Pretending that the Bush administration wasn’t a criminal organization isn’t working out all that well. Sending a message that the government can make serious violations of the law with impunity just isn’t a good idea.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
16 Comments
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
Has anyone noticed how out of sight George Bush been since sequestering himself in Crawford after the election? I understand he was in Haiti with Bill Clinton, but does anyone know it?
And so, why are the Republicans getting away with hiding the Democrat’s greatest election ticket: George Bush?
I believe most of Bush’s time is occupied by the task of cleaning Tom Hicks pool.
You do realize that Crawford was a complete set-up, right? He sold that house before even his term ended. He moved to an exclusive Dallas suburb(right next door the aforementioned Hicks, I believe)
I’m not a follower of the Bushes so I didn’t know about the move. Does he still go to church or is he now willing to admit to that fraud as well?
My guess is .. it’s a fraud .. even if he does still go .. after all .. given his dislike of reading .. do you think he’s read the Bible?
That court case is good news. The administration should appeal the case. Then when the lose the federal appeal, they will have no choice but to do the right thing and allow the issues of illegal wiretapping to be tried in American courts.
It is not right for a President to actively pursue charges against his predecessor. That smells too much like a political witch hunt. If the courts make them do it, its a completely different thing.
Who says they’ll lose a federal appeal?
The PermaGov never loses to itself.
If you think that it has, you are not in possession of all the facts.
AG
The oath of the president is to uphold the law.
Who cares if it`s a past president who broke it.
He`s not above the law, nor is the current one, who would be breaking his own oath, if he fails to enforce the law.
The past president is a war criminal, (not only in my book), so what does a president have to do to be a candidate for prosecution these days.
“…what does a president have to do to be a candidate for prosecution these days?”
Doublecross his biggest campaign financers.
Dassit.
Dassall she wrote.
Bet on it.
Obama is walking that line very carefully right now.
Balancing Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Dr. Big Brother and Great Big Finance against themselves and also against the threat of economic…and therefore societal…collapse.
So far…just recently, anyway…so good.
But he is a very easy target up there.
Watch.
AG
Well Mr. Gilroy, that`s certainly a darkly humorous reply accompanied by a quite descriptive image.
I didn`t even expect a reply, since my question was an implied rhetorical one, but your answer seems to be bearing out my fears.
Thank you.
Dark or otherwise.
Just the truth of the matter, clearly spoken.
AG
Y’mean…telling the truth is a bad idea?
Lissen up, BooMan…the FBI, CIA, military intelligence, various special forces and at the very least the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, JBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II administrations seriously violated “the law” with almost complete impunity, and you damned well know it.
Have you read this?
The Short Sword of State Sponsored Terrorism
Y’oughta.
Hip to “Gladio?”
Check it out at Wikipedia
You should get out more, BooMan.
Cabin fever and all…
AG
it was a rather quaint notion it seems, at least that’s the percieved interpretation the permagov’s continuing defense of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the continued assault on the 4th amendment.
.
(EFF) – Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the federal district court in San Francisco found that the government illegally wiretapped an Islamic charity’s phone calls in 2004, granting summary judgment for the plaintiffs in Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama. The court held the government liable for violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The government’s overreaching claim of unbridled executive power finally backfired today in the Al-Haramain case. As the court wrote in its order, “Under defendants’ theory, executive branch officials may treat FISA as optional and freely employ the SSP [state secrets privilege] to evade FISA, a statute enacted specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive branch abuses of surveillance authority.”
The court, although noting the government’s “impressive display of argumentative acrobatics,” flatly rejected this theory. “Defendants could readily have availed themselves of the court’s processes to present a single, case-dispositive item of evidence at one of a number of stages of this multi-year litigation: a FISA warrant. They never did so.” Therefore, “for purposes of this litigation, there was no such warrant for the electronic surveillance of any of plaintiffs,” and the surveillance therefore violated FISA.
(Washington Independent) March 2, 2010 – The Obama administration told the federal court, once again, that it did not have the authority to order the government to make the critical document in the case available to the organization’s lawyers. The decision to reveal the document, wrote the government, “is committed to the discretion of the Executive Branch, and is not subject to judicial review.”
Not only does that defy the court once again, but there’s a catch: the court already has the document, which was filed months ago under seal. What’s more, the lawyers for Al-Haramain have already seen it; it was inadvertently turned over to them back in 2004, when the government was busy trying to prove that Al-Haramain was funnelling money to terrorists. Weeks later, the government, realizing its mistake, sent FBI agents to the lawyers’ offices to retrieve the document. But the cat was out of the bag: the lawyers had seen evidence that the foundation, and two of its lawyers, had been wiretapped. And that same document has already been filed, along with several other classified, sealed and secret filings, with the U.S. district court.
In other words, the government lawyers threatened to physically remove the document from the court files if the Judge insists that he has the right — as he already ruled he has — to allow Al-Haramain’s lawyers to see it.
“It’s a not-so-thinly veiled threat to send executive branch authorities (the FBI? the Army?) to Judge Walker’s chambers to seize the classified material from his files!” wrote Jon Eisenberg, Al-Haramain’s lawyer, in an e-mail. “In my view, that would be an unprecedented violation of the constitutional separation of powers. I doubt anything like it has happened in the history of this country.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."It occurs to me that the civil service lawyers bringing these cases to the courts are likely the same civil service lawyers who were in the Bush administration, watching or helping to avoid taking these cases to court. The fact that they lost shows that their original pleadings had no merit and that over a period of a couple of years they sought through legal maneuver to cover their tracks and that of the Bush administration. Failing to win a case through such a hamhanded set of pleadings might merit firing of a civil service lawyer, burrowed in or not.
That tightrope image applies here too. Obama and Holder seem to be using the courts to crack open the issue instead of cracking it open from the executive side. “The courts made us do it” politically communicates a reluctance to go on a witch hunt.
Watch for a change if and when all of the DOJ appointments are in place.