Forced resignation from Gonzales is the first step for Americans to voice their strong disapproval for the Bush administration. It is no surprise to anyone that our president and his administration have stirred and cause scandals within White House and hid truth from the American public. Similar to the dealings with the war in Iraq, this administration has been feeding lies to the public. Now the war has proven to be a failure and is causing more violence, terror and poverty in this world. According to the Borgen Project, it only takes $19 billion dollars annually to eradicate world hunger and poverty. However, our government has already spent more than $450 billion dollars over this fruitless war in Iraq. It is time for the Bush Administration to take a real interest in the lives of the American people as well as people who are in desperate needs around the world. Stop the lies and stop poverty now.

...anyone honest to be appointed AG. He wouldn't last a month.

The most likely story at this point: someone has opened up. The HJC or SJC (Judiciary Committees) has the goods. They said 'get rid of Rove (check), get rid of Gonzo (check), get rid of Cheney (next month) and ... and we'll let you leave office unimpeached'. Not sure what's in the ellipsis (lay off Iran? start withdrawing from Iraq?), but I also think there's a good chance it won't work. The new Deep Throat may well say "What, I risked my life for this?" and go public.

Note that Paul Clement is currently #4 at DoJ. The #2 and #3 slots are open. He either thinks that he can keep Clement in for a lot longer than the 210 days he's due as interm AG, or he knows he's in such deep shit he can't even think 210 days in advance. I think it's the latter, and we don't need more than 1/4th of an FU to find out.

after the Blumenthal article- I especially like the one proposing this is part of a grand design of Rove to purify the GOP image in time for the election. No idea what's true or not, but this does not strike me as a chapter in the fall of the house of Rove .

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

Fix justice or the next president, a Democrat probably, will appoint an AG that will do the same thing Gonzales did. I think the response from the Republicans in Congress is very revealing of just how bad the GOP prospects are in the election.

Give me control over a nation's currency,
and I care not who makes its laws.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild
(1743 - 1812)

Booman

Did Chertoff lie to Congress about Guantánamo?

by Mark Benjamin for Salon

March 28/07

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will leave office Sept. 17 with a reputation for being untruthful. During his repeated appearances before Congress earlier this year to explain the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales answered "I don't recall" or some variation as many as 70 times at a sitting. When his replacement comes to Capitol Hill for confirmation, lawmakers hope they will hear nothing but the truth.

But one of the men most often mentioned as his replacement may have some of the same trouble with the truth. Since rumors of Gonzales' departure surfaced last week, speculation about his successor has centered on Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Just as Gonzales, under oath before Congress, failed to recall whether there was dissension within the Bush administration over a controversial war-on-terror-related policy, so Michael Chertoff seems to have suffered a similar lapse of memory while under oath before Congress when pressed on a different terror-related policy. Gonzales pleaded ignorance of a rift within the administration over warrantless wiretapping; Chertoff has denied knowledge of interrogation techniques that are tantamount to torture, despite regular attendance by his top aides at meetings on the subject.

"If Mr. Chertoff is nominated, the Senate needs to ask him some very tough questions about what he knew about the abuses at Guantánamo," said Hina Shamsi from Human Rights First.

When Chertoff appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Feb. 2, 2005, the subject was not interrogations. The panel was weighing Chertoff's nomination to his current post as secretary of homeland security. He was promptly confronted on the topic, however, by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. Levin's staff had dug up copies of curious FBI e-mail traffic about interrogations at the Guantánamo prison in 2002 and 2003, when Chertoff was head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.

That was a pivotal year at the military prison. The Pentagon was institutionalizing a brutal interrogation program approved by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Interrogation teams at the prison employed forced nudity, sleep deprivation, isolation and sexual humiliation, among other tactics. During that time, for example, a detainee named Mohammed al-Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, to wear women's underwear, and to perform "dog tricks" on a leash. He was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours on 48 out of 54 consecutive days.

FBI interrogators assigned to Guantánamo had balked at the methods employed by the DOD. Given its long institutional knowledge about legal and effective interrogations, the FBI thought the military interrogations were extremely problematic. E-mail strings documenting the FBI's objections have been well publicized.

