From The Raw Story
By Nick Juliano

Keeping track of all the scandals and malfeasance that have marked President George W. Bush’s two terms in office can prove rather taxing to even the most vigilant White House watchdog.

Now the online magazine Slate has created a handy visual aide pointing out which administration officials — including Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and scores of others — are implicated in various scandals.

The interactive Venn diagram gives Gonzales top honors as perhaps the most corrupt administration figure. Slate says Gonzales, who was White House counsel before becoming Attorney General, is implicated in all five scandals it studied: coercive interrogation, warrantless wiretapping, Justice Department hiring, Justice Department firing and CIA tapes.

“If this were The Sopranos, he’d be our Silvio,” Slate says, referring to Tony Soprano’s consigliere. (Even within theh White House, Gonzales had his own fictional-mobster-inspired nickname. The president reportedly referred to Gonzales, who had been with Bush since his time as Texas governor, as Fredo, a reference to Michael Corleone’s “weak” and “stupid” younger brother in The Godfather.)

Bush and Cheney were both directly involved in the coercive interrogation, wiretapping and tape-destruction scandals, Slate says. In its entries on each administration official, the magazine lays out the cases for and against prosecuting each of them.

The Slate reporters find reasons to prosecute both Bush and Cheney. For example, “The president, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the military, is responsible for the actions of his subordinates who broke the laws.” And, “The vice president and his office have pushed hard for violation of the law, fought to immunize lawbreakers and obstructed inquiries into lawlessness.”

Read more Gonzales

From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has caught some flak for proposing, in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, that Congress should declare war on Al Qaeda.

Instead, he should be applauded for his brilliant idea.

First of all, Mukasey is admitting, whether he wants to admit it or not, that the Bush/Cheney program of capturing alleged terrorists and holding them for years as enemy combatants without charge in detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and various undisclosed locations around the globe, and of torturing many of them, are illegal actions that violate US law and International Law. So let’s give him credit for that.

Second, he wants to make these criminal acts retroactively legal and future such acts legal, by declaring Al Qaeda to be some kind of an entity and to declare America to be at war with that entity. Of course, doing this wouldn’t exactly solve the torture problem, since the Geneva Conventions are fairly clear about the fact that you just cannot torture. You can’t even treat captives in a war in a degrading manner, which pretty much rules out things like stress positions and waterboarding, unless perhaps conducted by polite men in butler uniforms who address the victims as “sir” and deliver hors derves and wine spritzers during the process.

But what’s brilliant about Mukasey’s idea is that it could be so easily expanded beyond just terrorism.

Once you accept the idea that a gang of armed men can be declared war on like a country, it opens up a whole universe of enemies against which the US could declare war.

Read more War

From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

How bad can it get?

That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with for a while here, given the Bush administration’s utter disdain for the rule of law.

And I’m wrestling even more with it now, having just read an article by investigative reporter Tim Shorrock over at salon.com.

In it, he talks about something called “the Main Core,” a top-secret database that the government uses for domestic surveillance.

I’d never heard of the thing before.

But Shorrock says it “contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies.”

One former intelligence officer told him that it was “designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution, or the imposition of martial law.”

There it is again, that haunting, hovering phrase, “martial law.”

I’ve been told by members of InfraGard, an FBI-private sector group consisting of 26,000 businesspeople, that they’ve been told to plan for “martial law.”

And Bush’s National Security Directive 51 seems to pave the way for that, as well.

Read more Martial Law

From Salon
By Tim Shorrock

The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.

While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.

Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA’s working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.

The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi’s and Conyers’ offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses — and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.

Read more Abuse of Power

From True Blue Liberal
By Stephen Lendman

Along with other past and present administration officials, Attorney General Michael Mukasey supports lawlessness and police state justice. Weeks after the Supreme Court’s landmark (June 12) Boumediene ruling, he addressed the conservative, pro-war American Enterprise Institute (on July 21) and asked Congress to overrule the High Court - for the third time. His proposal:

– subvert constitutional and international law;

– authorize indefinite detentions of Guantanamo and other “war on terror” prisoners (including US citizens designated “enemy combatants”); and

– deny them habeas rights, due process, and any hope for judicial fairness.

Since June 2004, the (conservative) High Court made three landmark rulings. Twice Congress intervened, and Mukasey wants a third time. In Rasul v. Bush (June 2004), the Court granted Guantanamo detainees habeas rights to challenge their detentions in civil court. Congress responded with the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) of 2005 subverting the ruling.

