http://www.wired.com/threatlev…..ked-for-p/

i really enjoy the way that your work compliments that of tpm and provides more of the gritty detail.

it’s nice to see that you organize all of this sprawling information in timelines: the poorman’s data-mining technique.

i bet if more and more stuff were put into an ever-expanding mutli-issue, multi-dimesnsional matrix of timelines, the sickening felonious amateurishness would be exposed for all to see.

I expect one could dig into the public record, as it is now and as it will be in future as more and more from the Bush-Cheney era is released and escapes from classification and secrecy, and find a lot more to support your theory, and mine, and different theories of others as well — with a lot of them not being necessarily, or at all, in the alternative, but the result of looking to see patterns, as they came up with horse-shit legal-like theories and rationalizations and built on them and shoved them into each other, all the while in aid in using, nurturing, preserving and growing power, and for them and their friends and supporters and those who might carry on their “legacy” and “ideas”.

It’s amusing to no end to hear movement conservatives and Republicans refer to themselves as having “principles”, with the implication and sometimes the actual assertion that Dems and liberals and progressives and DFHs in contrast do not, and representing themselves as having a “philosophy” and those outside of their thrall suffering from “ideology”, when it seems pretty plain that they have absolutely no principles beyond power — including that the Constitution is to them simply an impenetrable black box transplanted to earth by some ancient godlike species, whereas to the rest of us is a statement of principles to be examined in detail for proper intention and translation to current exigencies, adhered to as a matter of the Rule of Law and where deviated from resulting in alteration where necessary to preserve the human ideals expressed in it or in enforcement where determined its been broken or subverted in pursuit of the idea of power of people over other people.

This last part is where I join you and others in the notion that young constitutional scholar Obama, who in his studies of the constitution appears to have gotten himself a pretty clear idea of the power levers, has also gotten something of fundamental importance very very wrong. If we don’t take a hard look at the breaking and subversion of the rule of law by those we voted into office to preserve and protect it, then the rule of law is gone — maybe for good. And moreover the act of declining to look into and do something about systemic breaking and subversion of the rule of law constitutes a complicity in that breaking and subversion every bit as serious as the underlying acts, because it ensures the success of the goal of the underlying acts to undermine the rule of law. This extremely bright, articulate, charming, engaging guy has come down from the hills to kill the wounded republic with democratic kindness.

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/wa…..rance.html

First: I don’t see it as intending any sort of accountability-free zone at all. Rather, I see the intent, and beyond that the only justifiable rationale, being that Congress is saying to the executive branch: if there is a declaration of war — which, incidentally, comes from us in Congress, but we’re not going to think to specifically repeat that here because so often presidents seem to feel obliged to dispute it as if there’s some actual controversy involved in this proposition — we recognize you might be really really busy having to react to a lot of spooky scary urgent things right away without a lot of forethought so it’s going to get messy and mistakes will be made and i’s not dotted and t’s not crossed and all; so you’ve got 15 days grace and then you’ve got to be straight with us and the courts and the constitution and the people, including backfilling on any otherwise illegal wiretapping you’ve been doing to “preserve national security”.

Next, IMO the good folks in OVP Org, who I think we can agree were really running the show, at least the mechanics and intell and attending to all the orders and paperwork while Bush was furiously adjusting his codpiece, viewed that 15 day grace period not as a mere one-off accountability-free zone [which again, I don’t agree Congress intended it to be, per above], but instead a REPEATABLE tool, once one regards the AUMF not as a declaration of war — which very arguably it is not; I certainly argue it is not, but instead an abrogation of Constitutional responsibility by Congress — but instead a Congressional invitation to the president to declare war at his whim, and moreover to do so repeatedly: in other words , an AURDW, short for Authorization to Use Rolling Declarations of War.

An AURDW would allow the president to take one ‘war concept’, i.e. The War on Terror, and roll it out organization by organization, territory by territory, person by person, concept by concept, in secret even, at first at least, with each such declaration bringing its very own 15 day accountability-free zone. Need another 15 days? Declare another organization as subject of the WOT. Rinse, repeat, etc. This could apply to render each such declaration, say of al-Haramain, a separate declaration of war; or it could apply to render anything done in relation to al-Haramain for a 15 day period unaccountable, and anything else somehow connected to that also accountability-free, or else it would render the former ineffective and cut in on Article II power, dontcha know.

You may think this is too loonytoons. Hey, I think it’s loonytoons. But what you think or I think didn’t matter to OVP Org.

Bob in HI