John Yoo: Al Qaeda Uses Telephones But KGB Spies Don’t
There’s a lot that’s downright amusing for all but Berkeley’s trustees in John Yoo’s rebuttal to the IG Report. Though there is some good news for Berkeley: John Yoo has heard of Youngstown, even if the Korean-American has underplayed the context of the Korean War.
The 1952 Supreme Court case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer is the IG’s lodestar. In Youngstown, the Court addressed President Harry Truman’s effort to seize steel mills shut down by a labor strike during the Korean War. Truman claimed that maintaining production was necessary to supply munitions and material to American troops in combat. Youngstown correctly found that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the exclusive power to make law concerning labor disputes. It does not, however, address the scope of the president’s power involving military strategy or tactics in war.
Our mistake in 2001, I guess, was to have had our labor discussions face to face and not via email.
But I’m most amused that John Yoo believes that the best way to find al Qaeda–an organization that had already cut back on the use of cell phones before 2001 and increasingly employed hawalas to elude electronic communication–is via tapping high tech communications.
Unlike, say, Soviet spies working under diplomatic cover, terrorists are hard to identify. Yet they are vastly more dangerous. Monitoring their likely communications channels is the best way to track and stop them. Building evidence to prove past crimes, as in the civilian criminal system, is entirely beside the point. The best way to find an al Qaeda operative is to look at all email, text and phone traffic between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S.
"The best way" to find an al Qaeda operative is to search high tech traffic between a select group of countries that doesn’t even include the country from which most 9/11 hijackers came?
Well, really, the whole thing is worth more for laughs, as Yoo desperately tries to shoot down the straw men haunting his unconscious. But at least we learn this.
"The best way" to find al Qaeda operatives is not, apparently, to torture other suspects.
Well, I’m glad Yoo finally figured that out.
Update: Anonymous Liberal apparently still has the patience with Yoo to engage him in good faith. But his entire post is worth reading for the way he slaps Yoo up silly with analysis from … John Yoo.
Ok. This post needed a spew alert for that last part.
(Klynn cleaning La Croix sparkling water off the monitor).
It is truly frightening to reflect that a person with Yoo’s “breadth of knowledge” can be put in a position to do the damage he has done to our Nation.
But then that is consistent with the Repugs view of governing – “Government is bad, so put incompetent people in positions to make it even worse so we can get rid of it completely”.
But this doesn’t even smack of partisanship to me:
It’s more on the level of: what is going on here that basic, seemingly simple things aren’t getting done.
Over and over, these things raise a lot more questions than they answer.
I’d impute it to ’stupidity’, but then when I look at the EW Timelines, someone didn’t want certain kinds of information known. The incompetence doesn’t seem random; it seems to have a fuzzy pattern. (Any time the word ‘Iran’ comes up, expect weirdness, for starters.)
yoo also misses the most important part
any time the administration wanted to track al qaeda they would have no problem procurring said warrant, they would also be allowed to track the information before they even applied for said warrant
you thinks that because the people he worked for are morons he could come up with moron excuses as if the people who he is talking toa re also morons
you use the word “sutspects” with too much poetic license
the adminsitration tortured everyone, not just “suspects” and they tortured these people for the purpose claiming they had information they knew did not exist
ps…marcy, did you read the thread we have going to say thank you to those being layed off at wilmington?
the mecca tour
think some main stream media might show up?
It does not, however, address the scope of the president’s power involving military strategy or tactics in war.
That would be Ex parte Milligan, which finds that as to US citizens on US soil, where courts are open, the 4th amendment applies. Even to “insurgents.” That’s one he still hasn’t processed. And then there’s the Keith case on domestic surveillance. Civil War, Vietnam War …
I thought maybe, given the great success Yoo’s tactics have had in finding Zawhahiri and Bin Laden, he was going to argue that the best way to find al-Qaeda is to torture people with funny names.
So he adds Pakistan to Afghanistan, but seems to forget his own rhetoric of a “global” war on terror. Remember how al-Qaeda was scheming with Iraq? Or was it Iran? Oh well, since all the hijackers were Afghan and Pakistani, I’m sure he’s got the bases covered on what communications to intercept. We just seize and search ALL worldwide communications with the US.