In June 2006, the Supreme Court reacted. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, it held that federal courts retain jurisdiction over habeas cases and that Guantanamo Bay military commissions lack “the power to proceed because (their) structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions (of) 1949.” Read the rest of this entry »

From The Washington Post
By Carol D. Leonnig

Political appointees at the Department of Labor are moving with unusual speed to push through in the final months of the Bush administration a rule making it tougher to regulate workers’ on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins.

The agency did not disclose the proposal, as required, in public notices of regulatory plans that it filed in December and May. Instead, Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao’s intention to push for the rule first surfaced on July 7, when the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posted on its Web site that it was reviewing the proposal, identified only by its nine-word title.

The text of the proposed rule has not been made public, but according to sources briefed on the change and to an early draft obtained by The Washington Post, it would call for reexamining the methods used to measure risks posed by workplace exposure to toxins. The change would address long-standing complaints from businesses that the government overestimates the risk posed by job exposure to chemicals.

The rule would also require the agency to take an extra step before setting new limits on chemicals in the workplace by allowing an additional round of challenges to agency risk assessments.

The department’s speed in trying to make the regulatory change contrasts with its reluctance to alter workplace safety rules over the past 7 1/2 years. In that time, the department adopted only one major health rule for a chemical in the workplace, and it did so under a court order.

Read more Workplace Toxins

From The LA Times
By David G. Savage

More than six years after the Bush administration sent hundreds of foreign prisoners to Guantanamo Bay, the rules for deciding just who can be held and for how long remain unclear.

Comments Monday by the attorney general and congressional Democrats suggest such issues will not be resolved soon — and not before a new administration takes power.

Roughly 270 prisoners remain at Guantanamo, of whom about 20 are slated to be tried as war criminals. No one is sure what will happen to the rest of them, even if the prison itself is closed.

Last month, the Supreme Court said judges could hear appeals from the detainees, and in theory, order some of them released.

But the justices did not spell out who would qualify as an “unlawful enemy combatant,” as the prisoners at Guantanamo are designated, nor did they say what proof would be needed to show that someone captured years ago remained a danger today.

On Monday morning, U.S. Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey called on Congress to pass legislation to set the rules.

“I am urging Congress to act to resolve the difficult questions left open by the Supreme Court,” he said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. “Without guidance from Congress,” judges will disagree on the rules, and it will “lead to a long period of protracted litigation.”

Read more Rules

From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

A conservative-dominated U.S. Appeals Court has opened the door for President George W. Bush or a successor to throw American citizens – as well as non-citizens – into a legal black hole by designating them “enemy combatants,” even if they have engaged in no violent act and are living on U.S. soil.

The federal Appeals Court in Richmond, Virginia, ruled 5-4 on July 15 that Bush had the right, while prosecuting the “war on terror,” to hold Qatari citizen (and Peoria, Illinois, resident) Ali al-Marri indefinitely as an “enemy combatant.”

But some of the court’s more liberal judges expressed alarm, saying the legal reasoning that denied al-Marri meaningful due process not only trampled on American legal traditions but could be used to lock up U.S. citizens as well.

“For over two centuries of growth and struggle, peace and war, the Constitution has secured our freedom through the guarantee that, in the United States, no one will be deprived of liberty without due process of law,” wrote Judge Diana Motz, a Bill Clinton appointee, who dissented against the court’s approval of sweeping presidential powers.

Motz noted that al-Marri has been imprisoned for more than five years, “without acknowledgement of the protection afforded by the Constitution, solely because the Executive believes that his indefinite military detention – or even the indefinite military detention of a similarly situated American citizen – is proper.”

Read more American Justice?

From The NY Times
By Bob Herbert

You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney but without the vice president’s sense of humor.

In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.

She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: “No one stood to his right.” Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: “He doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington’s existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration’s Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror — regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say — was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.

This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, known as “black sites.”

Ms. Mayer wrote: “The legal doctrine that Addington espoused — that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it — rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared.”

Read more Madness

From Think Progress
By Matt

The New York Times reported this weekend that “[f]elons are asking President Bush for pardons and commutations at historic levels as he nears his final months in office, a time when many other presidents have granted a flurry of clemency requests.” However the Times noted that despite commuting Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, applicants “should expect to be disappointed” because Bush “has made little use of his clemency power” compared to past presidents.

Except perhaps if you participated in any illegal activity involving the Bush administration’s controversial counterterrorism programs. According to the Times, “several members of the conservative legal community” in Washington D.C. are urging Bush to issue “pre-emptive pardons” to those involved so as to “not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills”:

Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.

Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. […]

“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”

Read more Pre-Emptive Pardons