Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was "feeble," "barely articulate" and "stressed" moments after a hospital room confrontation in March 2004 with Alberto R. Gonzales, who wanted Ashcroft to approve a warrantless wiretapping program over Justice Department objections, according to notes from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that were released yesterday.

One of Mueller's entries in five pages of a daily log pertaining to the dispute also indicated that Ashcroft's deputy was so concerned about undue pressure by Gonzales and other White House aides for the attorney general to back the wiretapping program that the deputy asked Mueller to bar anyone other than relatives from later entering Ashcroft's hospital room.

Mueller's description of Ashcroft's physical condition that night contrasts with testimony last month from Gonzales, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Ashcroft was "lucid" and "did most of the talking" during the brief visit. It also confirms an account of the episode by former deputy attorney general James B. Comey, who said Ashcroft told the two men he was not well enough to make decisions in the hospital.

"Saw AG," Mueller writes in his notes for 8:10 p.m. on March 10, 2004, only minutes after Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had visited Ashcroft. "Janet Ashcroft in the room. AG in chair; is feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed."

The typewritten notes, heavily censored before being turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, provide further insight into a tumultuous but secret legal battle that gripped the Justice Department and the White House in March 2004, after Justice lawyers determined that parts of the warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency were illegal.

Although Mueller did not directly witness the exchange between Ashcroft, Gonzales and Card, his notes recounted Comey's personal statement that Ashcroft at the outset said that "he was in no condition to decide issues." Ashcroft also told the two men he supported his deputy's position on the secret program, Mueller said Comey told him.

Comey had precipitated the confrontation by informing the White House days earlier that the Justice Department would not approve the wiretapping program's continuation in its present form. Gonzales and Card then decided to see if they could get Ashcroft to sign a certification that it was legal.

After the meeting concluded without success, the Bush administration decided to proceed with the program anyway. But Comey, Mueller and half a dozen or so other Justice Department officials threatened to resign if it was not changed. The standoff was averted after President Bush agreed to make changes, Mueller and others have testified, but the changes have never been described.

In his notes, Mueller recounts Comey's statement that Ashcroft complained to Gonzales and Card at the hospital about being "barred" from obtaining "the advice he needed" about the NSA program because of "strict compartmentalization rules" set by the White House. Although Ashcroft, as attorney general, had been fully briefed about the program, many of his senior legal advisers were not allowed to know about it, officials said.

Gonzales was White House counsel at the time of the hospital visit and replaced Ashcroft as attorney general in 2005. "We never had any intent to ask anything of him if we did not feel that he was competent," Gonzales testified, adding later: "Mr. Ashcroft talked about the legal issues in a lucid form, as I've heard him talk about legal issues in the White House."...

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• Albertogate redux
• If it gave Ashcroft pause...

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Bush, Bush administration, domestic spying, government, impeachment, john ashcroft, national security, news, NSA, politics, president, spying, warrantless wiretaps

For the past several months, the White House has been aggressively pressuring Congress to expand the administration's spying powers and update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). On Friday, President Bush bemoaned that Congress had not "drafted a bill I can sign." "We've worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution, but we are not going to put our national security at risk," said Bush. The House surrendered and voted 227 to 183 on Saturday to endorse the administration-backed legislation, which expands the powers of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Bush hailed the bill, which he signed into law yesterday, because it would give the Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell "the most immediate tools he needs to defeat the intentions of our enemies." But in reality, the White House had rejected a narrower compromise bill endorsed by both McConnell and the congressional leadership. As the New York Times noted, this episode was another attempt by the President to "stampede Congress into a completely unnecessary expansion of his power to spy on Americans."

CONGRESS 'PLAYING WITH HALF A DECK': Since March, the Bush administration has been building a case for its FISA legislation. But it wasn't clear until last week why it was pushing so urgently. On Tuesday, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) revealed on Fox News that earlier this year, a judge issued a secret ruling concluding "that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States." Boehner noted that this court order made "a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal," a fact the White House has attempted to conceal from the public and many in Congress. "It clearly shows that Congress has been playing with half a deck," said Jim Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology. "The administration is asking lawmakers to vote on a very important piece of legislation based upon selective declassification of intelligence."

