thanks.
heart warming to see our folks in uniform standing on principle and defending our constitution as if it’s their primary sworn duty.
oh, yeah, it is.
contrast: lots of it.

According to Nixon, “executive privilege” arose via custom and court decisions, not the Constitution or statute. Executive privilege is NOT absolute (contradicting Bradbury). The strength of the privilege varies from strong to weak, depending on the nature of the communication the president seeks to protect from disclosure. The strength of the interest competing with that privilege must vary accordingly.

The strongest privilege relates to direct communications between the president and an adviser on military, foreign policy or national security issues. In that realm, the privilege is virtually absolute. Other claims are less protected. In Nixon, the competing interest that overcame the president’s privilege was the public’s interest in pursuing a formal investigation into criminal wrongdoing by the president’s advisers. Little wonder that Bradbury avoids that whole discussion by ignoring Nixon.

That says two things: Bradbury’s got nothin’, and he’s willing to violate the normal rules of legal argument to avoid admitting it. Bradbury also has nothin’ on his claim that Miers can ignore the congressional subpoena and avoid showing up at all. Miers can assert various privileges – hers or the president’s – in response to questions, but she can’t refuse to show up at all. Further, it is up to a court to determine the extent of a privilege, not the person asserting it.

If cornered and hauled into court, the Bush administration will fight like a wolverine. But it prefers to argue its case in the media, where there’s no risk of perjury, using the Rovian claim that this is all politics. But its principal tactic is to run out the clock, hoping that evidence will stale, memories fade and statutes of limitation will pass. It also hopes that time and intervening emergencies will distract Congress or the next Attorney General into dropping the issue. In which case, the strength of their claims, if any, will never be tested.

The most useful thing we can do is keep the memory alive.

The brief filed Thursday by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer directly challenged the integrity of President Bush’s war court.

Notably, it describes a Sept. 29, 2006, meeting at the Pentagon in which Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a veteran White House appointee, asked lawyers to consider Sept. 11, 2001, prosecutions in light of the campaign.

”We need to think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election,” England is quoted as saying.

snip

England is a two-term White House appointee. He joined the Bush administration in 2001 as Navy secretary, briefly served as deputy Homeland Security secretary and then returned to the Pentagon, where he supervised the prison camps’ administrative processes.

Crawford was a Republican attorney appointee in the Pentagon when Vice President Dick Cheney was defense secretary.

off topic.
i had no other place to go to do my screaming.
apologies

Communications from that safe house, if there were such, should have been surveilled in detail. I’m not sure that they weren’t, especially since a warrant was not necessary. When an administration spokesman, Mukasey in this case, audaciously lies about FISA, can we believe him as to what intelligence agencies did and did not do?

So, why was Cheney pissed at NYT in 2005? Wasn’t that around the time of the who-struck-john about them publishing teh Google map of his Chesapeake home? And Rummy’s? I had assumed the outrage was manufactured by the lunatic fringe, but maybe he was upset about it.

I would have been pushing the next Democratic initiative to counter the WH crap. As it is, I’ve got to catch up on that front.