Bc it’s the best way.
He doesn’t really go into disobeying court minimization orders as a part of it all, does he?
That’s probably for the best as well.
At least now we can answer: which key precedent does Yoo hate the most? Turns out Milligan beats out Yoo by some margin.
He really never mentions it. It leaves him with nothing and he knows it. It even went so far as to define what is and isn’t “the battlefield”
Of course, it’s easy for someone like a top lawyer at OLC to forget that the courts were constantly open and operating through all of this. /s
Speaking of Milligan, what about the New York Times reporting in 2004 that Rumsfeld had signed an order authorizing Special Forces to kill Al Qaeda “where they found them”. If that includes inside the U.S., how does one square that with Milligan?
Kind of depends on the facts (channeling Judge Sotomayor much?) A US citizen and you’ve got a big problem, even notwithstanding Ex parte Quirin. Someone here illegally and covertly – harder call but you’d have posse comitatus issues as well. But it would all be very fact dependent.
http://www.harpers.org/archive…..c-90005373
It is noteworthy, however, that most of the evidence for that program puts it squarely under the aegis of JSOC, the military’s special forces command, and not the CIA. Documents that have emerged in the course of the torture investigation point repeatedly to high-level coordination of JSOC and CIA operations, however, and they point to friction as CIA seniors sensed their prime role in intelligence black operations was being usurped by Stephen Cambone and his pet project at the Pentagon.
Yeah, that Rumsfeld drivel on how the lawyers just took over and he and his operational guys ended up with not much say in anything cuz it was all the lawyers, all the time never made sense. Everyone has always pointed directly to Cambone’s participation and push on the torture programs.
And it wasn’t just Haynes at the meeting Mora recounts (where the rest of the civilian and military officers there were all voting to “return to” the Geneva conventions) who said no — it was CAMBONE AND Haynes.
Who’s that Cambone guy? Never seen the name before. /s
rotl – I assume that was a snark comment. But in case it wasn’t, Cambone was Rummy’s Under-Sec Def for Intel. Tried to be a behind the scenes type, but was heavily involved in all this stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cambone
Thanks, FormerFed. I did mean it as snark.
Rayne, per the Feb 2001 timeframe, that’s about the time that Cheney set up his Secret Energy Task Force IIRC. Possibly related? (Because it’s highly likely that Energy Task Force was looking at pipelines and oil around the Caspian, including regions of Iran.)
roTL – the article about Nacchio which indicated the feds spoke with him about “Groundbreaker” on Feb. 27, 2001, also said that the NSA had been working on the project in 2000:
Did that mean they were working on this in 2000 when Clinton was still in office, or did it mean late 2000, after the November elections? No idea.
I suspect that Team Cheney started influencing work at NSA as soon as the day after the election, regardless of the outcome. It seems incredible that he would have a completed energy policy within 100 days of the inauguration without having laid groundwork well in advance of the inauguration; why would national security projects be different?
Might be worth revisiting the Bush/Cheney transition team members to see if any familiar names pop up, the kind of people who’d be able to hit the ground running on both energy and national security issues.
There’s also the chance that Qwest unwittingly played a different role in this situation; if Team Cheney or others used Qwest’s assumptions about income against them, they could have traded on this and made money on the decline of the company’s stock valuation. (Hello, Goldman Sachs?)
[edit: just realized the judge’s comments are redacted, so we’re not certain it’s NSA or CIA or some other entity which was in discussions with Nacchio — but without reading the full context of judge’s comments, it’s likely it was NSA talking with Nacchio.]
Rayne, if you come back to read this — I’ve never been able to catch up on the Iran-Contra issue, but at least back that far the whole Israeli, Iranian, Saudi mix of Ghorbanifar and Chalabi types were almost certainly snarling at Clinton while they tried to destroy him politically.
At least some of those interests, in different combos, wanted to control oil and gas, surely? (Meaning, Mid-East oil and gas.) Bush I had gone to war for it, and then Bill Clinton probably stumbled along and interruped their Grand Plans.