WHITE HOUSE OVERRULED INTEL DIRECTOR: The House congressional leadership quickly worked with McConnell to hammer out legislation fixing the holes created by the secret ruling, which included "three points" that McConnell "said the Bush administration needed." Yet instead of accepting the legislation, the White House took advantage of the opening "to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions." "We had an agreement with DNI McConnell," said Stacey Bernards, spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), "and then the White House quashed the agreement." Nevertheless, lawmakers "more concerned with protecting its political backside than with safeguarding the privacy of American citizens" caved in to the administration's demands for increased spying powers. "The only purpose of [the White House-backed] bill is to protect this administration from its own political problems and cynicism, and its own illegal actions it has taken outside the law without any authorization," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who opposed the legislation, on the House floor on Saturday.

GONZALES HANDED EXPANDED SPYING POWERS: Provisions of the compromise bill attempted to address the "anachronism" of the 1978 FISA legislation, while imposing oversight on the White House. For example, it would have required audits by the Department of Justice's Inspector General to check the Attorney General. It would also make the Attorney General "create guidelines to ensure that the government applies for a regular FISA warrant application when the government seeks to spy on a U.S. person." Yet under the legislation Bush signed into law, Gonzales has "sole authority" to "intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas) that involve 'foreign intelligence' -- not just terrorism. ... Instead of having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court ensure that surveillance is being done properly, with monitoring of Americans minimized, that job would be up to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The court's role is reduced to that of rubber stamp." Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) called Gonzales's expanded power "simply unacceptable," in light of the fact that he has misled Congress on disputes over the administration's spying program. On Saturday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who opposed the bill, sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) requesting legislation "as soon as possible after Congress reconvenes" to address the administration's overreaching on spying.

THE DEMOCRATIC-led Congress, more concerned with protecting its political backside than with safeguarding the privacy of American citizens, left town early yesterday after caving in to administration demands that it allow warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens, with scant judicial supervision and no reporting to Congress about how many communications are being intercepted. To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.

Administration officials, backed up by their Republican enablers in Congress, argued that they were being dangerously hamstrung in their ability to collect foreign-to-foreign communications by suspected terrorists that happen to transit through the United States. The problem is that while no serious person objects to intercepting foreign-to-foreign communications, what the administration sought -- and what it managed to obtain -- allows much more than foreign-to-foreign contacts. The government will now be free to intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas) that involve "foreign intelligence" -- not just terrorism. It will be able to monitor phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens or residents without warrants -- unless the subject is the "primary target" of the surveillance. Instead of having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court ensure that surveillance is being done properly, with monitoring of Americans minimized, that job would be up to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The court's role is reduced to that of rubber stamp.

This is as reckless as it was unnecessary. Democrats had presented a compromise plan that would have permitted surveillance to proceed, but with court review and an audit by the Justice Department's inspector general, to be provided to Congress, about how many Americans had been surveilled. Democrats could have stuck to their guns and insisted on their version. Instead, nervous about being blamed for any terrorist attack and eager to get out of town, they accepted the unacceptable. Most Democrats opposed the measure, but enough (16 in the Senate, 41 in the House) went with Republicans to allow it to pass, and the leadership enabled that result.

• When you're in a hole, stop digging ... unless you have a magic spade
• From the desk of: Bruce Fein

Labels: Bush administration, Democrats, FISA, NSA, political cowardice, spineless politicians, warrantless wiretaps, wiretapping

Aug. 6, 2007 issue - Late on the afternoon of March 10, 2004, eight congressional leaders filed into the White House Situation Room for an urgent briefing on one of the Bush administration's top secrets: a classified surveillance program that involved monitoring Americans' e-mails and phone calls without court warrants. Vice President Dick Cheney did most of the briefing. But as he explained the National Security Agency program, the lawmakers weren't fully grasping the dimensions of what he was saying. Tom Daschle, then the Senate minority leader, tells NEWSWEEK that Cheney "talked like it was something routine. We really had no idea what it was all about." Still, as Daschle recalls, there were "a lot of concerns" expressed by some Democrats in the room when Cheney asked for their approval to continue the program. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, recalls that she "made clear my disagreement with what the White House was asking."

