He said, She said … “literally”

Posted: October 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , | 6 Comments

So, I’m sitting in the Denver Airport plugged into the free wifi and recharging batteries. I have two hours worth of sitting left.  The only eventful thing today was watching an up armored vehicle speed down the street in front of the Brown Palace towards the Capitol area.  There were also three people in zombie outfits and make up standing on the corner.  For awhile, I was thinking I should check for a Bourbon Street sign but the 16th street walking mall was just to my left and the Rocky Mountains were still behind me.  It was Denver alright. There was a huge occupy march this afternoon and a simultaneous Zombie festival.  I was wondering if they could merge the two and the zombies could play big banks.  The riot police just seemed to be buzzing the parade of maybe 500 or so folks.

Anyway, I’m trying to find something to post and run across the NYT article on Condoleeza Rice and an interesting thing about zombie vice president Dick Cheney.  I guess she is still miffed about his portrayal of her teary eyed jag in his memoir and shot back.

First as national security adviser and later as secretary of state, Ms. Rice often argued against the hard-line approach that Mr. Cheney and others advanced. The vice president’s staff was “very much of one ultra-hawkish mind,” she writes, adding that the most intense confrontation between her and Mr. Cheney came when she argued that terrorism suspects could not be “disappeared” as in some authoritarian states.

In November 2001, she writes, she went to President George W. Bush upon learning that he had issued an order prepared by the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, authorizing military commissions without telling her. “If this happens again,” she told the president, “either Al Gonzales or I will have to resign.”

Mr. Bush apologized. She writes that it was not his fault and that she felt that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Cheney’s staff had not served the president well.

Ms. Rice’s book, “No Higher Honor,” was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its Nov. 1 publication by Crown Publishing, a division of Random House. It is the latest in a string of memoirs emerging from Bush administration figures trying to define the history of their tenure.

Again, you may recall that Rice responded to Dick Cheney rather harshly last month.

Condoleezza Rice is hitting back at Dick Cheney for what she’s calling an “attack on my integrity” in the former vice president’s new memoir.

In his tell-all book, Cheney blasts the ex-Secretary of State’s handling of nuclear negotiations with North Korea and argues she misled then-President George W. Bush.

“I kept the president fully and completely informed about every in and out of the negotiations with the North Koreans,” Rice told Reuters on Wednesday.

“You can talk about policy differences without suggesting that your colleague somehow misled the president. You know, I don’t appreciate the attack on my integrity that that implies.”

Since Rice’s memoir follows both Rumsfeld and Cheney’s, it remains to be seen who will get the last dig.

DOJ Prepared Secret Memo Enumerating “Legal Arguments” for Assassinating U.S. Citizens

Posted: October 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Human Rights, Team Obama, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

In April of 2009, President Obama released the secret “torture memos” prepared in 2002 and 2005 by the Bush Justice Department. From Huffpo:

President Barack Obama says the release of legal opinions governing harsh questioning of terrorism suspects is required by the law and should help address “a dark and painful chapter in our history.”

Obama issued a statement accompanying Thursday’s release of four significant memos written by the Bush administration in 2002 and 2005. The president said that the interrogation techniques outlined in the memos “undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer.”

Now we learn that Obama’s Justice Department has produced a secret memo to authorize the killing of American citizens by order of the President.

The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials.

The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said.

“What constitutes due process in this case is a due process in war,” said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closely held deliberations within the administration.

So if this is all on the up and up, no violations of the Constitution involved, why can’t we see the legal arguments?

The operation to kill Aulaqi involved CIA and military assets under CIA control. A former senior intelligence official said that the CIA would not have killed an American without such a written opinion.

A second American killed in Friday’s attack was Samir Khan, a driving force behind Inspire, the English-language magazine produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. An administration official said the CIA did not know Khan was with Aulaqi, but they also considered Khan a belligerent whose presence near the target would not have stopped the attack.

But if they needed a legal opinion in order to target Aulaqi, then why didn’t they need one of Khan? None of this makes any sense to me, and frankly, I’d like the ACLU lawyers to review this Justice Department memo.

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf writes:

What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they’re asserting is a matter of sound law? This isn’t a military secret. It isn’t an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding a domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is an analysis of the power that the Constitution and Congress’ post September 11 authorization of military force gives the executive branch. This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose his specific reasoning to scrutiny. As the Post put it, “The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

Obama hasn’t just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set. It’s time for the president who promised to create “a White House that’s more transparent and accountable than anything we’ve seen before” to release the DOJ memo.

What I’d most like to know is who is making these decisions? I’m still slogging through the Suskind book, and again and again I’m learning that Obama had the right instincts–at least about economics–but then was thwarted by his supposed underlings. Is that happening in the area of counterterrorism as well?

We need to know, and that is why this memo must be released. Obama has shown that he has no ability to lead or even to stand up to his own “advisers” when they ignore his orders. We need to understand who really made the decision that American citizens must be murdered, rather than arrested, charged, and given fair trials. And that person needs to be fired immediately.

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