Experts Weigh In On Bush Justice Memos

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/03/experts_weigh_in_on_bush_justice_memos.php

Experts Weigh In On Bush Justice Memos
By Zachary Roth - March 3, 2009, 11:53AM

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Since the release of the memos yesterday, expert opinion has essentially been united in denouncing the opinions.

Walter Dellinger, who ran OLC during the Clinton administration tells the New York Times that the Bradbury memo "disclaiming the opinions of earlier Bush lawyers sets out in blunt detail how irresponsible those earlier opinions were."

Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch speaking to the Washington Post, singles out the memo that allowed the administration to send detainees to countries that commit human rights abuses. "That is {the Office of Legal Counsel} telling people how to get away with sending someone to a nation to be tortured," Daskal said. "The idea that the legal counsel's office would be essentially telling the president how to violate the law is completely contrary to the purpose and the role of what a legal adviser is supposed to do."

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA who writes frequently on issues of executive power, focuses on the memo that gave the administration the power to conduct warrantless wiretapping. On his blog, Volokh calls the argument that FISA doesn't apply to national security issues -- which appears to be the memo's argument -- "an extremely lame analysis." He continues: "Much of the point of FISA was to regulate that."

And Salon's Glenn Greenwald is particularly outraged by an opinion arguing that the president can deploy the US military inside the US, directed at both foreign nationals and US citizens. Greenwald calls this "nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens."

He concludes:

If this isn't the unadorned face of warped authoritarian extremism, what is?

traders.

Who cares if the Bush* Cabal broke every law possible and was the most unAmerican Administration in our nation's history. Time to move forward. If we were to decide to prosecute the Republicans, Rush in particular would yell at us..Can't have that so let's just move forward.....

Rush Limbaugh has sold torture to the American People.. so sad....what have we become?