PNAC was written in 1998; that was surely not the first salvo, but it suggests that were making plans — or pissed about their ‘plans delayed’ by Clinton and Gore — at least by 1998.
It sure looks to me as if this was in the works at least from the early 1990s when Cheney was Sec of Defense.
It also may help explain their almost blind hatred and irrational views of Al Gore and Bill (and Hillary) Clinton. Whoever Cheney’s minions and fellow travelers are, they’ll never, ever forgive Gore for trying to get us off oil. And they’ll never forgive Big Dog for being a bright, articulate person who understands the Constitution.
There’s no way they could have pulled something this big off a shelf in Jan 2001. It had to go back far earlier.
Very sorry, forgot to come back here and check for loose ends until now.
I think the other bit which scared the global energy warmongers was Gore’s first book published in 1992 while he was a seated senator; he called for a global Marshall plan to save our environment, including an exit from oil dependency.
Oh, and remember when the Russians left the Germans shivering in freezing weather last January? Looks like some EU types finally got tired of worrying that their heat might disappear in middle of winter. The last paragraph of this post is ominous, but again take with a giant grain of salt; it appears to be the emerging conventional wisdom, but as we know that doesn’t make it accurate.
Oh, and in some piece on the AIPAC case, Laura Rozen noted that the two AIPAC lobbyists (Rosen and Weissman**) got info from DoD’s Larry Franklin (who worked in Dougie Feith’s OSP Shop of Horrors), and then IIRC they went to Elliott Abrams who was at that time on the NSC (!).
So that’d be an interesting little Loop-de-Looperootie, eh?
** Weissman, according to her reporting and also New Yorker, was an ‘Iran expert’, whatever that means. If he was an ‘Iran expert’ like Condi was a ‘Russian expert’, he knew stats and a lot of ‘book learnin’, but hadn’t ever read Iranian literature or grasped the culture. But again, pure speculation on my part as to what his ‘expertise’ did — or didn’t — signify. He probably was an ‘expert’ on all things military, but whether he knew diddly shit about their history or culture is not reported.
WRT the link you provided: think about the origin of the nuclear energy technology Iran received already.
Some of it came from Russia; fuel certainly has, and recently.
Iran has plenty of natural gas to trade for currency; they have a legitimate need for nuclear electricity generation if we think of natural gas as their primary “cash crop.”
But the instability of gas business development has been due to a global tug of war, including China. Americans don’t really think of natural gas as a proxy for oil; it’s become a near-equivalent, and countries with demand the size of China are going to put a lot of pressure on the already volatile gas market.
China has also supplied both uranium and nuclear technology to Iran, too, and they certainly expected something for it.
You have to wonder if something similar was happening again, with Obama putting McChrystal (and his ties with JSOC and its possible assassination programs) in. CIA was getting antsy to not be divested and felt happy with the extent to which Obama would protect torture and murder, so they wanted to gear up instead of leaving it to JSOC.
I’ll say again – assassination of someone who is the “wrong” person is murder, even in war, and assassination after taking someone into custody and questioning them, even in war, is murder. As is leaving them to die from the damage you inflict by your questioning.
All the revelations really flesh out more the part of the el-Masri story, though, were the suggestions were made to just murder him as a way of resolving the problem. I think it wasn’t a lack of perceived authority to kill innocent people that prevented them, but more a concern over all the Macedonians including those at the hotel who knew of US involvement in his “disappearance.”
Hmmm, very interesting.
How did the CIA manage to let Yoo go, what with his unerring ability to spot Soviet spies? And his deeply rooted awareness that Russian nukes pose nowhere near the threat of Jose Padilla or Khalid el-Masri.
The real news is that Yoo was also tasked with heading up the OLC drunk drivers national security task force. Drunk drivers are apparently infinitely more dangerous than KGB spies as well. Yoo determined that the best way to catch them was to hang out in sleazy dives and monitor last calls. This tends to explain a lot about his legal writing during that time.
When I took a course on National Security Law taught by John Ely at Yale Law School back in 1994 or so, Youngstown was the leading case that the course concentrated on. That course was basically a war powers course.
