The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request Wednesday to gain access to a legal memo prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that reportedly contains information on the constitutional rights that Guantánamo detainees could legally claim during military commission proceedings in the U.S. Additionally, the May 4 [...]
George W. Bush justified his warrantless wiretapping by relying on Justice Department attorney John Yoo’s theories of unlimited presidential wartime powers, and started the spying operation even before Yoo issued a formal opinion, a government investigation discovered. Essentially, President Bush took it upon himself to ignore the clear requirement of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance [...]
In another case of protecting Bush administration secrets, Barack Obama’s Justice Department is opposing the release of a transcript of Vice President Dick Cheney explaining his role in blowing the cover of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson in 2003 while the White House was seeking to discredit her husband, a critic of the Iraq invasion. [...]
Since the Obama Administration now has czars for cars, information technology, bonuses, financial products, et cetera, can a book czar be far behind? Well, here’s a memo for the inbox of our book czar (or czarina) to-be. It’s about a slender volume that I want our new book czar/czarina to mandate as a “must read’ [...]
CIA Director Leon Panetta is continuing the culture of cover-up that has plagued the Agency for the past three decades, ever since William Casey and Robert Gates collaborated in the 1980s to hide the crimes of Iran-contra and to politicize sensitive intelligence. Panetta was expected to introduce an era of transparency and accountability to the [...]
On Jan. 17, 2003, Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo from the Pentagon’s top attorney. Attached to the classified document was a set of directives drafted two days earlier by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.”Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational [...]
John Yoo and some other Bush administration lawyers who built the legal framework for torture are now out of the U.S. government, but one still holds a Cabinet-level rank – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. In the summer of 2002, Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, offered assurances to the CIA that [...]