At the February 2005 hearing, Levin questioned Chertoff about an e-mail obtained by Levin's staff: a May 10, 2004, communication from one FBI official, with the name redacted, to another FBI official, T.J. Harrington. The e-mail rehashes the FBI objections to the military interrogations at Guantánamo back in 2002.

That FBI e-mail discusses the bureau's concerns at some length. It also divulges weekly meetings with officials from the Justice Department's criminal division, in which "we often discussed DOD techniques and how they were not effective or producing intel that was reliable." Chertoff was the head of the DOJ's criminal division from 2001 until the spring of 2003. The e-mail says that four people from the department's criminal division attended those meetings and that those attendees "all agreed DOD tactics were going to be an issue" if the government tried to prosecute Guantánamo prisoners. In the copy of the e-mail obtained by Levin, the names of those four criminal division officials had been redacted.

Under questioning from Levin that day in 2005, Chertoff disavowed any knowledge of abusive interrogation techniques being employed at Guantánamo and said he was unaware of those meetings. "I was not aware during my tenure at the Department of Justice that there were practices at Guantánamo, if there were practices at Guantánamo, that would be torture or anything even approaching torture," Chertoff told Levin. He told the committee he was unaware of "any use of techniques in Guantánamo that were anything other than what I would describe as kind of plain vanilla ... I do not know what the meetings being referred to are, what the techniques are being referred to, and who the people are."

MUCH MORE AT THE LINK

Yikes!

There Is Only One Executive
By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and LEE A. CASEY
August 29, 2007; Page A15

WSJ

Anyone who thought that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's resignation would improve the Bush administration's relations with Congress will be disappointed. The only unifying theme congressional Democrats have exhibited since taking control last January is an unremitting hostility towards President Bush in particular, and executive power in general.

This animus has manifested itself in a series of pitched battles over the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), the detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, presidential signing statements and the dismissal of U.S. attorneys, all of which shaped the anti-Gonzales crusade. Although the attorney general was instrumental in framing the administration's position on each of these issues, all are critical elements in a larger dispute over the proper roles of Congress and the president in our constitutional system, and his departure does not change this fact.

Whoever the new attorney general is, he or she must be just as determined to defend, beginning with the confirmation hearings, the president's legitimate constitutional authority against congressional encroachment as was Alberto Gonzales.

The Constitution's framers wanted the federal government to have a strong executive power. Although few Americans were ever interested in a king, the country's experience under the Articles of Confederation suggested that Congress could not and should not exercise both legislative and executive authority. If the United States was not actually on the verge of dissolution -- and some at the time certainly thought this possible or even likely -- it had no effective government under the Confederation capable of defending the country's interests abroad or of addressing national concerns at home.

The new Constitution remedied this situation by providing for a single, independently elected president who would exercise the executive power. As Alexander Hamilton later explained in The Federalist Papers: "Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks: It is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws."

"A feeble executive," Hamilton warned, "implies a feeble execution of government." And, he noted, the very first "ingredient" constituting energy in the executive was this "unity" of authority in a single individual. Accordingly, the theory of a "unitary executive," which has become a particular bugbear to the Bush administration's critics, is nothing more than Hamilton's prescription put into practice by the Constitution.

Because the Constitution grants executive power to the president alone, Congress cannot "balkanize" the office by carving out areas of executive authority -- such as responsibility for federal prosecutions -- to be vested in officials who are not ultimately subject to the president's direction and control. Thus, high-level officials like U.S. attorneys serve at the president's pleasure, and can lawfully be fired for "political" reasons.

Similarly, the executive branch is a co-equal branch of government, and Congress cannot micromanage the president's exercise of his discretionary authority, particularly in the area of foreign and defense policy, or assign this role to the courts. Nor can Congress use its oversight power, which has been implied from the power to legislate rather than from any supervisory authority, as a means of controlling the president or the executive branch in general. As a result, any congressional demands for executive branch information must be grounded in a legitimate lawmaking need as part of legislative process, and balanced against the president's legitimate need for confidentiality in deliberations.