You know, I’m guessing that made since then. Post -Church commission, I think the conventional wisdom was that the battlefield had moved from being the Exec vs. the citizens to being the Exec v. Congress (via maneuvering like the Congressional fiats re: the contras).
Resurrecting the ideology of imperialism vis a vis rights of citizens on domestic soil, and adding covert attacks on the court’s by secret Exec fiat and by authorizing direct lies to and misleading of the courts, would have probably been treated like the stuff of paranoia.
Yoo admits they were looking t all email, phone, and text traffic to Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11. That makes everybody who called, emailed, or texted anyone in those countries an aggrieved party under FISA. Paging Mr. Belew!
And they still couldn’t find bin Laden…? By Yoo’s logic, does that make bin Ladin a KGB spy…? Or is there a separate category for ‘Muslims who do not use cell phones, email, or text’?
Boy, it’s a good thing we poured billions into high tech weapons systems instead of teaching foreign languages in our schools. /s
It has always been a war against Muslims who don’t use cell phones and anyone else who does. That’s why collateral casualties are not an issue.
Yeah, I guess that state secret, of which americans on american soil the NSA snooped on without warrants, was ” still classified only because they are yet to be reported on the
fronteidtorial page of theNew York TimesWall Street Journal”BTW – anyone else less than impressed that his example of FDR’s warrantless surveillance “More than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor” is also an example of not only warrantless surveillance, but failed warrantless surveillance that didn’t prevent Pearl Harbor.
It reminds me of Goldsmith’s admonition that GITMO detainees in a real trial setting would tell tales like Scheherazade.
I guess a crazed despot who killed innocent people was on his mind when he made the analogy.
I was going to point -out that murder,torture,etc are OK if committed by those who will control any investigation of same, …but let’s just summarize…
If things are not done fairly, the ultimate result will be chaos.
Milligan is a tough one for Yoo. Where did you suppose he learned to ignore the inconvenient contrary opinion:
[Emphasis supplied].
Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (4 Wall.)(1866). Why would anyone in W’s cadre want to entertain the thought: “No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.” Hello? Maybe Nancy Grace could get on this!
* I am just going to repeat this one part: “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances.”
Milligan was a 5 to 4 decision of the Supreme Court. This from the dissent is interesting:
Even in the dissent the authority is always ultimately referred to Congress. There is no suggestion here of inherent authority of the President. All authority is referred to the sanction of Congress. The dissent in Milligan does not help Yoo in moving beyond the prescriptions of the then extent FISA.
The central arrogant idea at the source of the river of sewage only partially visible in the IG Report is, we’re going to do anything we can imagine and desire to do to whomever for any reason including, but not limited to, indefinite detention, torture, and murder without informing anyone or seeking anyone’s approval (Congress or the Judiciary) because we are the most powerful men in the world and not subject to anything so trivial as the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Rule of the Law. We will lie, sprinkle pixie dust (h/t to EW), redefine words, and change at will the official names of our programs and descriptions of their activities because we can and nobody can touch us because we have a legal opinion from a lawyer who says we’re right.
Yoo is the quintessential whore in this unsavory drama because his legal analysis wouldn’t receive a passing grade in a first year course in legal research and writing at any law school in the country. He did it because he wanted to piss with the big dogs.
I actually think we are fortunate that their arrogance vastly exceeded their intelligence.
I’m sure if we took every bloody sentence of Yoo’s op-ed apart, we’d find a gross error or misrepresentation.
This sentence bugs the crap out of me even more today than it did when I first read it last night:
Um, yeah. 18 of the hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis, one from UAE.
That’s why the BEST way to find other al Qaeda operatives is to AVOID surveilling communications between Saudi Arabia, UAE and the U.S.
And AVOID torturing any Saudi/UAE citizen colluding with al Qaeda in any way.
Just makes me want to grab Yoo by the scruff and ask him if he got his bachelors and his JD out of a CrackerJack box.
Also makes me want to ask WTF they were really doing, especially when they started on this warrantless wiretapping project at least as early as February 2001.
One gets the distinct impression reading Yoo, with his assertion about ‘obsolete law’ falling short of the unforeseen needs of fighting an international terror organization, that he/they were scared shitless by these furriners, almost like they were thought to be a highly advanced Martian civilization.
