Slashdot | Saruman Completely Cut from ‘Return of the King’
Far be it from me to venture into the culture wars, but this is nuts.
Yahoo! News - White House, 9-11 Panel OK Documents Deal.
Basically the White House just caved to the 9-11 investigators on this one in the face of a threat of a subpoena (and falling poll numbers…). The full Commission won’t access the documents—which include the Presidential Daily Brief—instead only a sub-committee (picked by the committee) will get access. That means there’s a fig leaf for the White House. But the sub-committee can share what it learns with the rest of the committee. So it’s a pretty threadbare fig leaf.
The AP story gives one account of what the fuss might have been about (in addition to any administration’s natural institutional reluctance to share intel with investigators), which it says is a year old, but I had never heard before:
The White House confirmed last year that one such report in August 2001, a month before the attacks, mentioned that al-Qaida might try to hijack U.S. passenger planes. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) has described the report as an analysis, rather than a warning, and said hijacking was mentioned in a traditional sense, not as it was used on Sept. 11.
I usually like Linda Greenhouse’s work, and I’ve been trying to figure out why this news analysis item on the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the jurisdictional aspect of the Guantanamo detainees case is so annoying.
For starters, I don’t find the account of the Court and the Executive going toe to toe while hepped up in “alpha mode” at all convincing. (I also don’t find it attractive, but that’s a different issue.) She writes, “it now appears that the administration laid down a challenge the justices were unwilling to ignore. This was a moment long in coming: the imperial presidency meets the imperial judiciary.” I think this is way over-dramatic for a ruling to grant cert. on jurisdiction.
Greenhouse argues that the administration took a needlessly hard line in arguing the court should deny cert. and this somehow poked a stick in the court’s metaphorical eye. But what else was the Solicitor General supposed to do?
The government won unanimously below on the jurisdictional grounds, there is no circuit split (quite the contrary), so why on earth should they invite the Supreme Court to rule, which can only hurt the Administration’s position? In any case, when a matter has international law overtones — and the question of where our domestic law runs always does — it’s not surprising that the nation’s highest court might think it appropriate to get involved.
Is it true that, “The administration’s argument that the Supreme Court should not even hear the cases was thus a direct challenge to the court’s sense of itself, a battle joined on the court’s own most sacred ground”? No. Not at all. After all, the basis for the administration’s argument, one that prevailed below, is grounded directly in a plausibly apposite decision of that same Supreme Court.
And the claim that the government should have defended the cert petition “on the merits” is just plain wrong: the court below did not rule on the merits, so the merits are not before the Supreme Court.
And, for a final annoyance, after having psychologized the court on the basis of a one-paragraph grant of cert., Greenhouse concludes with this,
The battle over who gets the last word in this round may have little bearing on the fate of the Guantánamo detainees. Even if the court finds jurisdiction, it is highly unlikely that any federal judge would order a detainee’s release over military objections. But that does not diminish the importance of what happened on Monday, when the Supreme Court could have turned away but decided, instead, to decide.
In other words (shorter Linda Greenhouse?),
Maybe I’m just a perennial optimist, but I think the grant of cert. is a marginally good sign. Grants of cert where there’s no circuit split can be just because of the importance of an issue, but sometimes they’re because members of the court think the lower court(s) erred.
And, as noted in an earlier and better Linda Greenhouse item, something can be learned from
a comparison of how the administration phrased the question presented by the two cases with how the justices phrased it in their order granting review. Solicitor General Olson said the question was whether the federal courts had jurisdiction to decide the legality of detaining “aliens captured abroad in connection with ongoing hostilities and held outside the sovereign territory of the United States at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.”The Supreme Court, by contrast, said it intended to decide the jurisdiction of the courts to hear challenges to “the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.” The court’s question incorporated no assumption about whether the base was or was not “outside the sovereign territory of the United States.”
Which at least leaves open the possibility of a fairly narrow ruling applying only to territory where the US has a perpetual lease and a permanent presenence. That would do, for now.
William Safire bought me lunch once.
There. That’s a William Safire leed. Has nothing to do with what I’m really going to write about, but it situates me as being a Player. ‘Course, when Safire has the personal item it’s a signal he’s going to be nice to the guy (it’s almost always a guy) who was nice to him.
