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Whitehouse, Kennedy slam administration |
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Monday, 10 December 2007 |
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By JIM BARONTwo members of Rhode Island’s congressional delegation have hammered the Bush administration in recent days with strong statements regarding what they say are questionable intelligence activities.
First, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor Friday to lambaste the president for concocting legal rationales to make it easier to spy on Americans overseas.Then Rep. Patrick Kennedy scored the administration on Monday after it was revealed that tapes made in 2005 of interrogations of two terrorist suspects were destroyed by the CIA.Whitehouse made his remarks while advocating amendments in the “Protect America Act,” which he decried as “a second-rate piece of legislation passed in a stampede in August at the behest of the Bush Administration.” The law is set to expire in February and the Senate Itelligence and Judiciary committees are both looking at making amendments to the law before it is re-authorized.Beyond the specifics of the law, however, Whitehouse voiced concerns about how the Bush White House interprets limits on its own authority.For years under the Bush Administration, Whitehouse told his colleagues, the Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice has issued highly classified secret legal opinions related to surveillance. “This is an administration that hates answering to an American court, that wants to grade its own papers, and OLC is the inside place the administration goes to get legal support for its spying program,” the senator asserted.Among the opinions Whitehouse was allowed to see as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and later was able to get declassified so they could be discussed in public, he said, were these:--- An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.--- The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.--- The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations. “In a nutshell,” Whitehouse said, “these three Bush administration legal propositions boil down to this: --- “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.”--- “I get to determine what my own powers are.”--- “The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.”“We are a nation of laws, not of men,” Whitrehouse declared. “This nation was founded in rejection of the royalist principles that ‘l’etat c’est moi’ and ‘The King can do no wrong.’ Our Attorney General swears an oath to defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States; we are not some banana republic in which the officials all have to kowtow to the ‘supreme leader.’ “When the Congress of the United States is willing to roll over for an unprincipled President, this is where you end up,” Whitehouse warned. “ We should not even be having this discussion. But here we are. I implore my colleagues: reject these feverish legal theories. “We simply cannot put the authority to wiretap Americans, whenever they step outside America’s boundaries, under the exclusive control and supervision of the executive branch,” the freshman lawmaker urged. “We do not allow it when Americans are here at home; we should not allow it when they travel abroad. The principles of congressional legislation and oversight, and of judicial approval and review, are simple and longstanding. Americans deserve this protection wherever on God’s green earth they may travel.”In a similar vein, Kennedy released a statement Monday expressing disquiet over the destruction of the interrogation tapes. “I am deeply disturbed by the CIA’s decision to destroy tapes of harsh interrogation tactics of two terrorism suspects,” the 1st District Democrat said. “Once again, this Administration’s disregard for accountability and law calls into question the real motives behind this action. Destroying CIA videotapes not only undermines the credibility of our country’s Intelligence Agency and its methods of interrogation, but it could very well put our national security at risk. “If the decision was made within the CIA to get rid of these tapes,” Kennedy said, then “the proper steps should immediately be taken to ensure the safety of additional tapes that may be in the agency’s possession.” “If the appropriate interrogation procedures were adhered to and the information was obtained by ‘lawful, safe, and effective’ means,” Kennedy reasoned, “there’s no reason to destroy the tapes. Isn’t the best policy to preserve the evidence?”CIA Director Michael Hayden was quoted as saying Thursday that the recordings were destroyed out of fear the tapes would leak and reveal the identities of interrogators.“To say the tapes pose a serious security risk to CIA personnel who had served in the program comes across as a justification after the fact.” Kennedy said. “There is risk inherent in the jobs members of the intelligence community carry out on a daily basis; by the agency’s logic, we should be destroying mountains of intelligence. Let’s hope that isn’t a common practice. I find it hard to believe that the best method for protecting CIA agents is destroying intelligence that the CIA claims was gathered to protect our country from the threat of terrorism.” “Unfortunately,” the seven-term congressman said, “Americans have grown accustomed to the Bush administration’s failure to acknowledge or accept any responsibility for any serious lapse of judgment.” |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 16 December 2007 )
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