What is the Judge Bybee hiding and why can’t he defend his actions? Cuz Dick Cheney said so! (I’m just making that up sort of…)

EW, a couple threads ago, you mentioned wrt to the CIA’s turndown of Cheney’s CIA Torture Results memo declassification attempt:

Oh, now that’s delicious. Dick can’t have it bc the ACLU asked first.

To add to your deliciousness delight, I bring you the actual CIA Turndown letter via Greg Sargent:

…Your facsimile of 21 April 2009 referred one document to this agency responding to the referenced Executive Order 12958 Mandatory Declassification Review request. I have enclosed a copy of your correspondence at Tab A.

As you are aware, a request for Mandatory Declassification Review is governed by Executive Order 12958, as amended, which was signed and executed by the President on March 25, 2003. Under section 3.5.(a)(3) of that Executive Order, a document is excluded from Mandatory Declassification Review if that document contains information that is the subject of pending litigation…

(My Bold)

Junya’s revenge?

Or since it was really PapaDick who was probably the culprit who actually made that EO amendment happen, one could say that:

“Cheney Cheney’d himself!”

Shorter PapaDick: “Fook me?!!!”

You know, and Judge Bybee surely will know, that West Law Publishing has devoted an entire key number to the principle of law underlying what Leahy says: Evidence 75.

A quote from one of my favorite cases, addressing this topic, may help. To set the scene a woman, the plaintiff, sued complaining of being a pedestrial injured by a car driven by the defendant. She repeatedly failed to see the defendant’s doctor for an examination, used by insurance companies to see if you;’re really hurt or not. The court:

In our opiion, evidence indicating a plaintiff seeking to recover for injuries involved in an accident had refused, without justifiable cause, to submit to a physical examination is admissible. A jury may infer that such refusal indicates that plaintiff has something to hide, a consciousness of the weakness of his cause. …. Here, defendant’s unsuccessful attempts to obtain a physical examination extended over a period of almost two years – a period during which, plantiff claimed at the trial, she was suffering continuously from the effects of the accident. The Court did not err in admitting [the insurance adjuster’s] testimony.

A friend who defended personal injury cases used to threaten to ask for a jury charge using that language, in the event the plaintiff was balking at seeing the defense doctor.

Or, for that matter, we can call up an old chestnut from Ed Meese’s assault on Miranda, written by a True Conservative Himself, Charles Krauthammer, back during Reagan days:

It is disgraceful that just after a parade of ex-Reagan aides piously invoke the Fifth Amendment, President Reagan’s attorney general is preparing an assault on the Miranda rules. It is a disgrace because Miranda is quite properly known as the poor man’s Fifth. Oliver North – and Claus Von Bulow and Anthony Salerno – do not need Miranda. They know that they have the right to remain silent, the right to counsel, etc. They do not need to be warned that what they say may be used against them. It is the indigent and the ignorant who need the Miranda warning. Ed Meese is promising a crusade to see [that the poor, ignorant and unrepresented can no longer have those same rights] …

Of course, back then Republicans at least pretended to have a sense of shame or had the self-awareness to see that what they were doing might be seen as less than wholly sinless.

Meese, of course, was [in]famous as Reagan’s AG for positing that, since confession is good for the soul, Miranda and its confession-excluding result was bad for the defendants because it didn’t help them unburden themselves of their guilt. Or something similarly incoherent.

Or another Ed Meese spectacular, highlighting his … um … something smelly:

Compare that with the behavior of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d, who returned the other day from a trip to Latin America to find himself embroiled – not guilty, of course, not quite indictable – in still another dubious episode at least as questionable as anything charged against Larry Speakes.

This time, the news was that Mr. Meese’s wife, Ursula, had had a job arranged for her by a real estate developer who was trying to lease office space to Mr. Meese’s Department of Justice. A foundation set up by the developer paid her salary.

This disclosure followed those about Mr. Meese’s disputed involvements with the Wedtech Corporation and with an abortive Middle East pipeline scheme. A special counsel looking into these matters has said he has found no evidence sufficient to indict the Attorney General – hardly a ringing endorsement of his ethical sensitivity and not even a guarantee that some sort of ‘’smoking gun” won’t turn up later.

Whether or not the highest ranking law enforcement officer of the nation ought to be indicted is one thing; whether he is sufficiently the model of probity that his office requires is another thing; and still a third is whether he can, under the cloud of suspicion and mistrust he has brought upon himself, lead the Department of Justice and maintain its morale as effectively as he should.

At least back in those olden days, we got special counsels actually investigating even minor improprieties by Republicans (and we hadn’t even graduated to torture, yet). And Republicans – like Meese – even resigned without being indicted first.

What of those litigants appearing in your courtroom, Judge Bybee, who need to be able to believe that you, as the judge of their case, will not be unfairly biased? What are they to think when the legal test in their case is whether something “shocks the judicial conscience”, when you have so far shown yourself to have no conscience at all? How can they believe that the justice system is not irretrievably skewed against them and in favor of you and your Republican buddies?

Syntax cleanup at the checkout counter, please:
“Whitehouse and Leahy have both promises… ” promised, maybe?

(Hey, I’m off to a slow start this morning!)

Bob in HI

What comes next? Subpoenas? Arrest warrants? …or, as Olbermann has declared, “w t f ?”