1 Boring Old Man

Why Bush Is So Desperate to Get Bradbury Approved

… But no one seems to get the reason why Bush has forced this stand-off with the Senate. As I pointed out several weeks ago, the re-appointment of Bradbury–whether or not he is confirmed – serves as a control on Mukasey from now until the end of Bush’s Adminstration: "…the re-appointment guarantees that Bradbury can continue to act as OLC head through the end of Bush’s term. It ensures that Dick and Addington have their stool (in both senses of the word, I suspect) in the heart of DOJ, preventing any real roll-back of Dick’s Constitutional atrocities. No matter what Mukasey’s intentions, it seems, Bush and Dick now have their insurance that Mukasey can only do so much to fix this Administration’s shredding of the Constitution."

More importantly, as yesterday’s HJC hearing proves, having Bradbury in OLC authorizing whatever atrocities BushCo dream up gives them immunity from federal prosecution for those atrocities; Attorney General Mukasey has made it clear that he will not investigate or prosecute anything that has OLC sanction. The very best we can wish for, from Mukasey, is that he won’t sign off on any more Pixie Dust and Waterboarding opinions (though that assumes that Addington and Bradbury will show him the opinions, which may not be a safe assumption).

George Bush would forgo all his other 84 appointments because he wants to remain safe from prosecution and probably would like the insurance of immunity for any of his actions going forward. Democrats need to make this clear – Bradbury is about more than a personnel dispute, it’s about whether the President is above the law.

The matter of Steven Bradbury is a big deal. He holds the Office of Legal Counsel, the office responsible for legal opinions for the Executive Branch. Here are some of his connections [from Muckity]:

So, he’s in all the right clubs to be in Bush’s DOJ. He’s an active Federalist Society member. He clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. He’s acting in an office the Senate refuses to confirm him for because of his involvement with "the Torture Memo." Bush’s OLC from 2001-2003 was Jay Bybee. The memo in question was framed by John Yoo of the DOJ with Steven Bradbury involved. It is the center of the storm around the Bush Administration’s Torture policies. If you read it, you’ll find that Torture was defined so as to allow almost anything that didn’t disfigure the victim. Bybee and Yoo moved on and were replaced by Jack Goldsmith in 2003 who lasted only nine months:

Office of Legal Counsel

The office provides legal opinions and advice to the president and the executive branch on legal issues of special importance or complexity, including the limits of executive power. Goldsmith resigned after 9 months. Some claimed that he resigned after a failed attempt to moderate what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. Goldsmith himself claims that he largely succeeded in correcting what he saw as overbroad legal opinions issued by his predecessors at OLC. In his book, The Terror Presidency, he claims he resigned partly in an attempt to ensure those corrections stuck and partly because he felt he had lost the confidence of administration leaders. He does not specify who those leaders were, but notes that White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales several times asked him to remain while David Addington, then the legal counsel to the Vice-President and an influential White House figure, was concerned with how often he had overturned previous OLC opinions.

The Terror Presidency

He is the author of The Terror Presidency, a book that details the legal issues the Bush administration faced and continues to face in the war on terror, including the definition of torture, the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the war on terror and the Iraq War, the detention and trial of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and wiretapping laws. Though he is largely sympathetic with the concerns of the Bush administration’s terrorism policies, his primary claim is that the administration’s focus on the hard power of prerogative rather than the soft power of persuasion had been counterproductive, both in the war on terror and in the extension of effective executive authority. Some of the assertions made in the book include that the current Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, David Addington, at one point said that "we’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court," referring to the secret FISA court that rules on warrants for secret wiretapping by the United States government.

He appeared on Bill Moyers’ show on September 7, 2007 to discuss his work, and his time in Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room when Alberto GonzalesAndrew Card attempted to persuade Ashcroft to change his mind about the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program. He reported that Mrs. Ashcroft stuck her tongue out at Gonzales and Card as they left the room. and White House Chief of Staff

It’s interesting to speculate about why Bush and Cheney have been so unwilling to give up the Torture thing. They could have easily bailed out of it a long time ago. The Bybee Memo was written in August 2002. There have been innumerable opportunities for Bush/Cheney to back down with no cost to themselves, but both men are still advocating this policy – today. One could hypothesize that they just can’t tolerate being wrong, or having anyone question them. Or you could guess that they really think Torture is a swell idea – that the Geneva Conventions are for sissies. But I think there’s more. They don’t want anyone nosing around what they did, because as much as we know already, I expect there’s a lot more that we don’t know about what went on. And I’ll bet there are a lot of pieces of paper that will turn up missing like the Presidential emails. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have been very bad boys. We know that. But it’s what we don’t know that’s driving them right now. They saw what happened to Nixon when the lights came on. If we don’t Impeach the both of them, they’re going to cover their tracks so well we’ll never really have the full story. And Steven Bradbury is probably not the only secret keeper in place.