Krisol's NYT column, Will Obama Save Liberalism?, finishes with this note,
This is William Kristol’s last column.
I can't say “another national nightmare” just ended, because he's too small beer for that. Maybe “our national stomachache is over”?
I just hope they don't replace him with Karl Rove.
Gitmo: There Are No Files.
The Bush people told us over and over that the people held at Gitmo were super-dangerous. That's why they couldn't release them, or even try them in the US. (Judges who reviewed selected cases in the main didn't agree, but put that aside.)
Now we learn the farcical basis on which decisions to hold people were being made:
“President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.
Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is “scattered throughout the executive branch,” a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.
Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner.
Beyond my darkest imaginings.
It's important to get to the bottom of this one.
Threat Level from Wired.com, Whistleblower: NSA Targeted Journalists, Snooped on All U.S. Communications,
Just one day after George W. Bush left office, an NSA whistleblower has revealed that the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program targeted U.S. journalists, and vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic.
Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, spoke on Wednesday to MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Tice has acknowledged in the past being one of the anonymous sources that spoke with The New York Times for its 2005 story on the government's warrantless wiretapping program.
After that story was published, President Bush said in a statement that only people in the United States who were talking with terrorists overseas would have been targeted for surveillance.
But Tice says, in truth, the spying involved a dragnet of all communications, confirming what critics have long assumed.
“The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications,” he said. “Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. … They monitored all communications.”
For those who came in late, the Wikipedia article on Russel Tice makes interesting reading.
Frank and Georgie Angones are important members of the University of Miami Law School community, and I'm a big fan of our surprisingly good local public library system, so it's nice to see the two coming together. She's our stellar Assistant Dean for Alumni Relations and Development; he was the first Cuban-American to head the Florida Bar, and has long been a good friend of the law school.
Cuban couple honored by Miami-Dade Library Foundation As children, Frank and Georgie Angones fled Cuba with their families penniless and not knowing English.
But they quickly discovered libraries could help them adapt to their new home.
''The one place that welcomed us with open arms was the public library,'' Georgie Angones said.
They never forgot, dedicating decades of volunteering to promote literacy and the Miami-Dade Library system.
Now the Miami-Dade Public Library Foundation is bestowing on the couple its third annual Library Champions award.
On Friday evening, the foundation will honor them at its Stories in the Garden event in the courtyard of the Pinecrest Branch Library, 5835 SW 111th St.
The event is tonight; I hate benefit dinners, but this is one I'd actually like to go to if only I didn't have a conflicting obligation.
A day late, but even so…
And, more importantly, here are four executive orders signed today.
These are major, major, welcome developments.
Only sour note: Adm. Dennis Blair can't bring himself to call waterboarding “torture”. [Link improved]
This is fairly amazing: Justice Dept. snubs federal judge's ruling.
In a parting shot, the Bush administration's Justice Department shrugged off a San Francisco federal judge's order to make a classified document available to lawyers for an Islamic group challenging the legality of the outgoing president's secret wiretapping program.
National security officials, not judges, must decide whether private citizens – even those with security clearances – are entitled to see classified material, Justice Department lawyers said in a filing Monday night.
…
At the heart of the case is a document that purportedly showed the government monitored Al-Haramain's overseas calls in 2004 before classifying it as a terrorist group. The National Security Agency accidentally sent a copy to Al-Haramain in 2005, but the Islamic group, a charity that has since ceased operations, returned the document at the agency's request and is barred from revealing its contents.
Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled Jan. 5 that Al-Haramain could proceed with its case, saying government statements showed that the group had probably been wiretapped.
…
Government lawyers asked Walker's permission to appeal his ruling to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco – an appeal they had already filed without his permission Friday – and did not say explicitly that they would withhold the classified document regardless of his orders.
One to watch to see if the new administration takes a different view. The next hearing is tomorrow.
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