President Bush is Not Above the Law
02 February 2006 12:03 am by Taylor Marsh
President Bush is Not Above the Law
We're back in Dick's office, where all our troubles began.
Vice President Dick Cheney, the man who fantasized secret meetings
between Mohammad Atta and some Czech in a coffee shop.
The Dick Cheney who said Saddam “has, in fact, reconstituted
nuclear weapons,” which helped him concoct our miserable war in Iraq.
Vice President Cheney, the guy who directed the hit on a CIA operative,
not to mention may
have destroyed emails so the prosecutor can't discover the truth. Decided
that the “New Sovereigntist” club could craft policies that
would make anything his boss did legal even if it wasn't, which brings us to
Bush's illegal domestic wiretapping scheme.
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Next Monday Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has his date with the Senate
Judiciary Committee. However, as of right now, we've hit the proverbial presidential
snag. That is, George W. Bush is stonewalling the release of classifed Justice
Department memos. I'm so shocked.
The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from
members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions
on President Bush's domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in
advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional
officials said Wednesday. New
York Times
But it's not just Democrats who want answers. Senator Specter has said
Bush's illegal wiretapping “violates FISA — there's no doubt
about that.”
That could explain why President Bush and our top cop, Alberto Gonzales, don't
want the damning documents to see the light of day. Dick isn't worried, because
he's got a man on the inside.
Some background… There are at least two classified documents or memos in
question, the first written by John Yoo sometime around early 2002 or so. The
second came in 2004, at the same time several Justice officials started questioning
the legality of Bush's illegal wiretapping, but also their torture policies.
Justice refused to sign off on the wiretapping program's reauthorization. If
you recall, at one point Mr. Comey refused as well, sending Gonzales and Andy
Card to see a drugged Ashcroft at his hospital bedside, where he too refused
to sign the reauthorization. However, eventually everyone made nice and Bush
got his illegal program jump started again.
Just recently, we learned from Newsweek
that Comey stepped down this past summer because of White House pressure over
a serious tug of war on presidential powers, which led to push back from all
the president's men. Much of Justice's discontent is because of David Addington,
Dick Cheney's head legal thug, who took over Scooter Libby's position when he
got indicted. Dick Cheney and David Addington were now fully in charge and ready
to continue their goal of making a king out of a clueless cowboy.
Inexperienced in national-security law,
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales was steered by more-expert lawyers like
Addington and Flanigan. Others, like John Bellinger, the National Security Council's
top lawyer, were simply not told what was going on. Addington and the hard-liners
had particular disregard for Bellinger, who was considered a softie—mocked
by Addington because he had lunch once a month or so with a pillar of the liberal-leaning
legal establishment, the late Lloyd Cutler. When Addington and Flanigan produced
a document—signed by Bush—that gave the president near-total authority
over the prosecution of suspected terrorists, Bellinger burst into Gonzales's
office, clearly upset, according to a source familiar with the episode. But
it was too late. PALACE
REVOLT
Please read that article completely. It's yet another chapter in the unfolding
story explaining why we're in so much trouble today. When career Justice officials
get in the way, Dick Cheney and his malevolent minions just make things so miserable
for them that they either give up, give out or simply go away.
It's truly hard to know what to say at this point. Our president is giving
the finger to the Senate again, with Justice's top cop backing him up, while receiving directions straight from Dick Cheney's lair. This hardly seems constitutional,
let alone respectful of what the Founders had in mind for the three co-equal
branches of our government, but Bush and Cheney couldn't care less and it seems
Alberto Gonzales is a weak kneed nerd without any real power. Perfect for the vice president's plan.
While the administration has laid out its legal defense
repeatedly in the last two weeks, the formal legal opinions developed at the
Justice Department to justify the program remain classified. The administration
has refused even to publicly acknowledge the existence of the memorandums,
but The New York Times has reported that two sets of legal opinions
by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel asserted the president's
broad power to order wiretaps without warrants in protecting national security.
Senate
Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying
Without access to the classified memos that state the case for
why President Bush felt he could legally and constitutionally go around FISA,
it seems obvious the hearings we are all waiting for on Monday will be,
to use a Keith Olbermann analogy, presidential puppet theatre, only much less
amusing and far more infuriating.
So, if you had any illusions that the White House was taking this
challenge from Congress seriously, this should put them to rest. Just chalk
it up as another Jack Abramoff the president stole our pictures moment, only
this time we're talking about classified legal documents which made the argument
that our president was above the law. If Dick Cheney has his way, these documents will never see the light of day.
