The Strident Centrist Blog

Sidney Blumenthal, at Salon, writes about how Michael Mukasey’s quick-step in response to the White House’s marching orders to cover its ass on the waterboarding-is-torture question has all but doomed his nomination as Attorney General:

Mukasey’s retreat into abstraction, however, did not shield him from controversy. On the contrary, Democratic senators on the committee now declared that his nomination was in jeopardy. With his deliberately opaque replies, Mukasey had failed to protect himself, but instead in a stroke exposed himself to rejection. He did not suddenly find himself in trouble because he was an outsider to Washington. Nor had he committed a gaffe or a slip of the tongue, or displayed strange behavior. The nominee who was to be the break from Gonzales was acting remarkably like Gonzales.

Mukasey is not a free agent. He had been strictly briefed and in his testimony was following orders. He has avoided calling waterboarding torture because that is consistent with the administration’s position and past practice. Mukasey’s refusal to disavow waterboarding reveals his acceptance of his assignment to a secondary role as attorney general, an inferior agent, not a constitutional officer, to certain political appointees in the White House.

Those who are responsible for waterboarding have defined and dictated Mukasey’s evasions. His acquiescence demonstrates that no one in his position could take a contrary view to that of David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s former counsel and now chief of staff, who directed and coauthored the infamous memos by former deputy assistant director of the Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo justifying torture, and charged the current acting director of OLC, Stephen Bradbury, to issue new memos rationalizing it.

Blumenthal also expands on Addington’s role as the eminence grise behind Cheney’s pusf of the unitary executive theory for over two decades now.

Kargox at The Next Hurrah is deeply troubled by the responses of Judge Michael Mukasey, the administration’s nominee for Attorney General, to questions posed by Sen. Pat Leahy and others of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

An “administration” that sends distinguished federal judges to Capitol Hill and puts them in a position requiring them to hedge on answers to such basic questions as must a president obey federal statutes is operating so far outside the bounds of normalcy already, that it hardly seems worth anyone’s time to pretend that an Attorney General is necessary to the functioning of the government at all.

Indeed, the confirmation of an Attorney General at this point does the country a considerable disservice, by glossing over the fact that the “administration” is operating in a manner that would actually require this kind of evasion from someone who supposedly aspires to the nation’s top law enforcement position.

Previously, a few days after the hearings two weeks ago, Kargox had asserted that the country is better off with no attorney general than one who had to compromise him or herself to the extent necessary to be successfully vetted for nominated by this administration.

The aspect of Mukasey’s testimony that has garnered the most press is his reluctance to state unequivocally that waterboarding is a form of torture. But what Kargox and other writers find even more troubling is the fact that during his second and last day of testimony (Tuesday, October 16, IIRC) he refused to state explicitly that the president is constrained by law, as typified by this exchange between Sen. Leahy and the judge quoted by Marcy Wheeler in her riff on Kargox’s post:

LEAHY: And, lastly, where Congress has clearly legislated in an area, as we’ve done in the area of surveillance with the FISA law, something we’ve amended repeatedly at the request of various administrations, if somebody — if it’s been legislated and stated very clearly what must be done, if you operate outside of that, whether it’s with a presidential authorization or anything else, wouldn’t that be illegal?

MUKASEY: That would have to depend on whether what goes outside the statute nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the country.

LEAHY: Where does the president get that authority? I thinking of the Jackson opinion and others. Where does he get the authority if it’s clearly enunciated what he can do, law that he signed, very clearly enunciated? I mean, the president say, This authority, I’m going to order the FBI to go in and raid 25 houses because somebody told me they think someone’s there. We’re not going to wait for courts, we’re not going to do anything else. There’s no urgency, but we’d just kind of like to do that.

MUKASEY: We’d kind of like to do that is not any kind of legitimate assertion of authority.

And I recognize that you’ve posited the case that way for a reason. But the statute, regardless of its clarity, can’t change the Constitution. That’s been true since the Prize cases. And it was true before that.

Mukasey explicitly states that the president can ignore the law if ” . . what goes outside the statute nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the country.” And the clear implication is that it is the president who determines the necessity, or lack thereof, of going outside the law to defend the country. As one of the people who submitted comments to Marcy Wheeler’s post wrote:

If the President can decide that the 4th Amendment (which is what the FISA bill is all about) restricts his Constitutionally delegated responsibility to protect the nation, then what would stop him from deciding that the 22nd amendment also prevents him from saving the U.S. from the always imminent truly collosal islamofascist attack that will wipe out our way of life?

If the Senate confirms Mukasey without drawing the line on this issue, we’ll have taken one more long step down the slippery slope to the demise of our democracy.

A week or so ago Glenn Greenwald at Salon wrote a post about the apparent politicization of General Petreaus’ press operation in Baghdad. Yesterday, Glenn received an email from a Col. Steven Boylan of that same press office, which he quotes extensively in this post. Here he also links to Boylan’s entire email, unedited. In his opening sentences the colonel states that he is ” . . not sending this as anyone’s spokesperson, just a straight military Public Affairs Officer . . .” Read the email plus Glenn’s commentary (including the updates pertaining to whether or not the email is authentic), then you be the judge of whether or not Glenn is on to something.

To thoughts of chocolate, that is. At least according to the researchers whose work is described in this Science Daily piece.

