran up politic debts that needed to be paid back to wealthy benefactors and corporations, that seem to create a need for an everlasting, imperialistic "war footing", that also nurtures an excuse for transfer of the power formerly reserved for the people, into a "war pressidency", run "behind the curtain" by his "deciderness", Dick Cheney. They seem to have tried to practice a "no sleazy republican operative left behind", strategy, reaching at least as far back as into the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations.... Rove from 1972's "CREEP", Rummy and Cheney from Nixon/Ford, John Roberts and Ted Olson from the Reagan legal braintrust, as well as all of the contra-players, and circa 70's college republican leaders who were willing to sign on in 2000. Notice how few of Bush '41 inner circle, besides Cheney, who are still around. It's a politically obsessed, power corrupted cabal enabled by race baiting vote supression, and exploitation of the christian fundies....(it's hard to see if the CNP is slave to these fucks, or their master....or maybe both.) I see it as all of the motives and players and amassed playbook of dirty tricks, in a "blow off top", not unlike a stock mania or a housing bubble. They've come together via Jeb's 2000 felon's purge list and the partisan SCOTUS ruling facilitated by Reagan and Bush '41 appointments, and the last six years are the results of all of them coming together, working in a common interest to exclude the majority of Americans....the lower 85 percent, from power. ....and now, unless they attempt to execute an actual armed coup, we might be witnessing the execution of a Waxman/Pelosi/Schumer/Leahy plan to take all of it back, for the rest of us.....if you believe in fairy tales, I guess ! The ideology that financed it, until Abramoff and Delay/Norquist/Reed/Rove figured out how to get folks like casino owning (or wanting) Indian tribes and Marianas sweatshop operators to pay the "to play"....selling legislative initiatives and regulatory agency oversight to them....came from the Coors and the John Olin and Richard Mellon Scaife fortunes, Prince auto parts, the Ocean Spray cranberry fortune, etc. mixed with the Tim LaHay rapturists, Bob Jones/Falwell.Robertson, CIA's Irving Kristol and William F. Buckley Jr., snd all of the moths attracted the bright light of these misguided "John Bircher" billionaires....who built heritage foundation, AEI, and all of the other phony "think tanks" that, along with shill's like Buckley's nephew Bozell III, demonized the media to reverse Walter Cronkites perceived status as "most trusted man in America", facilitating Reagan's "noble war" message, enabling the new militarism that replaced the disdain for war and all things military of the late '70's. With the mainstream media painted as a "liberal" "the other" kind of monster, the "think tanks", Bozell, and "townhall.com" and foxnews could be the new propaganda organs of this politcal monstrosity that we are only beginning to swat like a moth or squash like a roach.....because, when you look what they actaully offer to most Americans, are they, their methods, or their message and actual agenda, anything else but an insect like infestation, a plague of locusts? Last edited by host; 05-17-2007 at 11:38 AM..

05-16-2007, 04:42 AM	#5 (permalink)
tecoyah Illusionary	Why do I feel I just read a rejected script of the "West Wing"....written by the folks that pen "24"? Likely, Gonzales has no recollection of any of this.

05-17-2007, 06:09 PM	#18 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	thanks folks. very helpful. mulling this over.... __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

07-30-2007, 07:36 AM	#21 (permalink)
aceventura3 Junkie Location: Ventura County	On 60 Minutes last night they replayed their segment on the Prescription Drug legislation, how it was passed and how many of the key players may have been paid off (my interpretation) by drug companies to get the bill past. The cost to tax payers and profits to drug companies will be in the billions. The House has passed a measure to allow the government to negotiate prices similar to the way the VA does, but the measure is locked-up in the Senate. The above situation is real. Democrats have a basis for real criticism of Republicans and the Bush administration. There may be some real ethical violation. And there can be some real savings, in the billions, to the American people. This real issue is being ignored, while Congress is fighting this very public battle over Gonzales, a battle that they will loose and a battle that has no real impact on anything important to other than Gonzales' reputation. What is wrong with this picture? __________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."