No serious analyst ever suggested they had fighting capacities beyond what the USSR possessed. They had no labs, no manufacturing capacities for highly advanced weapons. Yet Yoo gives the impression our backs were against the wall, as we desperately clung to the one (illegal) weapon that would save us from certain defeat.
The FISA courts never limited the capacity of the President to wiretap Al Qaida. At least, that’s never been demonstrated; they’ve claimed it but have never offered evidence. Apparently evidence is also an obsolete thing under the Yoo justice system.
And there’s nothing original in his claim that the executive has the right to break any law under a blanket national security privilege. The law could have been quickly and easily changed and ultimately was. But Yoo insists it was both sensible and legal to break the law, much as Nixon told David Frost “it’s not illegal when the President does it.”
Where is the sitting judge that has supported Yoo’s claim? In Yoo’s imagination. Thankfully, numerous obsolete laws still protect us from governmental abuses. If we don’t do better at enforcing them, though, they’ll become as worthless as the paper John Yoo’s law degree is printed on.
I don’t know whether anyone else is still watching the SJC panels, but on this last one, we have just learned that David Rivkin will be appearing. This has been a PSA.
Did Yoo really mean this:
Our military and intelligence agencies cannot attack or defend the nation unless they know where to aim
Why would our military need to attack our nation?
Freudian slip. The missing object could be that our forces cannot attack “other nations”.
But his authoritarian subordinate’s mind probably did think in terms of a Seven Days in May scenario whereby they “attacked us here to keep my bosses safe”, or something to that effect.
Luckily with all that warrantless surveillance they discovered where to aim – Iraq.
Someone has to put the suck in successful.
@26 – the beauty of the case is that they include in the reported version the arguments of the petitioners and Gov. If you gave it a “translation” to modernize language, Gov then sounds pretty much like Rush Limbaugh and John Yoo now, down to the “war like no other” allegations.
The argument, even more so than the opinion, lays out all the reasons Obama should be shying away from military commissions now.
From the dissent in In re Milligan.
“We have no apprehension that this power, under our American system of government, in which all official authority is derived from the people and exercised under direct responsibility to the people, is more likely to be abused than the power to regulate commerce or the power to borrow money. And we are unwilling to give our assent by silence to expressions of opinion which seem to us calculated, though not intended, to cripple the constitutional powers of the government, and to augment the public dangers in times of invasion and rebellion.”
Beautiful.
The introductory sentence to the dissent:
http://www.constitution.org/ussc/071-002a.htm
Thanks for supplying the reference.
On topic, Ken Silverstein over at Harper’s has this:
Six Questions for Jack Balkin on the Entrenchment of the National Surveillance State
OT: Marcy, I’m watching the little “thermometer” at the Marcy Fund, and it’s been inching steadily upward since the “blowjob incident.”
Just sayin’. . .
Are you suggesting that giving the MSM a Blowjob pays well ?!! *g*
Naw. Just suggesting that Marcy’s appearance on a MSM show and saying “blowjob” excites folks so much that they open their wallets & give to the Marcy Fund.
Or, that the rest of us like hearing & seeing Marcy on the TeeVee, so we donate as well.
“The best way” to find al Qaeda operatives is not, apparently, to torture other suspects.
I’m learning new shadings of the bitter laugh lately.
Soooooo, they’ve now decided that torture is classified information. (See no evil, hear no evil, etc.) What a farce.
Censors come out at Gitmo war crimes hearing
Associated Press — “A reference to harsh treatment at CIA prisons brought out Guantanamo’s censors Thursday as an official of the war crimes court abruptly cut the sound to prevent spectators from hearing classified information.
“Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, a lawyer appointed by the Pentagon to defend 9/11 suspect Ramzi bin al Shibh, began discussing the prisoner’s treatment before he was taken to Guantanamo in September 2006 when the censor hit the switch.”
Link.
Yoo is nothing more than a war criminal masquarading as a law professor. His sins will catch up with him.
Agreed, so what’s up at Boalt Hall, which is the name of the law school at Berkley?