Last week, embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a different account of the briefing, provoking yet another controversy in his tenure as the country's top law-enforcement officer. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales, who participated in the briefing as the White House counsel, said the legislators were told the deputy attorney general at the time, James Comey, had raised objections to the program. Gonzales said there was "consensus" that the program, aimed at catching terrorists, was needed. "The congressional leadership ... told us, 'Continue going forward with this very important intelligence activity'," Gonzales testified.

It was only after getting that go-ahead, Gonzales said, that he and then White House chief of staff Andrew Card visited the hospital room of John Ashcroft, the gravely ill attorney general recovering from surgery. Gonzales tried, unsuccessfully, to get the heavily medicated Ashcroft to overrule Comey—a pivotal moment in one of the fiercest behind-the-scenes clashes of the Bush presidency. ...

Congressional Democrats plan to step up the heat in coming weeks, pressing for Justice memos and other documents. They also plan to call a potentially crucial witness: Jack L. Goldsmith, the former chief of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. It was Goldsmith who wrote a key opinion concluding the eavesdropping program was illegal. A conservative lawyer now at Harvard, Goldsmith, who declined to comment, will have every incentive to talk. He is due to publish a new book this fall called "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration." According to its Amazon.com listing, the book will chronicle how the president's "apparent indifference to human rights has damaged his presidency." On the cover are pictures of Bush, Cheney—and Gonzales.

Update: Arlen Specter has given Alberto one more day to clarify his testimony, or else ... or else, what, Arlen? Hm?

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, impeachment, NSA, warrantless wiretaps

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Fox News, NSA, warrantless wiretaps

July 28 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush urged Congress to pass legislation to expand potential surveillance targets, a step he said is important to help fight terrorism.

Bush's plea comes days after Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said he had serious concerns about the Bush administration's terrorism surveillance program, saying there had been a dispute in the administration over the spying.

``Today we face sophisticated terrorists who use disposable cell phones and the Internet to communicate with each other, recruit operatives, and plan attacks on our country,'' Bush said in his weekly radio address.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that Democrats would advance a proposal next week to revise laws governing the the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping programs under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Bush said Congress should update the law to include people in the U.S. suspected of possessing significant information on terrorists or enemy government plots. The law now allows the government to get court approval for eavesdropping only if it shows a clear link to an enemy government or terrorist group.

``The law is badly out of date,'' Bush said. ``Our intelligence community warns that under the current statute, we are missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country.''

The Bush administration in April proposed legislation to update FISA to take into account the development of cell phones and e-mail, which they say has made it easier for terrorists to communicate.

WASHINGTON, July 28 — A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.

The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program.

Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining.

If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.

A half-dozen officials and former officials interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity, in part because unauthorized disclosures about the classified program are already the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used.

Nor would they explain what modifications to the surveillance program President Bush authorized to head off the threatened resignations by Justice Department officials.

An agency spokesman declined to comment on the data mining issue but referred a reporter to a statement issued earlier that Mr. Gonzales had testified truthfully.

The first known assertion by administration officials that there had been no serious disagreement within the government about the legality of the N.S.A. program came in talks with New York Times editors in 2004. In an effort to persuade the editors not to disclose the eavesdropping program, senior officials repeatedly cited the lack of dissent as evidence of the program’s lawfulness.

In December 2005, The Times published articles describing the program, the data mining and the internal legal debate. The newspaper reported that the N.S.A. had combed large volumes of telephone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects.

It's hard to see through the White House obfuscation about its warrantless wiretapping program, but thanks in part to former deputy attorney general James Comey's congressional testimony in May, we think we know this much:

Soon after 9/11, the administration started eavesdropping on Americans. By March 2004, Bush's own Justice Department had decided that the program was clearly illegal, and top department officials couldn't find a way to rationalize it. After a rebellion led by Comey -- and backed by a hospitalized John Ashcroft -- the White House agreed to make some changes. The revised program, still controversial, was described in the New York Times in December 2005. The White House christened it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program." And in January 2007, Bush agreed to put the revised program under court jurisdiction -- although it's not clear exactly what that means.

