Entries by emptywheel

Were They Bypassing Gonzales, Too?

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Marty Lederman points to this excerpt from Jack Goldsmith’s book at Slate. Goldsmith explains he only saw Alberto Gonzales disagree with David Addington once–and that Bush ended up siding with Addington.

Addington’s hard-line nonaccommodation stance always prevailed when thelawyers met to discuss legal policy issues in Alberto Gonzales’ office.During these meetings, Gonzales himself would sit quietly in his wingchair, occasionally asking questions but mostly listening as thequerulous Addington did battle with whomever

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Or Maybe O’Hanlon Is the New Judy Miller

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Because for the life of me, I can’t understand how taking an “overly rigorous approach to the numbers” makes one “sloppy.”

Yet according to Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policystudies at the Brookings Institution who has closely followedstatistics on Iraq for years, the average number of daily attacks onIraqi civilians and US/allied forces has declined from 160 in August2006 to 120 in August 2007.

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The ACLU Begins to Win Back Our Country

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If you haven’t given to the ACLU in a while, here’s the donate button. The ACLU (with some help) has scored some important wins this week, starting with today’s decision that National Security Letters are unconstitutional.

The ACLU said it was improper to issue so-called national securityletters, or NSLs — investigative tools used by the FBI to compelbusinesses to turn over customer information — without a judge’s orderor grand jury subpoena.

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General Petraeus Is the New Judy Miller

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General Petraeus, lying to Congress is a crime.

Let’s just repeat that fact over and over. Because that’s what Petraeus is planning on doing on Monday, as Karen DeYoung (in an article buried on page A16) explains clearly. Go read the whole article, closely, for a description of the many methods of the Administration’s hocus pocus.

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Yet Another Whine about a Report Card

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No, seriously. The GAO’s report on DHS is really important evidence that Bush has done very little to make this country more safe. But I’m most struck by the fact that the DHS people quoted are making exactly the same complaint the military did last week, when GAO reported that Iraq has met few of its benchmarks (for the record, DHS seems to be doing somewhat better than Iraq, making at

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The Purpose of Homeland Security

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Silly GAO! Silly bloggers! The purpose of the Department of Homeland Security is not to gather together all the resources of homeland security in one coordinated whole. The purpose of DHS is not to improve off of our performance on 9/11. And so you really shouldn’t worry too much about any silly little GAO report.

The GAO states that after the largest government merger in more thanhalf a century, the DHS met

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No Senators Knew

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There are a number of details that make Sidney Blumenthal’s latest appear to be a happy coincidence of timing. Just after Bush biographer Robert Draper reports that Bush still claims to have believed–in April 2006–that Iraq had WMD, Blumenthal comes out with an article tying up a lot of loose ends on Saddam Hussein’s Foreign Minister, Naji al-Sabri, proving Bush was briefed that Saddam did not have WMD.

On Sept.

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Somebody to Fire!!!!

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I’m thrilled with the news that George Bush just gave Barry Jackson a promotion.

Yesterday, President Bush named Barry Jackson to be Peter Wehnher’s replacement to run the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives.Jackson was the major White House strategist behind Bush’s failedSocial Security privatization ploy, and was one of the White Houseemployees discovered to be using RNC email accounts to e-mail an associate of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

That’s because just

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Republicans Back Sound Minimization Oversight

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I’m watching HJC’s first hearing on FISA Amendment, and I think the Republicans may be giving us a superb opportunity to address one of the big problems of the FISA Amendment.

You see, the Republicans have no fucking clue that the reason McConnell chose the Republican bill over the Democratic one is because it removed all oversight over minimization.

Thus far–and at 12:04 we’ve only had questions from 3 Republicans–Dan Lungren has already

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The Decider on Iran

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Aside from the boorishness of discussing more war with bread crumbs all over your chin, Bush’s pathetic simplification of our relationship with Iran–in a monologue he calls “strategic thinking”–is pretty alarming, even coming from Bush.

“The job of the president,” he continued, through an ample wad of breadand sausage, “is to think strategically so that you can accomplish bigobjectives.

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