That’s a done deal now - even McCain buys in. Anyhow, these documents are about warrantless wiretaps and the justification for torture, at least in the articles I read, not the war.
You must be too young to remember Richard Nixon. In any case, many of these documents would have been released while the president was in office before now.
If Obama starts to tread on our Constitutional rights, I sure hope the files are opened. Maybe you are forgetting that these guys are supposed to be working for us.
Duh. You know all that stuff that Bush was allowed to do? Obama isn’t. What do you expect from a Justice Department full of politicized twats from a Bible College. I’m surprised you’re surprised.
One of my favorite parts of the released documents was the OLC’s opinion made just this January, at the very end of the Bush Administration.
It starts: “The purpose of this memorandum is to confirm that certain propositions stated in several opinions issued by the Office of Legal Counsel in 2001-2003 respecting the allocation of authorities between the President and Congress in matters of war and national security do not reflect the current views of this Office.”
Agreed and re: ETA—that to me is one of the scarier parts of this. Had McCain been elected, there’s no way these things would have been released for at least another 4 years. By that time, fewer and fewer people would care.
Quoting my sister:
What nobody stops to consider is that after 911 we were not attacked on our soil again. Do you think Iran or bin laden gives a sht about the World Court or the Geneva Convention? Ask Daniel Pearl… ask any of our soldiers who were beheaded while in the care of Iran or bin laden. As I recall hearing, Daniel Pearl couldn’t say much once they started hacking his head off, even the screaming stopped, didn’t it, once they cut through the vocal cords? We can sit back and play nice but they don’t play nice back. We water-boarded and American lives were saved… that’s the bottom line to me. I have no time for Obama’s class act of releasing these memos. Wasn’t he the one who was only going to look forward, and wasn’t interested in pursuing anything against George Bush? And isn’t he the one who is now corresponding secretly with Russia, offering to do away with missile defense in Europe, leaving our FRIENDS in Europe vulnerable? * As my brother replied, how can you stoop to their level and still call yourself the good guy?
Of course, as pointed out, the memos talk about setting the stage for Gitmo and using soldiers on our own soil…but let’s see what else they dig up. It seems to be driven by fear. “Surely you don’t want Jones to return, comrades?”
It might not be a bad tradition to start. But like I said if they don’t release all the information, it’s easy to quote out of context and mislead people.
I remember Tricky Dick, though I was young. Case in point about what I was saying earlier: they went after him while in office.
Sigh, whatever happened to that whole “checks and balances” thing?
I wonder how many of us were on double-secret probation :dubious:
*NEW YORK – The Central Intelligence Agency admitted Monday it has destroyed 92 tapes of harsh interrogation sessions of terror suspects – 90 more than it had previously acknowledged destroying.
The admission came as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder pledged against the use of the simulated drowning technique known as water-boarding, which is one of the methods believed to appear on at least some of the tapes.*
Gee, it was wrong, they knew it was wrong, but they did it anyway. If they were in the right legally or morally, there would be no need to destroy them. Makes you wonder if the tapes were even worse than imagined. Scary shit.
And it makes me wonder what other evidence was destroyed. When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib make the news, they’re probably the tip of the iceberg. How did these memos escape the fire? Which memos didn’t?
I’d like to see Bush et al tried for something. Whether there’s a conviction or not is beside the point. Showing the world that our leaders have to account for themselves after the fact would restore some of our international credibility, IMO.
It bothers me too. If I think what i do is legally and morally justifiable, I would want to KEEP the records of it, in case someone came after me (CYA). The last thing I’d do is destroy the very evidence that might protect me.
No, you destroy records when you think they will be used to take you down. But that leads to my question. If you are doing something you know is wrong, why would you want records and evidence of it, that you have to worry about? That sounds kind of dumb.
It would at least support our wild claims that we are a country of laws, and our equally wild claims that no one is above the law.
If the above is not the case, then maybe we should just drop the pretense once and for all.
Stuff came out after also. He fought tooth and nail against releasing things when he was in office, and if there was a Republican majority they never would have come out. No doubt he’d mark them double secret when he left.
It might be SOP to record such things, and it might be easier to quietly destroy the tapes afterward than to quietly get the soldiers to break SOP and quietly go along with overtly acting like unsupervised Gestapo.
I actually got into a bit of an argument with my dad over this. According to him, there was no direct benefit to the American public from releasing these memos. It didn’t help nor change anything and thus there really wasn’t a reason for them to be released. I argued that there was no requirement that information directly DO anything outside of educate people and that what was in those memos needed to be seen by the world. He refused to change his viewpoint, convinced that since they didn’t benefit anyone, there was no reason to release them. The undertone I got from him, however, was that he believed Obama released them as part of some bigger scheme to further his ‘agenda’, whatever the hell that is.
Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo refuses to back down on his post-9/11 legal opinions that gave President George W. Bush virtually unchecked power, even though many of the memos have since been repudiated for overreaching and inferior scholarship.
One nugget from the article:
*Yoo, a tenured law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, took a leave of absence in January to teach foreign relations law at Chapman University in Orange, California. While teaching at Berkeley, he was routinely the subject of protests by students and faculty.
*
Obviously Obama has the same “agenda” as any first-term president, which is to win a second term. But the RW, for no rational or even irrational reason I can see, persists in seeing something more sinister in him – either he’s a “puppet” of Pelosi/Reid/Soros/the “left”/something else, or worse he’s a puppetmaster, and in either case a lot further to the left than he’s willing to admit and his plan is to turn America into a socialist state.
Interesting. I live not far from there, and have never heard this, and was wondering WTF had make Berkeley students such wimp. Back in the good old days his office would have been occupied around the clock.
A few years back we were there when there was a street protest during which a car was burned. But it turned out that the protesters had bought the car ahead of time! The place is turning into a '60s revolutionary movement theme park, of you ask me. :dubious: