Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

It looks like the combination of new technology and secrecy is putting an enormous amount of public information at risk:

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is suing to force the Bush administration to account for the missing e-mails, obtained a copy of the National Archives and Records Administration’s contingency plans for processing White House records. The eight-page plan (.pdf) contains few specific dates and warns of possible e-mail archiving complications relating to the ongoing lawsuit.

If we can’t even find out what has been happening during the last eight years we won’t even be able to salvage a Pyrrhic victory.

Avedon pointed to another Raw Story item about the White House misleading Congress about the effectiveness of private over public workers in an effort to outsource government jobs.  David Obey (remember “As chairman of the appropriations committee, I have no intention of reporting out of committee any time in this session of Congress any such [war funding] request that simply serves to continue the status quo”?)  and Tom Harkin issued a Strongly Worded Letter expressing their disapproval.  This short news item manages to highlight:

• The corruption of the administration
• The ineffectual state of Congress
• The intellectual bankruptcy of purely capitalist economic theory
• The latest reason the White House Office of Management and Budget should be abolished

That last one is a topic for another day.

Your rights as an American citizen are increasingly irrelevant past the water’s edge.  Hope you’re OK with that.

Considering my many previously noted reservations about Attorney General Michael Mukasey this was maybe the most noteworthy item of the week:

Richard Sanders, a justice on the Washington State Supreme Court, has never been one to shy from controversy or blunt language…After listening to [Attorney General Michael] Mukasey defend the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies — its detainment practices at Guantánamo Bay, its interpretation of the Geneva Conventions’ reach — Sanders stood and shouted “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!”

“Frankly, everybody in the room was applauding or sometimes laughing, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to stand up and say something.’ And I did,” Sanders told The Seattle Times Tuesday. “I stood up and said, ‘Tyrant,’ then I sat down again, then I left.”…Mukasey, later in his speech, began slurring his words, slumped at the podium and passed out. He was taken to a hospital, where he was released the next day after getting a clean bill of health.

Richard Sanders is now one of my favorite people.  (See here, too.)  If we can’t get justice for or even details on the crimes against the Constitution during this era then maybe we could at least have enough citizens like Judge Sanders to make the most deeply implicated perpetrators reluctant to accept speaking engagements or otherwise be featured guests for pleasant evenings out.  If they do not voluntarily stay out of public life once they leave office I hope there are plenty of other Richard Sanders scattered through the country to loudly call them out.

Here is why I always see what Marcy is up to.  Going through public documents and trying to connect the dots is simply great investigative journalism.

I had a positive opinion of Jack Goldsmith as someone who opposed White House abuses from within, then left his job when that proved impossible.  His latest thoughts are very different, though.  Also:

In our system, if the law needs changing there’s a process for doing it and constitutional principles that guide it. If in the end, a lawyer or a CIA agent or a president breaks that law out of what they believe is patriotic duty, then a jury can assess whether or not that’s something for which they should be punished and they should be willing to face that.

Exactly.  By the way, you’d be better informed by reading Hullaballoo every day than you would by reading the Washington Post Op-Ed pages.  That’s why traditional media outlets are so dismissive and contemptuous of bloggers:  Not out of superiority, but fear.

UNPACKING JANE:  Page 188:

Rather than heeding the cautionary warnings about detaining the wrong suspects, starting in the summer of 2002 the Department of Defense pushed for greater “flexibility” in Guantánamo to interrogate the detainees more forcefully.  It was understandable that in the midst of the confusion and upset surrounding September 11, large and damaging mistakes would be made.  But what is less understandable is the intransigence, and even belligerence, with which unbiased evidence of error was met months and even years later.

Hostility towards unbiased evidence of error is a nice summary of how the administration has operated in general, not just with respect to Guantánamo.