Major league embarrassment having Hey, Yoo Dude on the faculty. Two more important questions are what the hell is he teaching and what are his students learning?
Who is the CIA allowed to kill?
Cheney’s secret assassination program may be terminated, but the U.S. is already carrying out “targeted killings”
By Mark Benjamin
July 17, 2009 | “Media reports recently exposed efforts by the Bush administration to create a CIA “assassination squad” so secret that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the agency to keep Congress in the dark about it. The Wall Street Journal called it a secret plan to “capture or kill al Qaida operatives”; on Thursday, the Washington Post said the program was about to be activated when CIA director Leon Panetta pulled the plug.
“But the blaring headlines, and the buzz in the blogosphere, are not just due to more evidence of the ex-veep’s addiction to executive power and behind-the-scenes machinations. It’s that word “assassinate.” Most observers assume that assassination is specifically proscribed by U.S. policy. Except it isn’t, exactly, and while the secret CIA assassination program canceled by Panetta may never have claimed a victim, the U.S. is already carrying out actions that look nearly exactly like assassinations, and doing so within the guidelines of domestic and international law. The United States has had plenty of legal latitude to carry out targeted killings during the so-called war on terror — and has been exercising that option vigorously for the past eight years.”
Link.
All those drone targets are assassinations.
Wow, Benjamin needs to be a bit more specific than this:
There were assassinations. They were carried out by JSOC-affiliated teams.
At least one of them was a major embarrassment, and at least one other was embarrassing but not as bad as the first.
They could be the reason why the CIA team was being ratcheted up; based on content I’ve read so far, the JSOC teams were comprised of people who were not suited for these kinds of missions, and the missions operated without informing the local CIA station chief or any other intel apparatus in the impacted countries. CIA had always been a better fit, but the nature of the mission made disclosure to Congress a necessity and the administration obviously didn’t make any disclosures, running through JSOC-related infrastructure instead.
I thought I read that the assassinations were moved to military special ops, where it can be kept completely secret–no congressional notification required.
Everything I’ve seen so far suggests that there were two programs — one in CIA, one in JSOC. The CIA wasn’t active. The JSOC was.
We could be looking at internecine warfare between CIA and DOD, where CIA is outing some of these skeletons in order to re-take control of intel prerogatives and resources which had shifted to DOD under Porter Goss and remained there under Hayden. The f*ckups weren’t enough to cause this to happen in 2006 (under what appears to be Goss’s watch); they’ve taken the opportunity to shake this out under a Democratic administration when their power is at ebb, getting the yips out of the system.
Does anyone believe, as I do, there’s a good chance that Cheney continued to be in charge of that program despite the result of the election?
Nothing to back this up–just a hunch. And somebody else expressed it here just a day or so ago, too, so maybe my hunch isn’t too far-out. Namely, I wonder if Obama didn’t extend Secret Service “protection” of Dick “Dick” just to have some agents around keeping an eye on him. Ya know?
Some folks ’round these parts have described Panetta and his quick trip downtown to have an unscheduled and urgent meeting with the members of the Intelligence Committee as Panetta showing up with his hair fully engulfed in flames. After the briefing, several members of the committee said everyone was stunned by what he said. Later on they downplayed the surprise factor and over the past week media reports about the program Panetta terminated and briefed the committee about appear to be approaching a consensus that it involved inserting assassination teams into foreign countries to dispatch Al Quaeda targets into the great beyond. Efforts have been made to ho-hum the program by stating that it was off and on, never really functional, and would have been lawful activity in wartime in any event.
I don’t doubt that Panetta and the committee members could set my hair on fire with stories about the past 8 years, so it’s going to take a helluva lot more than the commonplace wartime horror story de jour to shock them than it will take to shock me. With the exception of assassinating U.S. citizens for political reasons inside the United States, the only other circumstance that I can imagine that would set Panetta’s hair on fire and shock the members of the committee would be to discover that Cheney was still de facto in charge and actively operating his own assassination squad as if the election hadn’t happened.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can’t eliminate it as a possibility give what these jokers have done. As you say, maybe Cheney is under house arrest pending further investigation.
