May 07 2009
Angler Research Notes
The way the whole program was set up was very careful, to use other methods and only to resort to the enhanced techniques in those special circumstances. (deep involvement)
our commitment to the Constitution and constitutional principles, (code name for American Exceptionalism)
One way to nail that down is that there are two documents in particular that I personally have read and know about that are still classified in that National Archives. I’d ask that they be declassified. I made that request over a month ago on March 31st. What those documents show is the success, especially of the interrogation program in terms of what it produced by way of intelligence that let us track down members of al-Qaida and disrupt their plans and plots to strike the United States. It’s all there in black and white. (calling bluff)
Interrogation Debate Sharply Divided Bush White House
President George W. Bush issued on June 26, 2003, to mark the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture seemed innocuous (the irony)
The real trouble began on May 7, 2004, the day the C.I.A. inspector general, John L. Helgerson, completed a devastating report. (the bureaucrat)
Nobody knew it then, but the C.I.A.’s fateful experiment in harsh interrogation was over. (rule of law)
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales proposed a middle ground: move the detainees to Guantánamo but never acknowledge having held them in secret prisons. This proposal, lampooned by some officials as the “immaculate conception” option (the stupid)
In February 2007, Mr. Bellinger wrote to the Justice Department challenging Mr. Bradbury’s position. He called Mr. Bradbury’s memorandum a “work of advocacy” that gave a twisted interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and told colleagues he might resign. (the scrooge and the good guy)
In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Yoo wrote in the memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States.”
This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revoked—but not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration. (the extreme)
“I think the job of a lawyer is to give a straight answer to a client. One thing I sometimes worry about is that lawyers in the future in the government are going to start worrying about, “What are people going to think of me?” Your client the president, or your client the justice on the Supreme Court, or your client this senator, needs to know what’s legal and not legal. And sometimes, what’s legal and not legal is not the same thing as what you can do or what you should do.” (A bureaucrat gone awry)
“He claimed it was just a political ploy by the president’s enemies,” says Bradley. “Cheney saw politics as a game where you never stop pushing. He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls. If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back.” (what is his formative event?)
One source indicated that at least two of the earlier drafts were “equivocal” and “nuanced” — but noted over time they became “more advocative” of the views of then-Vice President Dick Cheney
Regarding Yoo’s advocacy of the use of presidential pardons, Gillers noted that although presidents have the constitutional right to pardon whomever he wants, and the decision to do so is often a political, it is ethically wrong for attorneys giving advice to Presidents to suggest ahead of time pardons for “entire particular categories of crimes.”
In a 2006 memoir of his government service, entitled “War by Other Means,” Yoo advocated that a president could take a number of steps so that people criminally charged with allegedly torturing prisoners would go free.
One investigator said that a state bar association is likely to consider Yoo’s comments perhaps the most “damning evidence” in considering his intentions while coauthoring his OLC memos.
先斩后奏：
“If that were true,” says the former official, “then the whole legal and policy review process from April through August would have been a complete charade.”