Seven newly released memos from
the Bush Justice Department reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the President
with power to override the Constitution. The memos provide “legal” rationales
for the President to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrantless
searches and seizures, including wiretaps of U.S. citizens; lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely in the
United
States without criminal charges; send suspected
terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and
unilaterally abrogate treaties.
In
the months following September 11, 2001, lawyers in the White House and
the Justice Department interpreted U.S. and international law to
provide legal support for the administration in its "war on terror."
With regard to interrogation of terror suspects, John Yoo, David
Addington, Jay Bybee, and others justified the use of such harsh and
dangerous tactics as waterboarding and stress positions.
WASHINGTON - The US Central Intelligence Agency revealed today that it had destroyed far more videotapes of terror interrogations than it had originally admitted, resuscitating a Bush administration scandal and increasing the pressure on Barack Obama to support a full investigation of the agency's detention practices during his predecessor's time in office.
In "Guilt About the Past," based on guest lectures that Bernhard Schlink gave at Oxford University last year, the University of Berlin law professor describes the "long shadow" cast by the perpetrators of war crimes on their descendants.
"The act of not renouncing, not judging and not repudiating carries its own guilt with it," he states in the book published in January by University of Queensland Press.
The Obama DOJ's embrace of Bush's state secrets privilege in the
Jeppesen (torture/rendition) case generated substantial outrage, and rightly so. But it's now safe to say that far worse is the Obama DOJ's conduct in the
Al-Haramain case -- the only remaining case against the Government with any real chance of resulting in a judicial ruling on the legality of Bush's NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. Here's the first paragraph from
the Wired report on Friday's appellate ruling
Have you heard that we won the Iraq War? Well, sure, we've still got
142,000 troops there, we're spending $12 billion per month on it and
hundreds of Iraqis per week are dying violent deaths. What's more, none
of the fundamental political questions that divide Iraq's murderous
factions have been settled, and the place is poised to collapse into
genocidal anarchy--which might engulf the entire region--should
President Obama withdraw our troops too hastily. So we're going to have
to stay, well, perhaps forever.
On his second day in office, President Obama directed all of his administration's employees to work toward "an unprecedented level of openness," explaining that transparency would "strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government."
Now the president can begin to make good on his promise of transparency by releasing the dozens of still-secret legal memos written by the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel.
More than 30 years ago, a special Senate investigation peered into
abuses that included spying on the American people by their own
government.
Since he took office, President Obama has instituted many changes that break
with the policies of the Bush administration. The new president has ordered that
no government agency will be allowed to torture, that the U.S.
prison at Guantánamo will be shuttered, and that the CIA's secret black sites
will be closed down. But Obama is non-committal when asked whether he will seek
investigation and prosecution of Bush officials who broke the law.