That’s one possibility, although the notion of Dick Cheney under house arrest is too cheering a notion for me to get my head around.
FWIW, and not to be a conspiracy theorist, but largely because in the summer and fall of 2007, some nuclear warheads went missing on a B-52, after which the CIA basically slam-dunked GWBush with an Iran NIE that took the wind out of the BushCheney momentum to bomb Iran. I don’t actually understand all the details and procedures of military life, but for nuclear warheads you’d have to assume that: (1) someone at the very, very highest levels had succeeded in overseeing and implementing some kind of parallel process, and/or (2) someone had infiltrated and set up a parallel process.
Because that whole weirdness has never been explained, nor do we know whether all ‘missing’ warheads (or whatever they are) were ever fully accounted for, it sticks in my mind. Something like that seems like a Cheney operation: ignore what the experienced military command recommends and just set up an alternate system to suit your objectives. After all, he’d already overseen the set up within DoD of the OSP, Feith’s Little Shop of Horrors. So it wouldn’t have bothered him one bit to continue setting up alternative, parallel structures; that seems to be his forte.
Problem is: how does the left hand know what the right hand is doing? And what if the left hand starts cloning itself, so we have 12 left hands, none of which knows what the others are doing? And then there’s the dividing right hand…
I’m not implicating Cheney in that event of August 2007, but to a striking degree it does seem to have that sort of ‘rogue, go-it-alone’ Cheneyish tone to it.
However, Pat Lang seems to think this whole CIA-Cheney conversation is naive and bizarre. Maybe he’s right. The problem for those of us ‘out of the loop’ is that so many things went so appallingly wrong there is just — at least in my own case — a desire for better explanations, as a first step in fixing a process that seems to have been subverted by interests as yet unknown.
and @ 62. Many thanks for sharing your thoughts. It’s so frustrating knowing that things went so very very wrong and, beyond a certain point, We the People are not supposed to know. It is none of our bidness–they’re in charge and, while they might fight among themselves, they also protect each other.
well.. perhaps I should rethink my opposition to aggressive surveillance using our communications infrastructure against extremist conspiracies bent on infiltrating and harming our democracy. I will expect to see Mr Yoo’s eloquent legal justification for tapping the phones and Internet connections of The Family and their C-Street residence by the end of the week. After all what can possibly be a greater threat to state security than a group of Taliban-types who openly proclaim that they were chosen by god to lead a purifying jihad and that their own actions as holy warriors are above the law and any other external standard of morality?
Mary a question for you..please..wouldn’t all assassination be murder? and if not why not? Do we as Americans have the right to go kill anyone as long as we deem them to be the ”RIGHT PERSON”?
Thanks for your answer ahead of time!! I love reading your posts!!
I’d like to add a question to yours, flyarm616: Who is the “we” determining who is/is not the “right person”? Shudder. Can you imagine having that job? Jeebus.
It goes back to the Laws of War and the theory that an illegal combatant or unprivileged belligerent has no rights. He can be killed or captured if he has taken up arms against a government. He can be kept captive under any conditions until the end of hostilities. This is what they are citing as the authority along with the AUMF.
The AUMF gives broad powers to the president:
As long as we say we are at war against terrorism, anything goes.
Please tell us what an “illegal combatant” and “unprivileged belligerent” are. And who made up those definitions? And who gets to apply them? Many thnx.
Three clicks to wikipedia’s helpful explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_combatant
Many thanks, esseff44. Motoring over there now.
and also Mary, if you see this. I’m slowly absorbing this stuff, I think. Please correct me:
“However, unlike the terms “combatant”, “prisoner of war”, and “civilian”, the term “unlawful combatant” is not mentioned in either the Hague or the Geneva Conventions. So while the former terms are well understood and clear under international law, the term “unlawful combatant” is not.[3][8]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_combatant
So, the ICRC defined the term in 2005, Bush issued that Nov 2001 Executive Order and the US Congress picked that up and put it in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Nonetheless, Geneva Conventions and other international law is still silent about it?
Many thnx.