The results indicated that there is a clear behavioural rebound among both male and female participants and both males and females who suppressed thoughts of chocolate ate significantly more than those in the control condition. Secondly, for males, actively thinking about chocolate can enhance subsequent consumption of that food.

SecretStorageBooks.com Check it out.

It still works - I think. At least the site home page comes up OK. Just selected a past post and that comes up OK too.

I just upgraded to a current version (2.2.2) of the WordPress blog engine scripts and so far it worked flawlessly. Sure am impressed with the hosting company LunarPages. Anyone out there who’s thinnking of setting up a website for whatever purpose can do a lot worse than hosting with them.

Now we’ll see if this post goes up OK.

When you click on an article thumb-nailed on the home page of the Science Daily website, in addition to the piece desired you get links to past articles that their algorithms calculate that you’re likely to be interested in as well. Today I selected a recent article on why the Indian subcontinent collided with the Eurasian land mass at the relatively high speed of 20 cm per year that brought up this link to a six year old piece about the genetics behind the caste system. The opening sentence pretty much sums it up:

In India, members of higher ranking castes are genetically more similar to Europeans, while lower castes are more similar to Asians, according to a study published in this month’s issue of Genome Research.

As for the subcontinent’s ‘lightening’ speed, that’s caused by the fact that it sits on the thinnest layer of lithosphere science knows of.

I’ve sat here stumped for the past five minutes trying to come up with an appropriately outrageous title for this post. I say ‘outrageous’ literally.

This from Larry Johnson at No Quarter, Valerie Plame Wilson’s colleague and friend for twenty some years since they met in CIA boot came:

In 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were enroute to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame. The FBI informed Valerie of this threat. This was just more “good” news piled on the fact that her intelligence career was in shambles, that intelligence assets she had recruited/managed were destroyed, and that she was unable to rebut publicly false and malicious smears of her character and reputation by a bunch of partisan Republican hacks. As the mother of two pre-school children, her first thoughts were about protecting her kids. She took the threat seriously and asked for help.

When the White House learned of these threats they sprung into action. They beefed up Secret Service protection for Vice President Cheney and provided security protection to Karl Rove. But they declined to do anything for Valerie. That was a CIA problem.

Valerie contacted the office of Security at CIA and requested assistance. They told her too fucking bad and to go pound sand. They did not use those exact words, but they told her she was on her own.

Before learning of this I credited George Tenet with doing a good job of restoring morale at the CIA but criticized him strongly for playing politics with the White House and helping set the table for scamming the American public into the Iraq war. Now, in light of this revelation, I realize the man is a despicable coward. He refused to come to the aid of one of his CIA officers who faced a specific death threat. In fact, Georgie boy never once reached out to Valerie to provide any comfort or encouragement. He wanted to stay on good terms with the White House so he effectively cut her loose.

If you can come up with anything sufficiently contemptuous for Bush, Cheney, Tenet and company, be my guest.

Michele Bachmann, the embarrassing first-term wingnutwoman who represents Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District (roughly the arc of far-northern Twin City suburbs plus the rapidly growing St. Cloud corridor stretching 90 miles to the northwest; PDF map here) finds that the shoe is not so comfortable when it’s on the other foot. After winning office with a lavishly funded campaign against Patty Wetterling that featured misleading and outright falascious negative ads, she now is upset by the fact that she finds herself on the other end of an uncomfortably truthful TV pitch, sponsored by Americans United, regarding her support of Bush’s veto of the S-CHIP bill. Eric Black of Minnesota Monitor has the details of the letter she had her chief of staff send to the TC area TV stations asking that the ad be withdrawn. Via the link in the MM piece to his blog you can find his deconstructions of some of Bachmann’s below-the-belt hits against Wetterling.

There have been recent press reports that General Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency who is not the Director of the CIA, is investigating one John Helgerson, the Agency’s Inspector General. An IG’s job is, among other things of course, to be the one who investigates possible malfeasance within his or her own agency. Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer as well as State Department denizen, has some insightful comments as to what might be behind this:

Something important is going on inside the CIA. There are people of all political stripes on the inside. But there usually is a consensus that honor and professionalism should be the hallmark of intelligence work. You don’t recruit sources with torture. You recruit good sources by building relationships. The leak that Hayden is going after Helgerson is an alarm bell.

. . .

It does appear that the current Director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, is trying to tell John Helgerson to shut up and sit down. What truly puzzles me is that there is no specific charge of misconduct by Helgerson in the current leaks. In fact, Helgerson has sat on explosive information in the past without leaking info to the press. It appears that Helgerson has made the mistake of reporting that the king is naked. John’s future, economically and professionally, is secure regardless of what Hayden does. I am not worried about Helgerson. John earned his retirement. I am worried about what happens to the CIA officers still on the job. What is at risk is the independence and competence of the CIA. Most of the officers I know are men and women of exceptional character and integrity. They understand that torture and violation of international conventions to achieve a temporary tactical advantage can, in the long run, weaken and even destroy the effectiveness of the CIA. If Hayden succeeds in bullying and shutting down Helgerson (I am assuming that Helgerson is guilty only of embarrassing the CIA) then Hayden is putting our nation at risk.

Johnson also has some thoughtful inputs from associates of his who are still in the Agency.