Notably, it was Congress, and not the president, who the framers feared would usurp power from the other branches of government or the states. As James Madison explained during the Convention itself: "[e]xperience had proved a tendency in our governments to throw all power into the Legislative vortex." And, as in so many things, they were prescient. From efforts to control the conduct of the war on terror and the campaign in Iraq, to demands for White House materials relating to the removal of several U.S. attorneys in 2006, the current Congress has directed its efforts at enfeebling the president, and the presidency.

Building upon this unfolding interbranch confrontation, Congress's efforts to undermine presidential authority are likely to play out with a vengeance in the weeks to come. Like other cabinet officials, the attorney general is subject to the senatorial confirmation process and senators have asserted themselves in the past by demanding commitments or concessions from a nominee (and his or her White House sponsors) on important legal and political issues. Frequently, they were indulged by administrations anxious to confirm their nominees.

Today, there is every reason to believe that the new attorney general's confirmation hearings will be used by the Senate Judiciary Committee as a platform to compress and prevail on all of the legal issues, from the USA Patriot Act and the TSP, to the U.S. attorney firings and Guantanamo Bay, that have dominated their anti-Bush agenda. They will want their pound of flesh, but the White House should not pay. Instead, it should use the hearings as an opportunity to defend first principles and the policy choices the president already has made.

In addition, the administration should unequivocally reject any Senate demands for the appointment of a special prosecutor to "investigate" the 2006 U.S. attorney firings, or allegations that Attorney General Gonzales "lied" to Congress when discussing the TSP. First, there is no substance to the claims that Mr. Gonzales, or anyone else, acted improperly in removing the U.S. attorneys -- who are political appointees and can properly be fired based on political considerations. The administration's opponents have been trying to find evidence of wrongdoing -- a "politicization" of the Justice Department -- for months now and have produced nothing more than speculation and innuendo. The White House should aggressively debunk the myth that either the attorney general himself or the U.S. attorneys should be somehow independent of the president -- a key Democratic talking point in the last several months. Congress should be reminded that all the authority U.S. attorneys exercise, including and especially prosecutorial discretion, ultimately belongs to the president and its exercise can be properly directed by him.

Similarly, claims that Mr. Gonzales committed perjury are groundless. Last spring, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on highly classified intelligence programs, including the TSP. He chose his words carefully, so as to be truthful and to protect classified information. He stated correctly that there was no dissent among the Justice Department's leadership over the TSP, because it had been revised by those very officials to ensure its legality.

An earlier program, doubtless similar to the TSP and over which there were objections, remains classified and Mr. Gonzales properly insisted on speaking only to the TSP that had been publicly acknowledged. While his statements appeared to differ from those of other officials, a careful examination of his testimony reveals no discrepancies in any material facts -- merely differences in descriptive terms used by different people. This is not perjury, it is life.

Second, the "special" or "independent" counsel is a highly suspect institution. As Justice Robert Jackson, who himself served as attorney general and the chief Nuremburg prosecutor, explained long ago, the interests of justice are always at risk when a prosecutor is told who to investigate, rather than what offenses to pursue. The natural, and perhaps inevitable, result is a determination to fit a crime to the suspect, rather than find a suspect to fit the crime.

This tendency is magnified when a special counsel is appointed because he does not have the perspective of an ordinary prosecutor -- who must balance priorities and assign scarce resources -- and his success or failure is measured based on whether a prosecution actually takes place. This is not the pursuit of justice, but the recipe for a political witch-hunt -- as was proven again and again in the 1980s and 1990s, before the independent counsel statute lapsed and went into a well-deserved legislative oblivion.

Overall, the next attorney general's confirmation hearings offer the administration a unique opportunity: to defend the president's constitutional authority and policy choices to the American people, to reveal how Congress has attempted again and again to usurp his legitimate power, and to refuse any constitutionally suspect compromises with the Senate. If, as a result, it refuses to confirm a worthy attorney-general nominee, President Bush can properly state that the Democrats are playing politics in the middle of a war. This is a fight he can and should win, revitalizing his presidency in the process.

Messrs. Casey and Rivkin served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.