Entries by emptywheel

DiFi’s Amendment

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DiFi’s discussion of her amendment on immunity raises all sorts of interesting questions. Did the telecoms get oral authorizations to wiretap Americans, or were they all written? Did those authorizations specifically vest their authority in the President’s Article II power, rather than in the statutes governing wiretapping?

From what I can see in her discussion, though, her amendment offers one great advantage: it asks the FISA Court to review the program and rule on the limits of the President’s Article II power to wiretap. Oh–and of course she requires the one court against which Bush can’t invoke State Secrets to conduct this review.

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Henry Gets Impatient

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Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed that, since the time when Henry Waxman first asked Michael Mukasey to hand over the White House-related materials from the CIA Leak Case investigation, he has proven to be mighty responsive to requests from Congress when it involves covering up for the White House.

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Dick versus Scottish Haggis: The Grudge Match

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Arlen “Scottish Haggis” Specter introduced a letter exchange with Dick Cheney into the Congressional record yesterday. In case you needed any proof, the letters show that Dick is an asshole, even to nice little compliant Senators like Scottish Haggis.

U.S. SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY,

Washington, DC, June 7, 2006.
Hon. Richard B. Cheney,
The Vice President,
Washington, DC.

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The Torture Debate

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Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus have an interesting article describing the debate between CIA and FBI over whether waterboarding worked with Abu Zubaydah. If the timeline they describe is accurate, then it means that Abu Zubaydah gave up his most important intelligence before they started torturing him. As to the information he gave up under torture, the CIA and FBI dispute whether it was useful or not. The implication of the article is that the CIA may have destroyed the torture tapes to hide the fact that the water-boarding was ineffective.

The article explains that Abu

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Why Did Reid Pull the Bill?

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Senator’s Dodd demonstration that he was serious about a filibuster was undoubtedly one of the things that led to Reid pulling the bill yesterday. But I suspect it also has a lot to do with plans the moderate Dems had to introduce amendments that, while perfectly reasonable, would have been poison pills for the Republicans.

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WHORM and WAVES

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Amid the excitement today, you may have missed the news that the White House visitor logs are public documents. I’m sure this will be in the Courts for another year and a half–at which point Dick will invite Scalia to go quail hunting again, and we’ll never get the records. But for now, look at the oozing skepticism of Judge Royce Lamberth.

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Noel Hillman Gets a Subpoena

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Hey, remember how I asked whether, if Noel Hillman were subpoenaed in the woods but no one saw it, whether he really got subpoenaed?

Well, he did … he did get subpoenaed.

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Sheldon Whitehouse’s Speech

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Whitehouse is up, hitting on the same issues he hit in his speech a week ago Friday. He accuses Mukasey and McConnell are being disingenuous when they ignore the issues outstanding on the FISA debate.

These two gentlemen do know what is going on and chose to talk past the issue, ignore it’s very existence.

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