Bush: Politics Trumps Everything

It turns out that President Bush was being serious when he said he was a uniter, he just meant that the government should be united to follow him:
That aide, Monica M. Goodling, exercised what amounted to veto power over a wide range of critical jobs, asking candidates for their views on abortion and same-sex marriage [...]

Mukasey Supports Yoo

In an address to BC law graduates, Attorney General Mukasey basically said that no one should be punished for torture:
One memo defined torture, as recognized by U.S. law, as covering “only extreme acts” causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by organ failure or accompanying death.
An internal Justice Department investigation is now considering whether [...]

Bush Says Torture Is Ok

President Bush has vetoed a bill that would have, among other things, restricted certain interrogation methods. Here’s Bush explaining why:
My disagreement over section 327 is not over any particular interrogation technique; for instance, it is not over waterboarding, which is not part of the current CIA program. Rather, my concern is the need to maintain [...]

Mukasey Says No To Grand Jury, On To Civil Lawsuit

It seems that Mukasey is holding to his belief that a person can do anything if someone in the Justice Department tells them it’s ok:
In his letter, received by the House early Friday evening, Mukasey pointed out that not only was Miers directed not to testify, she also was immune from congressional subpoenas and was right [...]

Mukasey, Still Stupid

Mukasey keeps on making stupid statements. His latest:
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Mukasey said it would be inappropriate to investigate the interrogators because the Justice Department had issued secret memos concluding that President Bush’s wartime powers made waterboarding and warrantless surveillance legally permissible.
“Essentially, it would tell people, you rely on a Justice Department opinion [...]

Bloch Investigates?

Majikthise has a post up about this article where:
Scott J. Bloch, head of an obscure agency charged with protecting the rights of federal workers, sent a five-page letter last week to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey complaining that his agency, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, had been asked to step aside from an investigation into the [...]

More Mukasey

Mukasey is an idiot when it comes to waterboarding. Go look at TPM for a bunch of bits of his testimony, I especially like the one with Whitehouse:
WHITEHOUSE: Has that been done?
Has there been a thorough, independent analysis, under your administration, of whether or not any national of the United States is potentially in violation [...]

Mukasey: I Can’t Say Whether Flaying Someone Is Torture

AG Mukasey must be better than Gonzalez was, but this is really stupid:
“Given that waterboarding is not part of the current program and may never be added to the current program, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to pass definitive judgment on the technique’s legality,” the attorney general said, speaking in the [...]

Mukasey and Waterboarding

It seems like Mukasey might be in a bit of trouble for refusing to call waterboarding torture. Why is he reluctant to just come out and say it’s torture?
No one will have a fixed count of votes until Mukasey responds to Durbin, but if he refuses to declare waterboarding expressly illegal, he looks likely to [...]

Mukasey–Not So Fast?

This is good to see:
“A number of issues need clarification,” Senator Specter said in a telephone interview today. “I’m troubled by the depth of his assertion of executive powers.” He said he was worried specifically about whether Mr. Mukasey would give advice to President Bush to disregard acts of Congress, including a proposed law that [...]

Mukasey

Mukasey seems to have backtracked a bit in his second day of testimony.
On the first day, he said, unequivocally and forcefully, that he was against torture, while on the second day he was not sure that waterboarding was torture (see here and here).
On the first day, he said the President couldn’t do whatever he wanted [...]

Mukasey

I didn’t used to be this untrusting, but you can’t trust anything this administration says.  That’s why this is so disheartening:
Mr. Leahy and other Senate Democrats had suggested that they would press for a variety of documents involving the firing of the United States attorneys and the eavesdropping program before agreeing to schedule confirmation hearings [...]

It’s Not Torture If We Say It’s Not

Gee, why am I not surprised:
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another [...]

Judge, Orders? I Don’t Understand.

Here’s another story via TPM.  It seems that Thomas Kontogiannis, who admitted bribing Duke Cunningham, was discovered in a hotel in Greece even though he was not allowed to leave the country without the court’s permission.  Here’s his defense: 
At today’s hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Forge said the trip was made at the government’s behest.

“My understanding [...]

National Security Letters

It’s good to see that a judge has recognized that the NSLs are not conistent with the constitution:
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act “offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.”
…
In 2004, ruling [...]

Net Neutrality and the Justice Department

I don’t quite get this:
The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.
 
The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to “Net neutrality,” the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any [...]

Goldsmith and the Office of Legal Counsel

In next Sunday’s New York Time’s Magazine, Jack Goldsmith who headed the Office of Legal Counsel for 9 months in late 2003 into 2004.  He talks about some of the details involved in the ‘torture memos’, the NSA’s wiretapping, and other programs:
Several hours after Goldsmith was sworn in, on Oct. 6, 2003, he recalls that [...]

Investigation of Gonzales

It’s good to see that the Justice Department is investigating Gonzales.  They have a lot to investigate. The main ones are:

his apparent lies under oath to the Congress
the politicization of many nonpolitical offices (Monica Goodling admitted she did this at times)

Here is what Inspector General Glenn A. Fine says he is investigating:
Mr. Fine made it [...]

Gonzales Resigns

So the Attorney General will now resign effective September 17. It’s good to see someone who has so obviously lied to the public and under oath gone, but I’m not sure if it will change anything.  The Congress will probably cross examine the next AG (rumored to be Chertoff who made a hash of New [...]

McConnell and FISA

In the passage of the newest version of FISA, Democrats accused Intelligence Director Mike McConnell of bargaining in bad faith because he said, very late in the game, that a bill they had negotiated with him and seemed to have his support was not acceptable. Now he has had an interview with the El Paso [...]