The talk sweeping Washington today of a possible perjury investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stems from Gonzales's assertion in a February 2006 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that "there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed."

Even after Comey's testimony, Gonzales insisted that he had testified truthfully.

How could that be? It appears that Gonzales is engaged in what one anonymous Justice Department official this week charitably called " linguistic parsing."

Gonzales is trying to make a distinction between the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" that was "publicly confirmed by the President in December 2005" and what he calls "other intelligence activities" that Comey objected to. But he dug himself deeper during his congressional testimony on Tuesday, when he characterized a March 2004 meeting with some members of Congress that was obviously about the Terrorist Surveillance Program as being about -- you guessed it -- "other intelligence activities." Those members of Congress begged to differ.

This is not just a story about Gonzales's relationship to the truth. It's also a story about all the things we still don't know about the White House and illegal wiretapping.

One of the chief unanswered questions, as I wrote in my May 17 column: What was the program like when it was illegal even in the opinion of Bush's own Justice Department? What was the government doing to its citizens for two and a half years -- starting soon after 9/11 through the spring of 2004?

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Bush administration, NSA, warrantless wiretaps

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, bloggers, Bush-bots, executive privilege, George W. Bush, GOP, NSA, scandals, warrantless wiretaps, worst president ever

"...impeachment is the remedy if the president refuses to faithfully execute the laws."

Suppose Democrats capture control of one or both chambers of Congress in November. A conservative would instinctively cringe. ...

... perhaps not.

The most conservative principle of the Founding Fathers was distrust of unchecked power. Centuries of experience substantiated that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Men are not angels. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition to avert abuses or tyranny. The Constitution embraced a separation of powers to keep the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in equilibrium. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.”

But a Republican Congress has done nothing to thwart President George W. Bush’s alarming usurpations of legislative prerogatives. Instead, it has largely functioned as an echo chamber of the White House.

President Bush has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) for five years by directing the National Security Agency to target American citizens on American soil for electronic surveillance on his say-so alone. The president has defended his warrantless domestic spying with an imperial theory of inherent constitutional power that would empower him to open mail, break in and enter homes, or torture detainees, even in violation of federal criminal statutes. He has concealed details of the spying program indispensable to rational congressional oversight—for example, the number of Americans targeted, the earmarks employed to select the targets, or the intelligence yield of the spying. He has never explained to Congress why FISA could not have been amended to accommodate any unforeseen evasive tactics by al Qaeda in lieu of simply disregarding the law. Indeed, Congress has amended FISA six times since 9/11 at the request of the White House, and the Senate Intelligence Committee was informed by Bush’s Justice Department on July 31, 2002, that FISA was working impeccably. The president has also refused to disclose what legal advice he received to justify the NSA’s warrantless domestic spying at its inception. And Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has confessed that President Bush is operating other intelligence collection programs that are unknown to Congress and the public and that will never be revealed, absent leaks to the media.

Republicans in Congress have bowed to the president’s scorn for the rule of law and craving for secret government. They have voted against Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold’s resolution to rebuke Bush for violating federal statutes and crippling checks and balances. They have resisted brandishing either the power of the purse or the contempt power (with which it can compel testimony) to end the president’s violation of FISA and to force full disclosure of his secret foreign-intelligence programs. Indeed, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, is sponsoring a bill that in substance endorses President Bush’s FISA illegalities and authorizes an electronic-surveillance program warrant that would enable the NSA to spy on Americans indiscriminately without the particularized suspicion of wrongdoing required by the Fourth Amendment.

Republicans in the House and Senate have been equally invertebrate in the face of presidential signing statements that usurp the power to legislate. In approximately 800 cases, President Bush has both signed a bill and declared his intent to disregard provisions he believes are unconstitutional, the equivalent of a line-item veto. For instance, he signed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 prohibiting torture while issuing a signing statement declaring his intent to ignore the law in order to gather military or foreign intelligence.

