Running-Out-The-Clock Into the Ground

The Anonymous Liberal has a typically incisive post on the decision yesterday by the Senate Judiciary Committee to issue subpoenas for the Justice Department's internal memoranda concerning the NSA illegal spying program.

The blogger suggests that the reason BushCo has been so unresponsive to repeated Committee requests for the documents is essentially because of DOJ's two pillars of justification for the illegal program.

One is that the AUMF covers it. The other is that Article II (the "Unitary Executive") theory enables BushCo to do whatever they want.

The Anon Lib opines:

It's the second revelation that would be the most damaging, though. If true, and I suspect it is, it would mean that the administration put forth an argument in 2006 and 2007 that its own lawyers had rejected in 2004.

Why does he suspect it's true? Could it be because every argument, every rationale, every program and every justification this Administration ever puts forth are archaic throwbacks to a time so remote that few remember that the arguments, etc.... were actually then DISPROVEN!

It's a bad habit of just recirculating already discredited arguments. They just repackage them, dress them up enough so that nobody recognizes them anymore, and then they clamp on the secrecy so the public has a hard time getting at the facts. But eventually, as always in these situations, the truth is outed.

Then everybody sees that "Unitary Executive" is just a euphemism for "Fascist Dictator."

"War on Terror" is just a repackaging of "Red Scare" or "Might Makes Right."

As far as the subpoenaed documents are concerned, the Anon Lib concludes his post by saying

If [he's] right, then these internal documents show that the Bush administration publicly defended the NSA program by resorting to an argument that had been discredited and abandoned by its own lawyers years earlier. If so, I doubt we'll ever see the documents.