You’ve about got it. And the MCA “definitions” aren’t really a) tied to Congress’ own AUMFs and also aren’t b) really defined in a very decent way.
So the courts have been trying very hard to sort it out and we’ve been having even very “conservative” judges astounded at what DOJ is saying “counts” under the broad MCA definitions (for example, in one case DOJ argued, I think to Judge Leon, that the fact that someone was tortured by al-Qaeda and then held in prison by the Taliban after the false confession tortured out by al-Qaeda made them associated with al-Qaeda so as to be able to be held indefinitely in US torture).
See, in large part what Congress did was try to avoid the combatant issue period and make a case for classifying as “unlawful enemy combatants” people who might have sold a burger to bin laden at a Kabul McDonald’s drive through. The courts are buying into that, but they are trying to go as close to that as they can and, given the wide range of persons and situations before them, are spitting out opinions to try to set definitions and while it’s not necessarily contradictory – it’s not cohesive and more than that, the approach isn’t really bridging the civilian/military/madeupbcwe’dscrewedupcivilian&military chasms.
Obama and others keep trying to set out these “categories” of people at GITMO as the ones they can make out civiilan cases against, the ones they can have military tribunals for, the ones they tortured too much to use information, etc. etc. etc.
Those arent the right start point categories.
The start point categories should be — who at GITMO is or was actually a “combatant” to start with?
With under 10% battlefield captures and a huge number of sales, local vendettas, etc. involved, along with the obsession over kids sent to pick up tomatos and the like — the big start point is a 90% or so non-combatant detention group.
Start there, and you end up somewhere vastly different than Obama is going
Thanks very very much, Mary. I do appreciate it. This stuff is all so devious and awful! My mind balks at even trying to understand how perverse and contrived are the steps that have been taken to just do what a few wanted to do, to hell with the sadistic violence visited upon individuals as a result and the costs and consequences to this nation. And, like that Santa Clara v Southern Pacific travesty, what they have done is being slowly incorporated into law.
And “who at GITMO is or was actually a ‘combatant’ to start with?” Heck, they don’t/didn’t care about that any more than they cared about international law when they started this mess. They were only interested in bending any and everything to their will so they could have their way.
I’ll keep plugging away at understanding this. Rather proud of myself that you think I got off to a passable start.
Again, many many thanks.
Rachel had one of the best interviews on this with Col. Wilkerson. He says the made mistakes and that hurt the programs.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#31914358
EPU’d, but hope you see this.
I think that if there were a plot carried through where there was a car bomb, or a sniper, poisening etc. of Osama Bin Laden and/or other prominent, known, identified and identifiable al-Qaeda operations officers, then in the context of the authorizations given by Congress and the quasi war status and laws of war, arguabley such a targeted killing of a leader of the opposing “force” in something that is being denominated as war would be arguably “legal.”
I would certainly respect arguments to the contrary. I basically don’t believe you can paint what is going on as a war – which is why our military, who are certainly under the pressures and dangers of a war, have such a hard time achieving a “mission accomplished” footing.
Once someone has been “reduced to possession” even under the laws of war and even if they are the commander of the opposing forces, you can’t just kill them without it being murder. And if your car bomb/sniper/etc. ends up assassinating bystanders, civilians, etc. then even even the arguable legal footing of war based targeted killing of an opposing commander fails.
All imo, fwiw.
Yoo, one of the undead in a Zombie movie coming to eat your brains.
Who would ever consider a lower level Dept of Justice employee would have the authority to write a memo legalizing torture by renaming it “enhanced interrogations”?
Sure Cheney told him to and it was at the request of the President. Would John Yoo commit suicide if the president ordered it?
Why not?
I can only assume all of Congress went along with this by the way in which they lack zeal in seeking justice for it all….!
Here’s a link to a story about Cheney directed CIA assassination squads authorized to carry out missions within the United States per presidential order. The story first appeared the Washington Post yesterday.
http://rawstory.com/08/news/20…..n-program/
roTL — oh damn, I just tripped over something I forgot about completely.
klynn and I posted interrelated content about this more than a year ago.
I rather wonder whether Obama realizes his apparent public position with Russia may or may not be looking, um, flawed…or exposed…