The Presentment Clause of Article I, Section 7 gives the president but two options when presented with a bill passed by Congress: sign or veto the bill in its entirety. That was the holding of the Supreme Court when it found a line-item veto statute unconstitutional in 1998’s Clinton v. City of New York. The president is obligated to veto a bill that he believes to be unconstitutional; Congress may override that judgment by two-thirds majorities. In the 217-year history of the United States under the present Constitution, Congress has overridden only 28 constitutionally based vetoes, and on only one occasion did the override engender a constitutional battle between the president and Congress. Presidential signing statements further usurp the legislative power by resulting in the enforcement of laws that Congress has not passed. Members vote on all the provisions of a law collectively in the expectation that all will be executed if the president approves.

Signing statements also flout the president’s obligation in Article II of the Constitution to execute the laws faithfully. The Founding Fathers were acutely aware of the example of King James II, whose practice of suspending or dispensing with laws he believed encroached on royal prerogatives eventually occasioned his overthrow in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. With such precedents in mind, the framers of the United States Constitution directed the president to execute the laws without fail. The Republican Congress, however, has acted as a disinterested spectator while President Bush has stolen its legislative authority in plain view and exercised the tyrannical power of making, executing, and conclusively interpreting the law and the Constitution.

The most frightening claim made by Bush with congressional acquiescence is reminiscent of the lettres de cachet of prerevolutionary France. (Such letters, with which the king could order the arrest and imprisonment of subjects without trial, helped trigger the storming of the Bastille.) In the aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Bush maintained that he could pluck any American citizen out of his home or off of the sidewalk and detain him indefinitely on the president’s finding that he was an illegal combatant. No court could second-guess the president. Bush soon employed such monarchial power to detain a few citizens and to frighten would-be dissenters, and Republicans in Congress either cheered or fiddled like Nero while the Constitution burned. The Supreme Court ultimately entered the breach and repudiated the president in 2004’s Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Republicans similarly yawned as President Bush ordained military tribunals to try accused war criminals based on secret evidence and unreliable hearsay in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention. The Supreme Court again was forced to countervail the congressional dereliction by holding the tribunals illegal in 2006’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

Republicans have shied from challenging Bush by placing party loyalty above institutional loyalty, contrary to the expectations of the Founding Fathers. They do so in the fear that embarrassing or discrediting a Republican president might reverberate to their political disadvantage in a reverse coat-tail effect.

Democrats, for their part, likewise place party above the Constitution, but their party loyalty at least creates an incentive to frustrate Bush’s super-imperial presidency. This could help to restore checks and balances. For the foreseeable future, divided government is the best bet for preserving both the letter and spirit of the Constitution. If Democrats capture the House or Senate in November 2006, the danger created by Bush with a Republican-controlled Congress would be mitigated or eliminated.

• Wade in the water
• The walk towards the ridge
• A day in the life...
• Perjurer
• Impeach or indict these clowns already...
  

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Bush administration, NSA, warrantless wiretaps, worst president ever

The senators -- Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Russ Feingold and Sheldon Whitehouse -- are also members of the Judiciary Committee. In testimony esterday before the committee, Gonzales contradicted his own earlier sworn accounts, along with those of other witnesses in the probe.

In a press conference this afternoon, ranking Republican Arlen Specter railed against the request, and indicated that Chairman Leahy was not on board, either.

"I think that Senator Schumer has made a practice of politicizing this matter," Specter told reporters. "Senator Schumer's not interested in looking at the record. He's interested in throwing down the gauntlet and making a story in tomorrow's newspapers."

Specter has previously accused Schumer of having a conflict of interest in the firings probe, because the New York Democrat is also head of the DSCC, the Senate's campaign fundraising arm.

Specter has backed congressional subpoenas of administration officials, and drew a distinction with the prosecutor request. "The inspector general generally does not conduct investigations with a view to a prosecution. The inspector general conducts investigation with a view to improprieties and recommendations for changes in policy," Specter said. "I think there's a little bit of Don Quixote here. People are riding off in all different directions at once."