I’ve been reading Safire since he started at the Times. He does have some good qualities as a writer. For example, I think his book on Nixon, Before the Fall, is vastly under-rated. (It begins with meeting Nixon in a Moscow kitchen, the location of the famous Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate where Safire was the pitchman for the kitchen-manufacturer. You can see the famous picture Safire took of the debate here.) The book reads like it started out as a piece of puffery, and then took a sharp turn when Safire discovered that Nixon’s Kissinger had bugged his phone.
After all, if Nixon and Kissinger were nuts enough to suspect even true-blue die-hard loyalists like Safire, then maybe there was something wrong with the Nixon administration after all. Not everything, mind, but something.
So the end result is a very readable insider’s book, more balanced than you might think, with plenty of musings on the layercake that was Nixon, and great anecdotes about all the folks who get famous later in the Watergate hearings.
Plus I like his Lincoln book. Not as much as I like Gore Vidal’s, but I like it.
OK. That paid for lunch.
I read Safire’s column regularly. Not because I think it’s accurate. Not because my blood pressure really needs the stimulus. But because it’s so transparently tactical.
Today’s column, Never Love a Stranger is a prime example of the genre. Naturally, no Safire column would be complete without some germ of truth. Here, it’s used up in the opening: there doubtlessly are a lot of DC insiders who are not pleased at the idea of a Dean victory. Outsiders can be threatening.
But after that, it’s all tactical positioning in which Safire transparently (do you think he thinks we aren’t on to him?) tries to define, or mis-define, the folks he dislikes. You know that the Republicans must actually be worried about Dean if Safire feels a need to try to label Dean as McGovernite (pity this meme turns up in more sensible places too). It ought to be tough to paint a balanced-budget guy whom the NRA likes as a McGovernite, but I guess that’s the strategy; or the tryout at least. (Note how Safire subtly denigrates the balanced-budget Democrats as (1) all being for it, so it’s not interesting, and (2) worrying that Bush will luck out and there will be a boom.
And of course, there’s yet another outing for that Republican pet dream, Hillary for President. Republicans would love that — run against the candidate with the high negatives. Odd thing is, there are no Democrats supporting this plan, but that doesn’t stop it being a Safire hobbyhorse.
I wish Safire would turn his gifts to actual reporting, instead of constantly trying to (mis)characterize things. But perhaps his formative years as a pitchman for kitchen goods just left too strong a mark.
And even though Mr. Safire bought me a nice lunch at the Army-Navy club, he never wrote the column I was trying to interest him in. Seems the Republicans he called told him ICANN was about privatization, so he couldn’t be against it. Tactics, again.
The Washington Post tells the official inside story of how Dean bagged the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) endorsements.
Gephardt’s reaction: AFSCME “turned over the country to the Republicans for four more years.” But by the time you finish the story, you think Gephardt’s wrong.
For example, there’s Dean’s arrogance — the good kind, the kind that wins elections:
at the beginning of their discussions, Dean was not on either union’s list of likely endorsees. Last December, at one of their first meetings, Stern asked Dean if there was any way he could help him, thinking he could open some union doors to the little-known candidate. “He said, ‘Well you can endorse me,’ which I thought was a pretty bold, first opening comment,” Stern said. “And I said, ‘Well, we’re a little far away from that,’ and he said, ‘Well, if you endorse me, I’m going to be president.’ “
And there’s hard work.
The SEIU offered all the candidates the same resources: a list of their local leadership and a warning that the route to the endorsement began not in Stern’s fifth-floor office on L Street NW but through the rank and file. “Everybody got the same advice,” an SEIU official said. “Howard Dean took it to heart.” No other candidate came close to Dean’s outreach. “Shockingly” not close, Stern said.
And then there’s this:
[AFSCME President] McEntee had also asked two top advisers, executive assistant Lee Saunders and political action director Larry Scanlon, to go out and look at the headquarters operations of the campaigns. When they got to Dean’s Burlington headquarters in late October, they found energy, innovative use of technology, fundraising prowess and a clear strategy for winning.“They were blown away in Burlington,” McEntee said.
