Specter of Duplicity

Does there seem to be a pattern here?

Some Republicans, including Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a strong critic of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, have pressed the administration to agree at least to transcripts. But on Thursday, Mr. Specter backed off, saying now that the president has invoked executive privilege, Congress should take whatever information it can get “on the president’s terms” to avoid a protracted legal battle.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/

The Angler

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.

The Outrages Continue

Today Congressman Waxman reported through his Committee on Government Oversight that Vice President Cheney is claiming all sorts of special "security" privileges in order to exempt himself from public oversight.

Waxman wrote to Cheney and provided him with a list of reasons why he doesn't think Cheney should be exempt, especially since nobody else is exempt.

Congress ought to be crawling all over that office by now. I don't know whether to be angrier at Cheney or Congress for not impeaching him.

Can You Trust These People?

At all?

The al-Marri Case

Scarecrow over at Firedog Lake has analyzed the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit's ruling:

The Court thus rejected the Administration’s claim that the President has the inherent, unchecked Constitutional power to do whatever he wants in designating US residents as “enemy combatants.” (The Youngstown analysis also applies when evaluating the scope of the President’s Constitutional powers to authorize warrantless surveillance of US citizens, because Congress passed the FISA statute expressly limiting the executive’s surveillance authority.)

Scarecrow also does even more homework by examining the analysis of Marty Lederman at Balkinization.

Still waiting for Glenn Greenwald's response to the ruling.

The Latest Trickle

The internet news services are abuzz with the story. This from Reuters on Yahoo, complements of David Morgen, White House Under Pressure Over Guantanamo Ruling:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration faced pressure on Tuesday to overhaul how it brings foreign terrorism suspects to trial after the surprise dismissal of war crimes charges against two prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

With only days to appeal, the White House said it disagreed with the separate rulings by U.S. military judges on Monday and denied it had suffered another setback after being forced by the Supreme Court to change the system just last year.

Advocates for the detainees hailed the decisions as a watershed that would unleash legal challenges to the 2006 U.S. law that established the current military tribunal system.