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Bush administration, NSA, warrantless wiretaps, worst president ever

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration won't dismantle the controversial war-crimes tribunals at Guantanamo Bay for alleged terrorists, including Canada's Omar Khadr, despite rulings by two military judges tossing out all charges, a senior U.S. official said yesterday.

"The government is looking at a number of different options," said John Bellinger, legal adviser to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But scrapping the tribunals and putting the terrorist suspects on trial, either in federal court in the United States or in military courts martial, isn't among them.

Instead, the government has quickly assembled a court to hear an appeal of the dismissal of charges against Mr. Khadr, accused of killing for al-Qaeda, and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, alleged to have been a driver for Osama bin Laden.

"Judges have been appointed and the court is prepared to receive appeals," said Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. But Cdr. Gordon said he couldn't provide the names of those named to the Court of Military Commission Review. It was created by Congress last year, but had no judges or staff until the government scrambled in the wake of Monday's surprise rulings by the military judges.

The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee strongly criticized the Justice Department for obstructing an investigation of the Bush administration's warrantless spying program. The statement came after the committee scheduled a hearing next week to authorize subpoenas related to the shadowy government program.

"The warrantless wiretapping program has operated for over five years outside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and without the approval of the FISA Court. The Committee has continued to ask for the legal justification for this sweeping and secret program, and has continually been rebuffed by inadequate and at times, misleading, responses from this Justice Department," said Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, in a statement sent to RAW STORY. "The information we have requested has been specific to the legal justification for this program and is firmly within the Committee’s oversight jurisdiction."

Leahy's statement came after his committee had announced earlier in the day that it planned to "authorize subpoenas in connection with investigation of legal basis for warrantless wiretap program," according to the committee's website. The meeting will occur on Thursday, June 14. ...

Labels: Bush administration, civil liberties, NSA, terrorism, war on terror, warrantless wiretaps, worst president ever

... In written answers to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey spelled out the strongest case yet that pushback on the warrantless wiretapping program in 2004 came directly from Vice President Dick Cheney.

In testimony before the committee last month on the abrupt firing of eight U.S. attorneys, Comey revealed surprising new details about DOJ's resistance to the controversial surveillance program implemented at the direction of the White House following the 9/11 attacks. Comey said that he and other top DOJ officials, including then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, had decided to resign if the White House didn't agree to amend the program. Comey's testimony also revealed for the first time that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, a favorite villain of civil libertarians, had deemed the program illegal as well.

In his new testimony [PDF], released by Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy yesterday, Comey said that he had personally informed Cheney that DOJ would not sign off on the program one day before then-White House officials Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales were dispatched to Ashcroft's hospital bed.

Comey was acting attorney general at the time, but Card and Gonzales ignored him as they pressured an ailing Ashcroft to sign off on the program, according to the hearing testimony.

In the newly released statement, Comey wrote, "The vice president was aware of DOJ's decision not to certify the program, because I had communicated this orally during a March 9 meeting."

Gonzales, now in danger of receiving a no-confidence vote from Congress as attorney general, has not said who ordered him to make the dramatic trip to George Washington University Hospital the night of March 10, 2004. The dots connecting Cheney to the visit seem closer than they were previously.

Comey also confirmed long-circulating reports that Cheney blocked the promotion of a DOJ official over the surveillance program. Associate Deputy Attorney General Patrick Philbin, a terrorism-law specialist with solid conservative credentials, was being considered for the deputy solicitor general slot at the time he accompanied Comey to Ashcroft's hospital room to fend off Card and Gonzales' entreaties to Ashcroft.

Later, Comey said, he learned that Cheney intended to squash Philbin's promotion. "I understood that someone at the White House communicated to Attorney General Gonzales that the vice president would oppose the appointment if the attorney general pursued the matter."

It will not come as a surprise to his many critics that Gonzales dropped Philbin's promotion. ...

