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Oversight Denied

Andrew Sullivan has a question:

I wish these were not the facts. But they are. We now have a direct witness to the torture - and one who inflicted it - describing it as torture; we have all the legal precedents that do not begin to question whether waterboarding is torture; we know the president directly authorized it; we know the epidemic of torture that ensued. These are crimes, committed by the executive branch in full awareness of the law and with premeditation. They place the United States in violation of the Geneva Conventions. And the president bears the final responsibility.

I hate to ask the inevitable question: Who will now hold him criminally responsible?

A: Nobody

Hold Bush responsible? Come on. We've been over this before: every day, for the past 6 years.

Outrage Fatigue

I really don't understand why people are getting worked up about the CIA torture tape destruction. To me it seems like much ado about yet another example of BushCo malfeasance that will never amount to anything at all - just like all the others. We've been down this path many times now, and it always leads to the same thing: a couple of strongly-worded letters to Bush from a couple of Democratic Senators which will go unheeded. Maybe they'll have a hearing or two where the usual suspects will tell their typical lies. No laws will be passed to prevent this kind of thing from happening again (primarily because the Dems are complicit in all of it); nobody will be punished; nothing will happen.

King George

Senator Whitehouse (no, really), learned some things about how the Bush Administration views its own legal powers:

For years under the Bush Administration, the Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice has issued highly classified secret legal opinions related to surveillance. This is an administration that hates answering to an American court, that wants to grade its own papers, and OLC is the inside place the administration goes to get legal support for its spying program.

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I was given access to those opinions, and spent hours poring over them. Sitting in that secure room, as a lawyer, as a former U.S. Attorney, legal counsel to Rhode Island's Governor, and State Attorney General, I was increasingly dismayed and amazed as I read on.

To give you an example of what I read, I have gotten three legal propositions from these OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note taking could reproduce them from the classified documents. Listen for yourself. I will read all three, and then discuss each one.

  1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.
  2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President's authority under Article II.
  3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President's legal determinations.

Bush writes his own rules, and doesn't have to tell you when they change. He determines if his conduct is legal or not. And he tells the Courts what the laws are.

And the Democratic Congress is afraid to say "No, you stupid fucker, that's not how things work in this country!" - or maybe it is.

Read the rest.