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Bush administration, civil liberties, Dick Cheney, Gonzalesgate, Gonzogate, john ashcroft, NSA, warrantless wiretaps, worse than Watergate

WASHINGTON: On the night of March 10, 2004, a high-ranking Justice Department official rushed to a Washington hospital to prevent two White House aides from taking advantage of the critically ill Attorney General, John Ashcroft, the official testified on Tuesday.

One of those aides was Alberto Gonzales, who was then White House counsel and eventually succeeded Ashcroft as Attorney General.

"I was very upset," said James Comey, who was deputy Attorney General at the time, in his testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."

The hospital visit by Gonzales and Andrew Card Jr., who was then White House chief of staff, has been disclosed before, but never in such dramatic, personal detail. Comey's account offered a rare and titillating glimpse of a Washington power struggle, complete with a late-night showdown in the White House after a dramatic encounter in a darkened hospital room.

Comey related his story to the committee, which is investigating various aspects of Gonzales's tenure as Attorney General, including the recent dismissals of eight United States attorneys and allegations that applicants for traditionally nonpartisan career prosecutor jobs were screened for political loyalties.

Although Comey declined to say specifically what the business was that sent Gonzales to the bedside of Ashcroft in George Washington Hospital, where he lay critically ill with pancreatitis, it was clear that the subject was the National Security Agency's secret domestic surveillance program. The signature of Ashcroft or his surrogate was needed by the next day, March 11, in order to renew the program, which was still secret at that time. ...

On the night of March 10, as he was being driven home by his security detail, he got a telephone call from Ashcroft's chief of staff, who had just been contacted by Ashcroft's wife, Janet.

Although Janet Ashcroft had banned visitors and telephone calls to her husband's hospital room, she had just gotten a call from the White House telling her that Card and Gonzales were on their way to see her husband, Comey testified. "I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don't know that for sure," Comey said.

He said his security detail then sped him to the hospital with sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing, while he telephoned the director of the FBI, Robert S. Mueller 3d, from the car. Mueller shared his sense of urgency: "He said, 'I'll meet you at the hospital right now,' " Mr. Comey testified.

When he got to the hospital, Comey recalled, "I got out of the car and ran up - literally, ran up the stairs with my security detail."

"What was your concern?" asked Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, who was the chairman of the committee session on Tuesday.

"I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that," Comey replied.

Comey recalled arriving at the darkened hospital room, where Ashcroft seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. For a time, only Comey and the Ashcrofts were in the room. Meanwhile, Mueller, who had not yet arrived, told Comey's security detail by phone "not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances," Comey testified.

Minutes later, he said, Gonzales and Card entered the room, with Gonzales carrying an envelope. "And then Gonzales began to discuss why they were there, to seek his approval for a matter," Comey related.

"And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me," Comey went on: He raised his head from the pillow, reiterated his objections to the program, then lay back down, pointing to Comey as the attorney general during his illness.

When Mueller arrived, "he had a brief, a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general, and then we went outside in the hallway," Comey said.

Gonzales and Card departed, but after a while, Card telephoned Comey and "demanded that I come to the White House immediately," Comey said.

"After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness, and I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States," Comey said he told Card.

Whereupon, Comey said, he contacted the solicitor general, Theodore Olson, who was at a dinner party, and arranged to go with him to the White House. At first, Card would not let Olson enter his office, Comey said; he then had a considerably calmer private chat with Card for a quarter-hour, after which Olson entered the room and took part in the conversation.

"Mr. Card was concerned that he had heard reports that there were to be a large number of resignations at the Department of Justice," Comey recalled.

Ashcroft had such serious reservations about the program that he considered resigning then, Comey testified. Instead, he stayed on until November 2004.

Mueller, too, considered resigning, Comey said.

"You had conversations with him about it?" Schumer asked.

"Yes," Comey replied. The surveillance program was reauthorized on March 11, 2004, without a signature from the Department of Justice "attesting to its legality," Comey testified.

Comey said Tuesday that he intended to resign the next day, March 12. But on that day, terrorists carried out deadly train bombings in Madrid, and he put his plans on hold and remained on the job until August 2005. ...

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Bush administration, NSA, warrantless wiretaps